Certainly the illegal drug market creates a powerful demand signal that gangs have expanded to fill. Take away that demand signal and gangs will retract accordingly, but still exist.
Many factors surely contribute. Man is social. Look at all of the legal "gangs" like the Elks, VFW, Masons; or bowling and softball leagues, etc, etc, etc.
Mike is right though, that what we may be categorizing as a "gang problem" is really a much deeper problem that the gangs are just a symptom of. Fix the domestic policies that feed this response among young men through "indirect approaches" and one likely makes the challenge of dealing with the gangs that currently emerge from that pool of causation much more manageable. Legalization has to be on the table.
This same logic applies to the US's foreign policy challenge of Violent Extremist Organizations and transnational terrorism. At a tactical level these are "threats" but at a strategic level these are merely symptoms of deeper problems that are rooted in the perceptions of a wide range of foreign populaces. These organizations emerge from populaces that feel provoked by the Western foreign policies that they feel inappropriately shape their respective political and economic situations. One can run a counterterrorism program, much like one can run a counter-gang program, and what one is doing is mitigating the symptoms, while likely at the same time making the provocation of the root causes worse in the execution of said programs.
Less is more. Take a hard look at foreign policies and re-tune them to be less provocative in the world we live in today. We evolve slowly, but we need to come up with a new strategy, a new approach, and announce it to the world and make a major change of course to operationalize the same. We likely would give up little, and potentially could gain much.
I cannot help but look to the Great Britain's strong alliance across the Common Wealth that exists today because Britain wisely opted not to ride a desire for Empire all the way into the ground.
The system developed to contain the Soviets was appropriate enough in its day, but that day is long gone. New approaches must be far less ideologically defined, and much more respective of the sovereignty and rights to self determination of the assorted partner members. We can do this. At home in dealing with criminal gangs, and abroad in dealing with political gangs.
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