I have a theory that cocaine, and later crack cocaine, were really the downfall of the United States from the late 70's to late 80's. It wasn't Reagonmics, it wasn't the Japanese. All the white collar (and a lot of the blue collar) guys were all doing powder cocaine, and all of the rest of the blue collar workers and the unemployed were all doing crack. Crime got worse, business got worse...
Considering that cocaine has been with us since the mid-1800s and saw other periods of high (ab)use, I think it's safe to say this is a false assumption. The decline of cocaine between the '30s and '60s makes the cocaine boom of the 80s seem like more of a problem than it was. In fact, cocaine pretty much built the entire city of Miami; it had a massive positive effect on the economy.
There is _always_ some fad drug ruining lives and society hasn't collapsed yet. For every wasting addict that you see there are dozens->hundreds more functional people using the same stuff.
An article that was on HN 8 months ago puts forth evidence to support that the rise and fall in violent crime follows the introduction and elimination of leaded gasoline. It sounds strange but every single country the researchers have studied exhibited the same phenomenon. Even matching lead contamination at the neighborhood level fits with crime maps.
At this point I think it's hard to say that it falls on one thing. There's definitely a combination of factors that have led to reduced crime rates.
Another one that I've seen floated around as responsible was the rapid growth of emergency medicine in the late 1960s. The idea being that injuries were much less likely to kill someone and people were that much more likely to retaliate.
Another good theory is how crime rates are pretty much proportional to birth rates. The idea being that it's resource competition.
I understand what you're saying. I don't think the article is saying that only lead is responsible, though. However, it does say that lead levels explain up to 90% of the variation in violent crime in America. I have no knowledge of statistics, but that sounds pretty impressive.
The initial sudden drop in rising crime rates coincides neatly with personal computing and games consoles, and the final smackdown is delivered with the popularisation of the internet.
Except that there were plenty of videogames in the 80s, when crime was still going up...which is a glaring hole in the theory. Sure, the graph shows that claims of videogames leading to increased violence are probably bogus, but there's no evidence that they reduce violence either.
My money's on the environmental lead theory. I think the rise of ecstacy is too marginal to account for the scale of the change. But that's just a hunch.
Given that the crime wave in question is usually associated with more impoverished elements of society, I'm guessing they couldn't afford Apple ][s, Macs, IBM PCs or even Nintendos in most cases.
