“Students here [in Boston] support a $364M criminal economy fueled by drugs and sex… in the deafening silence of campus libraries, behind the cinderblock walls of dormitories, drowned out by the monotone lectures in a thousand classrooms every day, the upper-class, suburban-bred university and college students at Boston’s most elite universities are noiselessly contributing to a massive underground economy. This economy expands every time Jack pays $60 for a quarter of an ounce of marijuana, UMass Boston senior Ellen (her name has been changed, too) gets $15 a page to write someone else’s paper, and a student from Wentworth Institute collects his $80 for a fake ID. It’s fueled by the $5 BU senior Mike charges underage students for admission to a keg party and the $150 Wendy makes to spank submissive men. There are 65 colleges in greater Boston, with a quarter of a million students, who make up 7 percent of the area’s total population. But students contribute an estimated $364 million to Boston’s underground economy every year, most of it through illegal sex, drugs, and alcohol — about $150 million more than the entire police department budget. It’s become so bad, city councilors have proposed making universities turn over registries of where their students live.” —Boston Magazine (US)

It’s no secret that colleges and universities tend to be dens of iniquity. Kids go from high school, parental supervision, and the womb of home to a place where the rules are relaxed, where their peers have already established new “norms” for behavior, where drink and drugs are plentiful. In short, kids “experiment.” There’s nothing shocking or even new about that.

But when you take a broader view of this phenomenon, the numbers themselves have the capacity to shock. Granted, it is difficult to assess exactly how much money exchanges hands for “underground” goods and services. But if this writer’s estimate of $364 million per annum is anywhere near accurate, it’s an astounding number. Just consider what kind of sum that is for drugs, prostitution, fake IDs, counterfeit money, gambling. It’s practically half the Gross Domestic Product of a poor tiny country such as Guyana. And that doesn’t take into account the petty thievery of, say, swapping MP3 files on file-trading networks, nor does it take into account all the non-students who participate in that economy as well. One person in the article estimates that college students spend an average of $50/month on marijuana alone. Multiply that by the number of college students not just in Boston but in the country, and you begin to see that this “underground” economy is not really so underground.

And naturally this astounding number raises an obvious question: if so many people are willing to spend so much money on these substances and activities, should they really be illegal? After all, you can make a credible argument that minor drugs and prostitution are victimless crimes. If you remove restrictions on drinking ages, you also get rid of the fake ID business. Will these decadent students grow up and become legislators who create a more liberal world? Or will they, like so many generations that preceded them, just become hypocrites?

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