Speaking of low wages for unskilled workers (were we? I hear you cry. Well, I was.) I must now confess that I have only lately come to The Wire. Yes, I am one of those unlucky souls who is late to every trend--you have only to look through my wardrobe or my collection of home electronics to get a good sense of what is just about to go out of style. I haven't seen a movie in six months.

Stop looking at me like that, okay? I'm a very busy person.

Mmm, where was I? Ah, yes, The Wire. Like everyone else, having just finished watching the first season, I am utterly besotted. Unlike everyone else, it inspired the following question, upon which I mused for a good part of yesterday. What would happen to the economy of the Baltimore housing projects if drugs were legalized? Would it ultimately be better or worse for the people there?

There are, of course, a lot of negative effects of the drug trade in the inner city. For one thing, because contracts can't be enforced by law, they get enforced by interpersonal violence. For another, dealers sell a lot of their product to locals, which certainly doesn't improve their life prospects. Then there are all the kids who end up with wasted lives, dead or in jail, because of the war on drugs. Sudhir Venkatesh's work, which Levitt and Dubner covered in Freakonomics, implies that drugs pull kids in the inner-city out of low wage work into even lower wage work--the average drug dealer makes less than minimum wage. (My cousin, who is finishing her PhD in criminology, tells me that this is true of all non-white-collar crime.) But a few drug dealers make a lot of money, which encourages them to play the lottery rather than slugging it out as a fast food worker or baggage handler and hoping to move up.