| dc.description.abstract | In recent year, the trend of drug crime has arisen in Taiwan. This article uses the data from the website of the Statistics of Police Work, published by National Police Agency, Ministry of the Interior, to explore the determination of drug crimes in Taiwan. Causing habitual usage, abusive usage, and danger to the society are norms for categorizing drugs, and the drugs are classified into 4 categories. The punishment of category one is the most serious, and category four is the lightest. In this article, drug crime is categorized by drug classification and punishment, and focusing, in particular, on the factors of family structure and entertainment industry. The fixed-effect model is employed for empirical analysis. In addition, the two-stage least squares regression is adopted to deal with the endogeneity between unemployment rate and drug crime.
The empirical results show that an increase in unemployment rate raises the drug crime of category two and three, but decreases the drug crime of category one. The reason for this may be due to the fact that the drug price of category one is significantly higher than those of other categories, and there is detoxification for opioid. In addition, with increasing in unemployment rate, drug trafficking raises, while drug abuse decreases.
There are different impacts between the factors of family structure and drug crime. The increased percentage of single parent households may give rise to extending the drug crime of category one and drug abuse. The raised drug crime of category two and three and drug trafficking might also result from the enlarged percentage of grandparenting households. In terms of entertainment industry, the drug crime of category one and drug abuse may increase when holding a large musical festival or increase with entertainment revenues. The rising number of stores in entertainment industry also lead to drug trafficking.
Based on the empirical results, we suggest that the government authorities should pay more attention to the mental health and family financial of single parent and grandparenting families, assisting them properly. Moreover, setting up courses for grandparenting families to reduce their intergenerational gaps. Increasing police patrolling and irregular raids might suppress drug crime near the large musical festival and entertainment venues. The participants and service staffs over there ought to be informed about the harm of drugs. | en_US |