Drug WarRant

Ray Fisman at Slate bring us Narco Economics. A new study that could help Mexico win its war on drug traffickers.

This article spends most of its time discussing the interesting concept of “forensic economics” being explored by student Melissa Dell, really mostly an academic exercise at this point, having to do with the effect of channeling routes through Mexico (controlling or not controlling towns/roads) on drug trafficking organizations.

But Fisman sees this and, having completely slept through Economics 101, comes up with a completely nonsensical conclusion:

Once you add up these various effects, it’s easy to see how Mexico’s drug war has cost more than 40,000 lives over nearly five years, and counting. It’s also easy to understand calls to bring the war to a halt: For all the human tragedy and billions in economic cost, traffickers merely reroute their smuggling operations around the piecemeal interventions of the police and military. Yet that is precisely the point of drug-interdiction efforts—not to eliminate all drug trafficking, but to raise its costs. Raising costs squeezes the margins of Mexican smugglers who, like all good businessmen, will scale back their operations, thus reducing the supply that reaches the U.S. market.

What???

Let’s see that again:

Raising costs squeezes the margins of Mexican smugglers who, like all good businessmen, will scale back their operations, thus reducing the supply that reaches the U.S. market.

I’ve tried re-reading the article to discover if Fisman is really being sarcastic instead of stupid, but I find no evidence to support that (feel free to set me straight if I missed something).

Let’s try the Economics for Dummies approach.

• If there is demand, supply will follow.
• Rising costs don’t result in reduced supply, but rather are passed on to the consumer.
• The higher the price, the higher the quantity that will be supplied.
• Squeezing suppliers merely results in pushing for more ruthless suppliers to rise to the top to take advantage of higher prices (black market economics)

Drug traffickers are used to having 10-20% of their product seized in the normal course of business and they simply plan to supply more to make up for it (at the source, the cost is ridiculously low). And yet, somehow making their route… inefficient is going to do them in?

Fisman then makes it even worse by using a variation on the ridiculous “more people dying means we’re winning” meme.

And even the rise in local violence may ultimately have a silver lining. The increased factional violence that has accompanied government crackdowns may ultimately weaken all of the government’s adversaries. And it’s not just rival cartels that take advantage of weakness to attack—it’s also led to a splintering among the dominant cartels as lower-level commandants split off to compete with their former bosses.

Gee, that might actually work long-term if the laws of economics were repealed and there were no black market profits involved in the drug trade. But since that’s unlikely, then all it means is a continual shifting of power to fill each vacuum that occurs.

When I took economics in college, it was at 8 am. I’m not a morning person and found it to be excruciating. I often fell asleep. Yet somehow I managed to get through that class without being entirely clueless.

Count the Costs is an international organization that focuses on the costs of the war on drugs. They have just released an environmental briefing (pdf) discussing the costs of the war on drugs to the environment.

Send this to all your friends who are active in environmental issues. In general, environmental groups have been friendly to drug policy reform (despite governmental attempts at misdirection), but awareness of the depth of destruction caused by the drug war could cause them to increase their support even more.

Denver Post: Report shows fewer traffic fatalities after states pass medical-pot laws

The passage of state medical-marijuana laws is associated with a subsequent drop in the rate of traffic fatalities, according to a newly released study by two university professors.

The study — by University of Colorado Denver professor Daniel Rees and Montana State University professor D. Mark Anderson — found that the traffic-death rate drops by nearly 9 percent in states after they legalize marijuana for medical use. The researchers arrived at that figure, Rees said, after controlling for other variables such as changes in traffic laws, seat-belt usage and miles driven. The study stops short of saying the medical-marijuana laws cause the drop in traffic deaths.

“We were pretty surprised that they went down,” Rees said Tuesday.

I’m not. But then again, I’ve been spending years looking at cannabis and driving studies.

Now keep in mind that this study shows correlation, not causation, but it appears to be a very powerful correlation, in that it completely undermines the prohibitionist argument that legalization is certain to result in an Armageddon of fiery crashes on the highways.

I’m waiting for the inevitable complaint from the usual suspects about how both sides in the legalization debate are pushing statistics that don’t fully prove causation when we mention this study. But the clear difference is that this is an actual study that is specifically tracking data that is relevant to changes of use connected with legalization, whereas the drug czar either pulls stuff out of his ass, or lies about the import of completely irrelevant statistics.

Driving shouldn’t even be part of this legalization debate. There are so many other aspects of legalization that make the driving issue miniscule in comparison. But we have no choice, because every time we mention legalization, the prohibitionists are out there preaching vehicular doom and gloom.

So, why did the study find the roads safer after medical marijuana was passed? Are stoned drivers actually safer than straight drivers? Probably not. It’s the substitution factor.

Rees said the main reason for the drop appears to be that medical-marijuana laws mean young people spend less time drinking and more time smoking cannabis. Legalization of medical marijuana, the researchers report, is associated with a 12-percent drop in the alcohol-related fatal-crash rate and a 19-percent decrease in the fatality rate of people in their 20s, according to the study.

The study also found that medical- marijuana legalization is associated with a drop in beer sales.

“The result that comes through again and again and again is (that) young adults . . . drink less when marijuana is legalized and traffic fatalities go down,” Rees said.

Exactly. The truth is that the majority of drug users are not poly-drug users and changes in a drug’s status can result in switching. Despite the fact that alcohol and cannabis are very different in their effects on the body, they both fill a similar recreational niche, and there are many casual users who would prefer the many superior aspects of pot if it were legal.

Once that switch is made, the differences are astounding. I think back to my college years when the drunks came home and, after terrorizing some poor freshman, put their fist through a wall, while the stoners were affably listening to Pink Floyd and discussing philosophy. As George Carlin used to say, you don’t puke on your shoes. And you aren’t as likely to end up in fiery crashes.

Hey, I’m not against alcohol. I’m a big fan of Lagavulin 16 or a good Tanqueray and Tonic. And all drugs should be used in moderation.

But there’s no doubt that, when misused, alcohol is a phenomenally more dangerous drug than cannabis. And that’s especially true on the roads.

Alcohol releases inhibitions and causes people to act more recklessly even as their impairment increases, while making them feel invincible. Cannabis, on the other hand makes people almost paranoically aware of their impairment, resulting in increased caution, sometimes to extremes.

As I’ve been fond of joking:

The drunk driver speeds through the stop sign without seeing it.
The stoned driver stops and patiently waits for it to turn green.

Here is my own personal and completely unscientific view of the relative dangers of drivers (obviously, these are very broad generalizations, but I think they serve to make the point).

The most dangerous I’ve ever been behind the wheel of a car was from being tired. That doze off and sudden wakening while driving… I feel so much safer these days now that I’ve learned to pull over somewhere and take a quick nap whenever I feel that tired.

Do I want people to drive while stoned? No. Of course not. Nor do I want them to drive tired or distracted. And I really think that my 95-year-old Uncle should stop driving (I’d ride with a stoned driver instead of him any day.)

If legalization of marijuana means that some of those who currently misuse alcohol switch to pot, we will save lives. And that’s a fact.

It’s been discussed a bit in comments, but it’s important to note once again just how horrible Newt would be.

Chris Moody Interview with Newt

Three Republican presidential candidates have shown an openness to handing over control of drugs and medical marijuana to the states. Would you continue the current federal policy making marijuana illegal in all cases or give the states more control?

I would continue current federal policy, largely because of the confusing signal that steps towards legalization sends to harder drugs.

I think the California experience is that medical marijuana becomes a joke. It becomes marijuana for any use. You find local doctors who will prescribe it for anybody that walks in.

Why shouldn’t the states have control over this? Why should this be a federal issue?

Because I think you guarantee that people will cross state lines if it becomes a state-by-state exemption.

I don’t have a comprehensive view. My general belief is that we ought to be much more aggressive about drug policy. And that we should recognize that the Mexican cartels are funded by Americans.

Expand on what you mean by “aggressive.”

In my mind it means having steeper economic penalties and it means having a willingness to do more drug testing.

In 1996, you introduced a bill that would have given the death penalty to drug smugglers. Do you still stand by that?

I think if you are, for example, the leader of a cartel, sure. Look at the level of violence they’ve done to society. You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there’s nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine or you can be in the tradition that says, ‘These kind of addictive drugs are terrible, they deprive you of full citizenship and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American.’ If you’re serious about the latter view, then we need to think through a strategy that makes it radically less likely that we’re going to have drugs in this country.

Places like Singapore have been the most successful at doing that. They’ve been very draconian. And they have communicated with great intention that they intend to stop drugs from coming into their country.

In 1981, you introduced a bill that would allow marijuana to be used for medical purposes. What has changed?

What has changed was the number of parents I met with who said they did not want their children to get the signal from the government that it was acceptable behavior and that they were prepared to say as a matter of value that it was better to send a clear signal on no drug use at the risk of inconveniencing some people, than it was to be compassionate toward a small group at the risk of telling a much larger group that it was okay to use the drug.

It’s a change of information. Within a year of my original support of that bill I withdrew it.

Ron Paul and Barney Frank have introduced a similar bill almost every year since.

You have to admit, Ron Paul has a coherent position. It’s not mine, but it’s internally logical.

Speaking of Ron Paul, at the last debate, he said that the war on drugs has been an utter failure. We’ve spent billions of dollars since President Nixon and we still have rising levels of drug use. Should we continue down the same path given the amount of money we’ve spent? How can we reform our approach?

I think that we need to consider taking more explicit steps to make it expensive to be a drug user. It could be through testing before you get any kind of federal aid. Unemployment compensation, food stamps, you name it.

It has always struck me that if you’re serious about trying to stop drug use, then you need to find a way to have a fairly easy approach to it and you need to find a way to be pretty aggressive about insisting–I don’t think actually locking up users is a very good thing. I think finding ways to sanction them and to give them medical help and to get them to detox is a more logical long-term policy.

Sometime in the next year we’ll have a comprehensive proposal on drugs and it will be designed to say that we want to minimize drug use in America and we’re very serious about it.

I’d be happy to purchase a one-way ticket to Singapore for Newt Gingrich.

Representative Barney Frank isn’t too worried about Gingrich’s candidacy, and got in a pretty good jab:

“I did not think I lived a good enough life to see Newt Gingrich as the Republican nominee,” the 30-year House veteran said. “He would be the best thing to happen to Democrats since Barry Goldwater … It’s still unlikely, but I have hopes.”

Unfortunately, Frank, who has been a real friend to drug policy reform, has announced that he is retiring from the House this year.

He’ll be missed.

There’s a pretty cool guy named Carlo Garcia (who happens to be a friend of mine) who created quite a stir by spending a year giving a small amount to a different charity each day and blogging about it. (see Living Philanthropic). He got written up in the national press and his small gifts encouraged tons of others to give as well.

His latest follow-up on this successful project is Cyber Giving Monday. Take the concept of Cyber Monday (the online follow-up to Black Friday), but instead of buying more stuff that you may not need, make a difference to some useful organization. Then write about it and/or tweet about it to #CyberGivingMonday.

I think it’s a great idea and I’ve given a donation to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition for Cyber Giving Monday.

About Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP)

LEAP envisions a world in which drug policies work for the benefit of society and keep our communities safer. A system of legalization and regulation will end the violence, better protect human rights, safeguard our children, reduce crime and disease, treat drug abusers as patients, reduce addiction, use tax dollars more efficiently, and restore the public’s respect and trust in law enforcement.

LEAP’s goals are: (1) To educate the public, the media and policy makers about the failure of current drug policy by presenting a true picture of the history, causes and effects of drug use and the elevated crime rates more properly related to drug prohibition than to drug pharmacology and (2) To restore the public’s respect for police, which has been greatly diminished by law enforcements involvement in imposing drug prohibition.

LEAP’s main strategy for accomplishing these goals is to create a constantly growing speakers bureau staffed with knowledgeable and articulate current and former drug-warriors who describe the impact of current drug policies on: police/community relations; the safety of law enforcement officers and suspects; police corruption and misconduct; and the excessive financial and human costs associated with current drug policies.

LEAP’s voice is a powerful one that can do a lot. It’s amazing the impact a former police or Coast Guard officer or judge can have talking to a Kiwanis or Rotary club about the destruction of prohibition.

Join me in supporting LEAP, or make your own Cyber Giving Monday donation and talk about it here.

#CyberGivingMonday

Drone.

Looks like it may be time to freshen up the paint on my rooftop.

The LA Times discusses the potential expanded use of drones in the U.S. (you know, a variation of the kind of thing we’ve been using so successfully in Pakistan to kill children and friendly soldiers).

Drone aircraft, best known for their role in hunting and destroying terrorist hide-outs in Afghanistan, may soon be coming to the skies near you.

Police agencies want drones for air support to spot runaway criminals. Utility companies believe they can help monitor oil, gas and water pipelines. Farmers think drones could aid in spraying their crops with pesticides.

“It’s going to happen,” said Dan Elwell, vice president of civil aviation at the Aerospace Industries Assn. “Now it’s about figuring out how to safely assimilate the technology into national airspace.” […]

Police departments in Texas, Florida and Minnesota have expressed interest in the technology’s potential to spot runaway criminals on rooftops or to track them at night by using the robotic aircraft’s heat-seeking cameras. […]

“This is a tool that many law enforcement agencies never imagined they could have,” said Steven Gitlin, a company executive.

As Glenn Greenwald tweets: “Absolute rule: when you vest the Govt with a weapon, it will expand beyond its original application.”

Senators apparently decide the U.S. Constitution, individual rights, and limits on government are “quaint concepts” in this post-911-opportunity world.

ACLU

The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. […]

The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.

The worldwide indefinite detention without charge or trial provision is in S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act bill, which will be on the Senate floor on Monday. The bill was drafted in secret by Sens. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) and passed in a closed-door committee meeting, without even a single hearing

Unfortunately, this is attached to a must-pass Defense bill. Senators need to vote for an amendment to strip this passage from the bill.

It’s about the drug war; it’s about the war on terror; it’s about opportunistic authoritarians looking to seize power.

We are in more danger from those who take away our rights in the name of security than we are from terrorists and drug lords.

Write your Senator. Now.

Top story: Driven By Drug War Incentives, Cops Target Pot Smokers, Brush Off Victims Of Violent Crime by Radley Balko at Huffington Post

Arresting people for assaults, beatings and robberies doesn’t bring money back to police departments, but drug cases do […]

“When our cops are focused on executing large-scale, constitutionally questionable raids at the slightest hint that a small-time pot dealer is at work, real police work preventing and investigating crimes like robberies and rapes falls by the wayside,” Downing said.

NPR reports ADHD Sufferers Fear An Adderall Shortage and notes that the DEA actually controls the overall amount to be produced nationally, so that if there is diversion it ends up resulting in shortages.

Radley Balko comments: FDA: There’s a nationwide Adderall shortage that’s causing real harm to patients. DEA: Shut up.

Mark Draughn at Windypundit likens the DEA stupidity to attempting to reduce traffic accidents by restricting the number of cars that are manufactured.

Portugal and the drug war – a nice piece by Helen Redmond for Al Jazeera.

Before the Portuguese government was able to implement the National Drug Strategy in 2000, members of the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) flew to Lisbon to dissuade them from decriminalising drugs. The INCB is an unaccountable cabal of drug war proponents who enforce prohibitionist drug policies around the world through the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. They argued Portugal would become a drug destination for tourists, drug use would explode among youth, and decriminalisation would “send the wrong message”.

The doomsday drug drama portrayed by the INCB never happened. Portugal didn’t become Europe’s “Club Meth”, nor did rates of drug use significantly increase. In fact, drug use among adolescents decreased. There has been a small spike in drug use among adults. And, so what?

Mexico activists seek ICC investigation of drugs war – they’re asking the International Criminal Court to investigate both one of the top drug lords and the President of Mexico.

Good to see the two being put in the same category. In general, it is both governments and the major traffickers who profit from the war and they are both likely to abuse their power.

Headline of the day: Prime Minister refuses to legalize marijuana or ban shark fins

Another innocent victim of the drug wars. Federal agents say 88-year-old Saratoga man’s invention is being used by meth labs

An 88-year-old guy makes “Polar Pure” water purifier for hikers and campers. Now his distributor has been warned against sending him iodine (the critical ingredient) because the DEA thinks people might use it to try to make meth. So now he’s out of business.

And the DEA’s response?

“Methamphetamine is an insidious drug that causes enormous collateral damage,” wrote Barbara Carreno, a DEA spokeswoman. “If Mr. Wallace is no longer in business he has perhaps become part of that collateral damage, for it was not a result of DEA regulations, but rather the selfish actions of criminal opportunists. Individuals that readily sacrifice human lives for money.”

Yeah, there’s a special place in hell for people like that.

Voice of Russia says: Obama picked the wrong moment for a crackdown on medical marijuana

In any event, the Obama administration has picked the wrong moment for the launch of its questionable campaign. While the country is hopelessly struggling with the economic and social depression it seems that there are a lot more urgent problems to address than persecuting producers of a medical substance.

Always expanding the definition of safety sensitive positions for the purpose of drug testing… The city of Corinth (don’t know where that is) recently expanded their mandatory drug testing positions to include:

Employees who are traveling on the exterior of city vehicles and are exposed to external traffic hazards.

That confused me. Firefighters are already included. Is this for the dalmatian who rides the fire truck? Then it hit me – they probably needed to come up with a way to justify drug testing garbage men. Because Lord knows we wouldn’t want the men who pick up our trash all day to be getting stoned when they get home.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso must be reading my blog…

Amsterdam, November 22, 2011 – “Would legal regulation and control of drugs better protect children?” is a question posed by former President of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso in an editorial to be published in the January issue of Elsevier’s International Journal of Drug Policy (IJDP).

The editorial, “Children and drug law reform” follows the March 2011 report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, chaired by Cardoso, which made a series of recommendations for reforms of drug laws, including experiments with legal regulation and control.

“If we believe that the best interests of the child should be a primary consideration in all policies that affect them, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, then children have the right to be placed front and centre in drug policy discussions”, writes the former president.

Recognising the harms that have befallen children and young people around the world due to drugs prohibition, and the failure of current approaches to protect children from drug use and drug related harms, Cardoso calls for debate on a range of issues including what legal regulation and control of drugs would mean for children.

“I am convinced that the recommendations of the Global Commission will have significant benefits for children and young people,” he writes, “I would not support such policies if I did not believe that current approaches have singularly failed in this respect.” […]

“To protect children from drugs it is to my mind now beyond debate that drug laws need to be reformed. From what we already know, the ongoing and future identified harms of current drug policies to our children must be considered not as unintended, but a result of negligence, recklessness or simple disregard,” concludes Cardoso.

“President Cardoso’s editorial is a challenge to politicians, researchers and activists and is a much needed contribution to an important part of the drug policy debate we all too often overlook”, said Professor Gerry Stimson, Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Drug Policy. “This is no doubt a very difficult and controversial area and I wholeheartedly agree with President Cardoso, we need to create an environment where it is safer to openly discuss these issues.”

In the Ottawa Citizen: Kelly Egan: Pot problem: parents won’t go for legalization

Ordinary people are not going to read academic studies, unravel complex science on addictions, or solve a harm-benefit equation.

They are probably going to ask themselves: Would you buy a bag of weed and give it to your teenager?

The hell you would, Mom and Dad.

One afternoon this week, I sat down with a mother who wanted to quietly scream about the media’s depiction of marijuana as a soft, even helpful drug, that the state should legalize and control.

She has a son, 20. He began using marijuana when he was about 14. It soon turned into daily use, sometimes before school. So school became a problem.

“He just seemed so spaced out all the time,” said his mother, a 50-ish federal public servant. “He became very secretive about where he was going.”

Within a couple of years, he was dealing. Then he was expelled.

He was a good athlete, but gave up sports, gave up his sports friends and soon ran with another crowd. It changed the whole dynamic of the family.

“I would dread coming home at night because I didn’t know who I’d find there.”

Not a completely unfamiliar story. And there is so much going on in there that requires thoughtful analysis, particularly when you learn more about him…

The boy grew up in a middle-class suburb, with many advantages. He was taken to counsellors, psychologists, doctors. He couldn’t seem to stick with a program. His parents have joined support groups and sought help from the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre.

The boy has an older brother, who is thriving. It vexes the mother how one could be so focused and the other so lacking in motivation.

The young man suffers from depression.

Is this a story about marijuana abuse or something else entirely? Seems to me that there were a number of issues here and that marijuana may have just been a symptom reliever.

So what’s the conclusion from the author of the article?

And, in a nutshell, that is why state-control of marijuana will probably never happen. Because an ordinary citizen, a garden-variety parent, does not want to be party to the creation of a nation of young pot-heads. Period.

Really? Is that what we learn from this story?

Is prohibition why the older brother didn’t abuse marijuana? How did prohibition help the younger brother? It seems to me that all his problems happened under prohibition. So why is that an argument against legalization?

He dealt marijuana and hung out with that crowd. Would that have happened if marijuana was legal?

Wouldn’t legal marijuana have an age restriction?

It baffles me that people continue to look at the drug problems under prohibition and list them as reasons why legalization would be bad. There’s no evidence that legalization would exacerbate these prohibition-related problems and plenty of evidence that we’d have a better chance of helping people who abuse drugs without the sledge hammer of prohibition.

Every time one of these parents comes forward we need to ask why they support having criminals control the drug market.

How does that help their children?