Public-order crime is now the preferred term by proponents as against the use of the word "victimless" based on the idea that there are secondary victims (family, friends, acquaintances, and society at large) that can be identified.
For example, in cases where a criminal act subverts or undermines the commercial effectiveness of normative business practices, the negative consequences extend beyond those at whom the specific immediate harm was intended.
A vice squad is a police division whose focus is stopping public-order crimes like gambling, narcotics, prostitution, and illegal sales of alcohol.
Note that under English and Welsh law, a "public-order offence" is a different category of crime related to disorderly conduct and other breaches of the peace.
Thus, there is continuing political debate on criminalization versus decriminalization, focusing on whether it is appropriate to use punishment to enforce the various public policies that regulate the nominated behaviours.
When deciding whether harm to innocent individuals should be prohibited, the moral and political beliefs held by those in power interact and inform the decisions to create or repeal crimes without apparent victims.
For example, Margaret Sanger who founded the first birth-control clinic in New York City was accused of distributing obscene material and violating public morals.
The state and its institutions often rely on lotteries, raffles, and other legal forms of gambling for operating funds, whether directly or indirectly through the taxation of profits from casinos and other licensed outlets.
A further perceptual problem emerges when laws remain in force but are obviously not enforced, i.e. the police reflect the consensus view that the activity should not be a crime.
This may reflect a limited form of reality that, in the so-called "victimless crimes", there are no immediate victims to make police reports and those who engage in the given behaviour regard the law as inappropriate, not themselves.
Those who favor decriminalization or legalization contend that government should be concerned with matters affecting the common good, and not seek to regulate morality at an individual level.
Thus, in public-order crimes, it is simply a lack of priority in current enforcement strategies that encourages such widespread public disobedience which, in all likelihood, would increase if the behavior was to be decriminalized.
In the United States, the Supreme Court decisions of Webb et al. v U.S. 249 U.S. 96 (1919) and U.S. v Behrman 258 U.S. 280 (1922) drove the use of narcotics underground and consolidated their criminal status.
The consumption of some drugs can damage the health of users causing indirect societal cost due to increased hospitalizations and, in some cases, cause death through overdose because substitution or poor quality, although this potential for harm may be operationally indistinct from the potentials for harm associated with other noncriminal behaviors, such as driving a car while tired or over-consumption of healthy foods.
In general, making drugs illegal results in an exponential increase in their price so that addicts must indulge in theft, robbery, and burglary to support their habits.
Meier and Geis (1997) confirm that drug dealing is an area where victims are third parties who experience harm only indirectly through, say, losses from drug-related crime, and the costs of enforcing drug laws and of treating addiction, and the public health costs for treating illness and disease consequent on the addiction, e.g., HIV infection through using the same needles.
As with prostitution, crime related to drug dealing also affects the amenity of a neighbourhood, destroying property values and causing the flight of the middle class to the "safer" suburbs.
Further, Sampson (2002) comments that because intensive police enforcement is by its very nature temporary, the impact is often only short-term and dependent on the resiliency of the market and the buyers which has been shown to be strong.
Some officers have argued that intensive enforcement shows the community that the police care about the problem; however, some of the unintended effects may, in fact, have the opposite result.