Drug WarRant

Megan McArdle has a piece in the Atlantic: The Goals and Means of Meth Control. It looks at the ravages of drug abuse and also continues the discussion started by Keith Humphreys in his simplistic endorsement of making pseudoephedrine-based products prescription-only and Mark Kleiman’s follow-up.

Megan’s article is a good one to read, in that she gets some things right and opens the door to an important discussion in areas where she makes some important flawed assumptions.

First, the good stuff.

So with meth, we made it illegal, and then it turned out you could make the stuff from cold medicine in a very dangerous and dirty home production process, so we made it hard to get cold medicine, so they switched to an even more dangerous process, so now we’re going to make it even harder to get cold medicine . . .

At every step, we don’t consider the whole cost of functionally prohibiting cold medicine; we consider only the marginal cost of the new prohibition. And we compare that marginal cost to the whole cost of drug addiction, nasty amateur meth labs, etc. This policy ratchet means we can easily end up in a situation where the sum of our drug laws are worse than the disease of drug addiction, even though no one particular prohibition is.

This is an excellent point that is too often ignored. And it’s an important response to the kind of ridiculous emotionally-charged “policy” discussions that Humphreys employs:

If people get less cold relief but fewer children end up in the burn unit, I will vote for that trade.

It isn’t our desire to have cold medicine available when we actually have a cold that leads to children in the burn unit, it is prohibition that leads to children in the burn unit, and the notion that what we need is a distraction from addressing the real problem by adding another ancillary harm to the existing harmful regime — well, that’s just offensive.

Again, when it comes to understanding marginal cost, Megan gets is.

However, in her conclusion, McArdle gets caught up in the same fallacious fears that catch so many people in discussions of prohibition.

Against all this, you have to weigh the fate of people like Julie. Legal drugs undoubtedly mean more addicts. Maybe not a lot more–I don’t think we know how many people would get hooked on blow or crystal meth if it were legal. Personally, I haven’t tried the stuff not because it’s illegal, but because I am fabulously addictive to stimulants, and it seems sensible of me not to try anything that I might like well enough to sacrifice family, friends and career on its altar. I suspect that most people are like me. But it’s hard to say without running a big, scary natural experiment.

Personally, when I throw in the crime these black markets create, and the personal liberty costs of prohibition, I favor legalizing all of them. But I recognize the cost is more lives blighted like Julie’s. My only answer is that this would also be a world where fewer black kids lose their parents–or themselves–to the prison system, and fewer babies are badly burned when Daddy’s meth lab explodes. There are no real happy answers here–only damage control.

First of all, I suspect that Megan’s self-awareness is probably enough to insure that even if she did try the stuff, she wouldn’t end up sacrificing “family, friends and career on its altar.” But she rightly points out one of the reasons why it’s wrong to assume that the natural experiment should be so scary. However, there are plenty more.

There is absolutely no reason to assume, as Megan does (and so many others do), that there is a certainty of “more lives blighted like Julie’s.”

Let’s look at this a step at a time.

First, how will legalization affect use? It does seem likely that legalization of a formerly illicit drug will involve some increase in use. Of course, every bit of data that we have (various decriminalization moments in U.S. states as well as places such as Portugal and the Netherlands) indicates that, if properly managed, such increases are likely to be minimal and/or temporary (including a perfectly logical temporary spike due to curiosity).

And those increases and spikes will also be strongly influenced by the perception of harm and by social approbation. We have dramatically decreased the interest in trying/starting cigarette smoking due to conveying a perception of harm and through social disapprobation.

This means that individual drugs will see temporary spikes/increases in inverse relationship to the perception of harm and social disapproval.

Marijuana is likely to see a much larger increase in use than meth. Despite government efforts, most people don’t see a huge downside to marijuana use as opposed to a very real perception of danger regarding meth use. Also, in most social settings, the notion of breaking out a joint if legalized would be much more acceptable than breaking out a meth pipe.

The idea that legal cocaine would see as much use as alcohol (as is often claimed by Mark Kleiman and others) is patently ridiculous for these reasons. Alcohol has a far greater social acceptance and a much lower perception of harm.

Now the problem is that to this point, all we’ve been talking about is use. Unless you’re a sado-moralist who just wants to punish people for doing things they don’t like, then increases in use are generally irrelevant.

Yes, I said that “increases in use are generally irrelevant.”

If what you are really concerned about are the people like Julie, then all that matters is increased levels of abuse. I’m drinking scotch right now, and am not hurting myself or others, so nobody gives a damn about my use, nor should they.

One place people get it wrong is thinking that an increase in use will result in a corresponding increase in abuse.

Imagine a fictional drug called melange. It’s prohibited, and let’s pick some simple numbers for our calculations. 100,000 people use melange under prohibition. 10,000 of those abuse it. Under legalization, an additional 20,000 will use it.

There are a couple of way-too common mistakes made at this point. One is to assume that 10% of the new 20,000 users will be abusers (I’m not even including the morons who think we need to worry about all 20,000). Another is to assume that there will be no impact on those who are already abusing. Here’s what the incorrect assumptions look like.

Under this simplistic projection with bad assumptions, there are an additional 2,000 people (2,000 Julies, if you will) that we need to worry about. These are the poor souls that Megan McArdle and others are trying to balance with the damages of prohibition.

But that’s wrong.

1. There’s no reason to assume that 10% of the additional users will become abusers. There’s not some magical law of nature that dictates a percentage of users to be abusers. No, the fact is that some people are more likely to be predisposed to be abusers of certain kinds of drugs (something that Megan alluded to in her personal concern re: stimulants), and merely increasing the number of casual or curious users does not increase the number of those predisposed.

   And prohibition, despite all its oppression, provides no real barrier to obtaining drugs for those who are prone to abuse. For those predisposed, they’ve already either become abusers (of this, or other drugs) or, like Megan, decided not to take that chance. Either way, legalization doesn’t make them start abusing.

   Sure, there may be a few additional new abusers, but there really is no strong reason to assume any remarkable increase.

2. Legalization will also provide a net positive impact on those who were already abusing during prohibition, through: the increased ease in getting help (due to a change of stigma); the increased safety of dose and purity; the ability to have a more stable life situation without having to constantly find money for your next fix; etc. Some of these factors will actually help abusers quit, while others will reduce the drug harm to existing abusers. The net effect will be the equivalent of a significant reduction in abusers.

These two factors are huge and argue strongly against concerns for some mythical large group of new Julies under legalization.

Let’s try a very conservative set of numbers with our fictional drug given these corrected assumptions. Say that there’s fewer, but still a significant increase in abusers under legalization (1,000 new abusers) as well as a reduction of abusers/drug harm equivalent of 10% of the current abusers.

Now check out our chart:

No net increase in total number of abusers. No increase in drug harm. Yes, this is just one potential outcome, and there’s no way of knowing exactly how it would turn out given all the variables. It’s possible, though unlikely, that we could end up with some small increase in abusers. But the argument can just as easily (if not more easily) be made, given the points mentioned above, that there would actually be a net decrease in drug harm.

Either way, factor in the documented and pervasive destruction caused by prohibition and there’s no question that legalization is the preferred approach.

There’s no scary experiment involved here. It’s a big experiment, sure, but the only scary thing is not doing it.

What’s going on in your corner of the drug policy reform world?

Apparently there are no ads from the Drug Czar in this year’s Super Bowl. But do you remember how far they actually sunk after 9/11? Here are some of the offensive Super Bowl ads from 2002-2003.

In honor of his 100th birthday…

It’s a golden oldie…

Note: For those not familiar with this particular video, it’s a well-done edited comic mash-up of the Reagans’ talk about drugs that completely turns it around into a pro-drug Presidential talk.

… and with it, Caballes v. Illinois.

Those who have followed this blog for awhile know that I consider Caballes v. Illinois one of the more obviously clueless Supreme Court decisions of recent years. For those who don’t know, the decision basically said that a police dog alerting on a car was sufficient justification for a search even if there was no other suspicion. In other words, your Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search could be eliminated based on a dog’s reaction.

Justice Stevens’ decision for the majority had language that doesn’t pass the smell test for even a first-year law student:

We have held that any interest in possessing contraband cannot be deemed “legitimate,” and thus, governmental conduct that only reveals the possession of contraband “compromises no legitimate privacy interest.”

A dog sniff conducted during a concededly lawful traffic stop that reveals no information other than the location of a substance that no individual has any right to possess does not violate the Fourth Amendment.”

The bizarre assumption there is that a drug dog will only alert in the presence of illegal narcotics.

Just recently, as I noted in Dogs are like the Supreme Court. Often wrong.:

Chicago Tribune: The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.

For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.

So we have actual, practical evidence that Stevens and the majority were dead wrong.

But that’s not all.

Now we can add to that some powerful research evidence proving that drug dog alerts are strongly affected by the interest of their handler in this new study.

Explosive- and Drug-sniffing Dogs’ Performance is Affected by their Handlers’ Beliefs

The performance of drug- and explosives-sniffing dog/handler teams is affected by human handlers’ beliefs, possibly in response to subtle, unintentional handler cues, a study by researchers at UC Davis has found.
The study, published in the January issue of the journal Animal Cognition, found that detection-dog/handler teams erroneously “alerted,” or identified a scent, when there was no scent present more than 200 times — particularly when the handler believed that there was scent present.

“It isn’t just about how sensitive a dog’s nose is or how well-trained a dog is. There are cognitive factors affecting the interaction between a dog and a handler that can impact the dog’s performance,” said Lisa Lit, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurology and the study’s lead author.

“These might be as important — or even more important — than the sensitivity of a dog’s nose.”

In the study, they informed dogs’ handlers that there could be drugs in any of the rooms, and that a piece of red construction paper in two of the rooms would identify the location of the scent. In fact, there were no drugs or explosives at all.

Although there should have been no alerts in any of the rooms, there were alerts in all rooms. Moreover, there were more alerts at the locations indicated by construction paper than at either of the locations containing just the decoy scents or at any other locations.

That is significant, Lit said, because there were more alerts on target locations indicated by human suggestion — the construction paper — than at locations of increased dog interest — the hidden sausage and tennis balls. There also were alerts on a wide variety of other locations, indicating that the dogs were not simply alerting in the same locations where other dogs had done so.

Lit noted that in the early 20th century in Germany a horse named Clever Hans was believed to be capable of counting and other tasks. It was determined that Clever Hans actually was responding to the minute, postural and facial cues of his trainer or other observers. Similarly, detection dogs may be alerted to subtle human cues that direct dog responses without formal training, including pointing, nodding, head-turning and gazing.

We now have a significant body of evidence that drug dog sniffs are not a reliable identification of the location of contraband. Useful in investigation, to be sure, but not in any way sufficient to fulfill the requirements of the Fourth Amendment prohibiting unreasonable searches.

In the entire Supreme Court, now-retired Justice Souter was the only one who got it. In the Caballes decision, he blasted the majority for their decision and also called for re-visiting United States v. Place, an underlying 1983 decision regarding drug dog sniffs.

In United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696 (1983), we categorized the sniff of the narcotics-seeking dog as “sui generis” under the Fourth Amendment and held it was not a search. Id., at 707. The classification rests not only upon the limited nature of the intrusion, but on a further premise that experience has shown to be untenable, the assumption that trained sniffing dogs do not err. What we have learned about the fallibility of dogs in the years since Place was decided would itself be reason to call for reconsidering Place’s decision against treating the intentional use of a trained dog as a search. The portent of this very case, however, adds insistence to the call, for an uncritical adherence to Place would render the Fourth Amendment indifferent to suspicionless and indiscriminate sweeps of cars in parking garages and pedestrians on sidewalks; if a sniff is not preceded by a seizure subject to Fourth Amendment notice, it escapes Fourth Amendment review entirely unless it is treated as a search. We should not wait for these developments to occur before rethinking Place’s analysis, which invites such untoward consequences.1

At the heart both of Place and the Court’s opinion today is the proposition that sniffs by a trained dog are sui generis because a reaction by the dog in going alert is a response to nothing but the presence of contraband.2 See ibid. (“[T]he sniff discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics, a contraband item”); ante, at 3—4 (assuming “that a canine sniff by a well-trained narcotics dog will only reveal ‘the presence or absence of narcotics, a contraband item’ ” (quoting Place, supra, at 707)). Hence, the argument goes, because the sniff can only reveal the presence of items devoid of any legal use, the sniff “does not implicate legitimate privacy interests” and is not to be treated as a search. Ante, at 4.

The infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction.

Absolutely. And now we have even more proof.

Unfortunately, we’re not likely to see the Supreme Court willing to address this issue in the near future.

… in the Daily Mail:

These days the hard drugs are gone, but he continues – against the Hollywood grain – to smoke cannabis. ‘I don’t tend to say this publicly, but we can see it’s a curative thing. The narcotics industry is also enormous. It funds terrorism and – this is a huge problem in America – fuels the foreign gangs. More than 85 per cent of men incarcerated in America are on drug-related offences. It costs $40,000 a year for every prisoner. If they were really serious about the economy there would be a sensible discussion about legalisation.’

Some people here in the U.S. say that the reason the drug war isn’t working is that we’re just not taking it seriously enough. We’ve got to stop being so easy on the drug criminals.

Well, let’s take a little look at how it works when you really crack down hard on drug trafficking… Iran in Drug Offender Execution Frenzy

Iran began 2011 by hanging eight accused drug traffickers at Qom prison south of Tehran New Year’s Day, and that was just day one. By the end of January, Iranian authorities had executed at least 56 drug offenders, according to press accounts compiled by the anti-death penalty group Hands Off Cain.

… or how about Malaysia

Three people, including one couple, were sentenced on Thursday to death by hanging by the high court at Temerloh, Malaysia for trafficking 4.5 kilograms (just under 10 pounds) of marijuana last year.

“Death by hanging is the only sentence provided for offenses under Section 39B (1) of the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1952,” said Judicial Commissioner Datuk Akhtar Tahir, reports Bernama, the official Malaysian national news agency.

So, with that kind of extreme penalty for drug trafficking, they should really have this problem licked in those countries, right?

No

A senior Bukit Aman narcotics division official told theSun that unlike syndicates from other countries, the Iranian drug mules bring in large quantities of syabu or ice, and are willing to sell them way below normal market price here.

“Despite a continuous assault on these (Iranian) syndicates, there seems to be no sign of them slowing down,” said the official. […]

The official disclosed that besides selling the drugs in Malaysia, the syndicate was also using Malaysia as a point of entry into Thailand, where the demand is very high.

“And we believe they are using the land route to get into Thailand from Malaysia, which is quite easy.

The official disclosed that the Thai authorities have placed Iranians on number one on the alert list, especially at airports, and have detained scores of Iranian drug mules in recent months. […]

Based on available data, more than 40% of crimes in Iran are drug-related felonies.
In Malaysia, Iranian drug mules are also well protected by local crime syndicates, the official revealed.

“The local syndicates have resorted to buying the finished product from Iranians who smuggle them into the country rather than produce the methamphetamine here themselves.

The official disclosed that the street price of ice was close to RM250,000 per kg but the Iranian syndicates were selling them at between RM120,000 and RM175,00 per kg.

“These factors make the Iranian drug syndicates much sought after here, plus the fact that there is a large Middle Eastern community in Malaysia makes it easier for these drug mules to move in society without raising any suspicion, “ added the official.

So… how to you get tougher on drug traffickers than killing them? Could there be some penalty that’s even tougher on drug traffickers than death?

There is.

You take away their profits through legalization.

Get tough on drug traffickers. Really tough. Legalize.

End this absurd war by Glenn Garvin at the Miami Herald. Great piece featuring a LEAP’s Kyle Vogt.

An Illinois state panel found Monday that Illinois blacks convicted of low-level drug possession offenses are much more likely to be sentenced to prison than whites. According to the Illinois Disproportionate Justice Impact Study Commission, 19% convicted of drug possession were imprisoned, while only 4% of whites were.

The disparity was even worse in the state’s most populous jurisdiction, Cook County. While statewide, blacks were five times more likely to be imprisoned for drug possession than whites, in Cook County, the figure was eight times.

This is an open thread.

After U.S., Sweden, United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark and Germany objected to Bolivia’s amendment yesterday, President Morales is making it clear that he’s not going to sit back and give up.

Evo quiere presentar recurso para despenalizar el acullicu

Someone with a better knowledge of the language can perhaps help out with the nuances, but even Google’s mangled translation of the page shows a pretty clear intent…

President Evo Morales intends to submit an appeal (complaint) against the 1961 United Nations prohibits acullicu [ceremony of the coca] after at least six countries objected to the request Bolivian coca decriminalization of chewing.

The announcement was made yesterday by the Head of State at their annual meeting with the diplomatic corps in Palacio Quemado.

“The Government will continue to seek other mechanisms to take other courses of action to decriminalize consumption. If no objection is raised to chewing coca, will go to a conference (international) and we are also exploring another way is to denounce the 1961 Convention, “he said.

Morales said it is a right of all states to appeal to this type of mechanism to recognize the acullicu.

“I feel that some countries have been confused, we would be in the campaign to decriminalize the coca plant, we have established very clearly that the traditional consumption of coca leaf.”

He will appeal any effort that member countries make to oppose his amendment, and, failing that, he will consider withdrawing from the Single Convention. And it appears that he is suggesting that course of action to other countries as well.

from the Drug Czar’s “blog”

These consultations, across the country and across government, helped highlight an important truth — that public safety isn’t the only thing threatened by drug use; drugs also pose an extremely complex and dynamic challenge to public health. And the public safety community cannot bear the full weight of addressing drug use and its consequences. The result of our engagement with the American people is the Obama Administration’s National Drug Control Strategy — a shift in how we address drug control, by restoring balance in our efforts and treating drug addiction as a brain disease rather than a moral failing.

Tourette syndrome is a brain disease. That doesn’t mean we arrest everyone who says “fuck.”

Despite recent calls to do so, legalizing drugs is not the answer. Our opposition to legalization is not born out of a culture-war or drug-war mentality. It is born out of the recognition that our drug problem is a major public health threat, and that drug addiction is a preventable and treatable disease. Already drug use — legal and illegal — is the source of too many of our Nation’s problems. Why would we implement policies that would make these problems worse?

As President Obama said — we’ve made huge strides in reducing smoking, drunk driving, and other public health problems through a policy approach that stresses prevention and changing public attitudes about dangerous behavior. There’s no reason we can’t build on those successes and achieve the same results with drug use and its consequences.

We can’t change public attitudes about dangerous behavior as long as we give the control of it to criminals.