Drug WarRant

Boy, did I just waste a chunk of my life. Wish I could get it back.

Here’s my first mistake: Reading Kevin Sabet’s tweets today, which included this one:

Thoughtful Natl Review piece,Caulkins/Lee: “the arguments for legalization often overlook considerable downsides&risks” http://t.co/yTuaFMMQ

Here’s my second mistake: Deciding to read the piece.

It’s The Drug-Policy Roulette by Jonathan P. Caulkins and Michael A. C. Lee in the Summer 2012 edition of National Affairs (not National Review).

Tnis piece reminds me why I often consider Caulkins one of the worst of the drug policy “academics” cabal in the U.S.

And, I’ve just got to ask, how does someone, whom I assume has advanced degrees, miss out on gaining a basic understanding of analogies?

So, first he hits us with this:

The commission’s advice echoes four decades of arguments by advocates of legalization, who have long promoted their cause as a simple solution to the violence, disease, incarceration, social decay, and other ills fostered by the drug trade. […]

But the arguments for legalization often overlook its considerable downsides and risks. They serially underplay, for instance, the possibility of substantially increased use of and dependence on drugs. Though no one really knows precisely how much drug use would go up if it were legalized, advocates tend to disingenuously offer exact estimates favorable to their cause — suggesting that they can know with confidence that increased use would be limited and controllable. This false certitude neglects the fact that no nation in the modern era has legalized the production of any of the major illegal drugs for unsupervised use. (Even the Netherlands allows only retail sales of marijuana, not production or wholesale distribution.) Legalization is thus a leap into uncharted and potentially dangerous waters.

Sound familiar? Yes, it’s the uncertainty argument that he and his friends pushed in the “Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know” book.

How dare we legalizers say we know what will happen if drugs are legalized when there is no exact place in the world that matches the conditions? It’s unknowable, and it’s irresponsible for us to say that we know anything.

And then he proceeds to go on for over 60 paragraphs to tell us what will happen if drugs are legalized. Is he completely irony-challenged?

And, of course, like the rest of them, he never seems to consider that anything other than prohibition exists as an approach to dealing with drug problems.

I recognize a lot of the content of the book in this article, including the infamous “toast” example.

… it has become fashionable for legalization’s proponents to moderate their requests, asking only for “experiments” with legalization. The implicit (if not explicit) promise is that if legalization turns out badly, we can always re-impose prohibition — ending up no worse off, and at least a bit wiser. […]

The concept of reversibility (as employed in the drug-legalization debate) comes from the physical sciences, and has to do with whether an object can be returned to its original condition after being changed by some process. The difference between ice and bread is a good example: Applying heat to ice will melt it into water; removing the same amount of heat energy by putting the water in the freezer allows it to refreeze into the original state. By contrast, when one applies heat to bread, the bread becomes toast. Removing that heat energy by putting the toast into the freezer creates cold toast, not fresh bread. Melting ice is a reversible process; toasting bread is not. The related social-science concept is called “path dependence,” meaning that outcomes depend not only on current inputs, but also on the past history of the system.

Legalizing drugs is like toasting bread: Not all of the resulting changes can be undone by re-imposing prohibition.

No, it’s not.

It’s not even close. Legalizing drugs isn’t remotely like toast and adding a bunch of scientific talk about ice and water doesn’t make a bad analogy work.

Having a baby is like making toast. Once the toast is done and has popped out, you can’t put it back in and make it not be toast again. See what I did there? That’s how an analogy works.

Legalizing drugs could be like opening Pandora’s box. That would be an actual legitimate analogy. Wrong, but at least structurally appropriate.

By the way, that notion that Caulkins derides of wanting an “experiment” with legalization sounds a lot like what I and others have advocated for years using the Justice Brandeis “laboratories of democracy” idea.

An idea that his co-author Mark Kleiman now seems not only to be embracing, but almost ready to take credit.

TCR: In a column you wrote for TCR you mentioned using Washington and Colorado as ‘laboratories for democracy,’ what does that mean?

Kleiman: A lot of voters obviously want to legalize marijuana, but they’re often not very well informed, because we have no idea what the consequences are. There’s only so much you can know about the consequences of legality if all you can study is illegality.

Given that it’s likely we’re going to be changing our policies, it would be nice to know in advance what the consequences are, but it’s hard to do that without actually trying it.

We don’t want to try it at a national level, because that would be very hard to undo if it went wrong. So the place to try is in some district or territory and the whole world can learn a lot from letting Colorado and Washington play their game.

What do you think of that, Jonathan? Is Kleiman making toast now?

Going back to the Caulkins piece, the “roulette” in the title is, you guessed it, another horrific analogy, which he reveals at the end.

Experimenting with legalization is like playing drug-policy roulette. If you have been consistently putting money on black at the roulette table with only mixed success, would it make sense for you to place all of your remaining money on red the next turn and expect a certain win? Of course not. Expecting legalization to rectify prohibition’s unintended consequences without creating any of its own is similarly unwise. Worse, while a roulette player is free to alternate from black to red and red to black, betting on legalization could be an irreversible mistake.

No, it’s not. It’s not anything like roulette. It’s just a bad analogy.

So I’ve decided to title and end my post the same way Jonathan did. With a bad analogy.

The title of this post, of course, is from the description of a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster from Douglas Adams’ delightful “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It’s as ridiculous as Caulkins’ analogies, but has the distinct advantage of being funny.

It seems that at least once a week, we hear some breathless announcement that X activity has been found to be linked with Y behavior. Correlation seems to be the social science tool du jour, and the media eats it up.

Why? Because we have all sorts of data, and computers that can sort that data into unlimited comparisons, so it’s easy for someone to just start feeding in numbers and seeing what pops out.

The thing about correlation, though, is that by itself it’s meaningless. It’s a possible indication of an area for further study, but without context it’s useless for making policy. And it certainly doesn’t prove causation.

What’s fun and instructive is to explore some of the strange correlations that exist out there.

For example, did you know that people who have to look at the keyboard to type are much more likely to prefer thin crust pizza over deep dish as compared to the rest of the population?

Why? Who knows. You might speculate that Chicago (which tends to prefer deep dish) has better typing classes in the schools than New York (which tends to prefer thin crust) and that difference affected the overall population. But without further study, you really have no knowledge other than a bizarrely interesting statistic. (Disclosure: I’m from Chicago, can type without looking at the keyboard, and prefer deep dish pizza.)

Studies will also show you that people who don’t like camping are linked with a lesser ability to burp at will, as well as the fact that loving non-fiction books is linked to a likelihood of pigging out when you’re upset, and also that people who prefer soft serve ice cream don’t like roller coasters as much as the rest of us. (10 Crazy Correlations Between Unrelated Things – Business Insider)

So remember when you hear that a new study has conclusively shown that A is linked with B, that only means that someone put some numbers in a computer and looked for any kind of variance they could find, and in this case, 12% of people who did A, also did B, commpared to only 7% of the rest of the population doing B. Those numbers tell you absolutely nothing about why anyone did B.

This is a lesson that reporters should take more time to learn themselves and pass on to their readers.

December 10, 2012: It officially became legal for people in Colorado to possess an ounce of marijuana or up to 6 plants under state law.

Marijuana Legalized in Colorado with Hickenlooper Proclamation

He tweeted his declaration Monday and sent an executive order to reporters by email after the fact. That prevented a countdown to legalization as seen in Washington, where the law’s supporters gathered to smoke in public.

I don’t pretend to understand the political structure and procedures nearly as well as I do for the U.S., but there has been a new report put out by the Home Affairs Committee of the House of Commons on drug policy study and recommendations as a result of extensive study and taking evidence from a variety of sources on drug policy. This report has already caused quite a stir.

The report was embargoed until today, but the Daily Mail jumped the gun with an hysterical screaming headline on Sunday (with a truly bizarre juxtaposition of a free glass of champagne offer on the top of the page).

Of course, the truth is far more complicated than that.

However, it does appear that there are some very good recommendations included in the report (along with some not-so-good ones).

The big ones are that the report calls for the immediate establishment of a royal commission to consider alternatives to current drug policy, including decriminalization and legalization. They also recommend that the government look closely at Portugal’s system (the committee traveled there).

This good article by Alan Travis in the Guardian is a much more coherent read about the report (than anything you’d get in the Mail): David Cameron urged to take ‘now or never’ step on drugs reform.

Naturally, the hard-liners over there are not responding very well to the report.

Check out this truly ignorant piece by Thomas Pascoe: Drug policy cannot be decided by commissions on the basis of empirical evidence. It’s a moral problem

A grim sense of inevitability surrounds the suggestion by the Commons Home Affairs Committee that a Royal Commission be established to consider the legalisation of certain drugs, particularly cannabis. The suggestion that the legalisation of drugs ought to be subject to a commission of impartial experts is particularly tiresome. […]

Drug-taking is a moral issue. The fact that large numbers of young people feel the need to obliterate reality through drugs says something both about them and us. First, drug use feeds into a culture in which people take refuge in imaginary lives, rather than taking practical steps to remedy their problems. Second, it implies that as a society we can offer nothing else to these people, that release from the crushing boredom of many people’s daily existence cannot be found in charity work or education or self-betterment.

Legalising drug use endorses both of those viewpoints. Whether you want to build the New Jerusalem or simply improve your own lot, one way to ensure you fail is to turn inwards and seek the solitary consolation of a fantasy world. To take such a despairing view of people’s prospects is a moral tragedy.

Then there have also been the tossing out of ridiculous and false scare items about drugs.

(Reported in tweet by @Release_Drugs)

“It’s like going from a pint of beer to a pint of neat vodka” Minister on growing strength of cannabis (2:14) http://t.co/2BG8W09M

Um, no. If anything, it’s like going from a pint of beer to a shot of neat vodka.

Of course, the real issue is that this is merely a report. It would require action by politicians to be implemented.

It’ll probably end up on a shelf.

As demonstrated here (also via @Release_Drugs):

“We are open to new ideas but we will not consider decriminalising drugs” Minister contradicts himself (2hrs 14mins in) http://t.co/NZbZy1GX

Anyway, the truly good news is that here is yet another piece of this inexorable shift in international opinion about the drug war. The hardline governments can only withstand this continuous bombardment of facts and common sense for so long before their defenses crumble under the onslaught.

If you enjoy the read, here is the full report, and after the jump, I have provided the full conclusions section (the most interesting bits are sections 26, 42, and 43). You’ll notice a range of things discussed in this report, and many of them are suggestions of better methods of enforcement, but there’s also a sense throughout the report of looking at overall harm reduction (including reducing the harms of the drug war), which is a very good shift in focus.

Continue reading →

I know, I know.

I have a friend who teaches at-risk youth and she’d really like to show them the “Breaking the Taboo” film, but it would be better if she could also show a film with a different perspective and turn it into a writing assignment.

Any suggestions? Obviously, I don’t think we’re going to find one as good as Breaking the Taboo, but I don’t want to insult them with anything obviously stupid (no Reefer Madness, or that bizarre Church Lady parody, etc.)

Tommy Chong is interviewed on The Young Turks and he seems outright optimistic about the future after the votes in Washington and Colorado.

“Huge, huge difference. It’s going to bring about the legalization of hemp, for instance […] It’s also going to empty the jails, and we’re probably going to disband the DEA. Yay! […] Washington and Colorado are just the toe into the water. The whole country is following.”

Just the thought of the U.S. without the DEA is really quite stirring.

There’s nothing this administration hates worse than leakers… except when it’s doing the leaking intentionally to use the media.

There’s no better tool for official leaks than the New York Times, which has a policy against using unnamed government sources — a policy that it ignores constantly.

Administration Weighs Legal Action Against States That Legalized Marijuana Use

WASHINGTON — Senior White House and Justice Department officials are considering plans for legal action against Colorado and Washington that could undermine voter-approved initiatives to legalize the recreational use of marijuana in those states, according to several people familiar with the deliberations.

Even as marijuana legalization supporters are celebrating their victories in the two states, the Obama administration has been holding high-level meetings since the election to debate the response of federal law enforcement agencies to the decriminalization efforts.

[…]

Federal officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. Several cautioned that the issue had raised complex legal and policy considerations — including enforcement priorities, litigation strategy and the impact of international antidrug treaties — that remain unresolved, and that no decision was imminent.

The Obama administration declined to comment on the deliberations, but pointed to a statement the Justice Department issued on Wednesday — the day before the initiative took effect in Washington — in the name of the United States attorney in Seattle, Jenny A. Durkan. She warned Washington residents that the drug remained illegal.

The article goes on to explore some potentially extreme options with no indication that these specific options are being considered.

This appears to be a blatant political trial balloon using the New York Times to see what kinds of reactions there are and what political fallout might come from action… or inaction.

Update: I wrote to Charlie Savage for some clarification on the story. In reading it, I couldn’t positively connect the specific options listed to the sources. It was inferred that those came from the sources, but not linked (and with the third one actually attributed to someone else, that also made me cautious about assuming).

He wrote back:

@DrugWarRant Yes, this is something they are mulling. Also, saw your blog re tool for planted trial balloon – you are, forgive me, paranoid.

So apparently, the unnamed sources did specify at least those first two rather outrageous options.

And yes, I am paranoid. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, when considering either the history of this administration, the history of the drug war, or the history of the New York Times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UtNF-Le2L0&sns=em

In the state of Washington, people are now apparently legally smoking pot and getting gay-married (though not necessarily both at once), and from browsing the news reports, it appears that God has neglected to smite anyone, and there are no reports of rampant cannibalism or other societal collapses.

It’s still early, though, so we’ll keep a close watch on the sky…

The new documentary, Breaking the Taboo opens tomorrow… on YouTube. Interesting notion to have a film open on YouTube, but it certainly is a good way to get wider distribution immediately. Based on the trailer, it sure looks like it could be a good one.

At the link above, you can also sign their petition to end the drug war. And if you take a look at the supporters they have, or the list under the mission statement, it’s pretty impressive, and sure dispels the old tired notion that drug policy reform is just about potheads wanting to get high.

Event the relentlessly hysterical pro-prohibition rag The Daily Mail seemed to get excited about the film after seeing all the celebrities that showed up to support it at last night’s screening.

I don’t expect the film will be overtly pro-legalization, but it will be overtly pro-change, and specifically include a call to change the single convention. Here is their mission:

We call on Governments and Parliaments to recognise that:

Fifty years after the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs was launched, the global war on drugs has failed, and has had many unintended and devastating consequences worldwide.

Use of the major controlled drugs has risen, and supply is cheaper and more available than ever before. The UN conservatively estimates that there are now over 250 million drug users worldwide.

Illicit drugs are now the third most valuable industry in the world, after food and oil, all in the control of criminals. Fighting the war on drugs costs the world’s taxpayers incalculable billions each year. Millions of people are in prison worldwide for drug-related offences, mostly personal users and small-time dealers.

Corruption amongst law-enforcers and politicians, especially in producer and transit countries, has spread as never before, endangering democracy and civil society. Stability, security and development are threatened by the fallout from the war on drugs, as are human rights. Tens of thousands of people die in the drug war each year.
The drug-free world so confidently predicted by supporters of the war on drugs is further than ever from attainment.The policies of prohibition create more harms than they prevent. We must seriously consider shifting resources away from criminalising tens of millions of otherwise law abiding citizens, and move towards an approach based on health, harm-reduction, cost-effectiveness and respect for human rights.

Evidence consistently shows that these health-based approaches deliver better results than criminalisation. Improving our drug policies is one of the key policy challenges of our time. It is time for world leaders to fundamentally review their strategies in response to the drug phenomenon.

At the root of current policies lies the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. It is time to re-examine this treaty, which imposes a “one-size-fits-all” solution, in order to allow individual countries the freedom to explore drug policies that better suit their domestic needs.

As the production, demand and use of drugs cannot be eradicated, new ways must be found to minimise harms, and new policies, based on scientific evidence, must be explored.