Drug trrafficking

The heirs of Al Capone

IN “Breaking Bad” a high-school chemistry teacher from Albuquerque, New Mexico, sets up a crystal-meth lab to pay his medical bills. The television series, though entertaining, was unrealistic: meth labs are relatively rare in the American south-west. Although meth-usage rates are reported to be highest in the West, states in the Bible belt have the most meth labs. A survey in 2010 noted that counties containing meth labs tend to be disproportionately poor, white and evangelical.

Those same communities also happen to be the ones with stiffest restrictions on the sale of alcohol. When Prohibition ended in 1933, local governments began implementing their own bans on alcohol sales, many of which remain to this day. Fifty-three of Kentucky’s 120 counties have some sort of restriction on the sale of alcohol, while another 31 ban its sale altogether. One question posed by social scientists is whether alcohol is a complement to, or a substitute for, drugs.