Instead of one or two crops a year, you can harvest coca leaves every ninety days. As a farmer-friendly shrub, about the only thing that could beat Erythroxylon coca would be a money tree. This staggering profit reflects the risk involved in moving the product from factory to market. It is hard to see how law enforcement agencies can stand between determined criminals and this kind of business opportunity. Gray notes the temptations they face when they try.
Prohibition breeds other kinds of corruption as well.
Gray rides with a group of cops who stop six black teenagers for no particular reason, verbally abuse them, search them for drugs, find nothing, and let them go. Gray observes assembly-line justice on the night shift at the Cook County Courthouse, where he finds that police often misrepresent the circumstances in which they find drugs so the evidence will be admitted. It's gotta have an impact on a cop to stand up and lie on a regular basis and think nothing of it. Gray perceptively connects these routine violations to the motivation behind the Fourth Amendment, which grew largely out of anger at heavy-handed British efforts to locate smuggled goods. The illegal transfer of goods between two people who are in agreement is a tough act to interrupt.