Drug WarRant

Mark Kleiman has his response to the Cato Unbound series with: Drug Policy in Principle, and in Practice. A couple of excellent comments have already been expressed in the placeholder post below. But I wanted to take a chance to look at his response a little more in depth.
As this moment (Kleiman’s response) was approaching, I found myself wondering how he would find a way to subtly slam legalizers for no apparent reason. This time it was in the opening paragraph.

Cato Unbound is to be commended for having assembled a symposium free both of the usual drug war rant and of the usual ‹drug policy reformŠ rant.

Note first the use of the “scare quotes” around “drug policy reform.” This is Kleiman’s way of saying that those of us who claim to be drug policy reformers are not actually policy reformers, but are legalizers, which in his view is not… reform. We are apparently not serious folks, but rather fringe elements who think that “crack should be sold at the 7-11.Š (Ah, the ever-present straw man)
How many times is that offensive approach used by prohibitionists? That willful effort to misrepresent opponents’ arguments. If McCain had done something even similar regarding Obama’s views, Kleiman would be up in arms asking “Just how stupid does the McCain-Palin campaign think I am?” Well, then, why shouldn’t we be asking “Just how stupid do Kleiman and Caulkins think we are?”
Kleiman doesn’t go as far out of bounds as Caulkins’ offensive straw man: (“Denying or denigrating an individual‰s right to choose temperance is an extreme position not worth engaging.”) Caulkins, in fact, didn’t seem engaged at all in actually participating in the discussion in any legitimate way.
Kleiman seems to excuse Caulkins’ behavior as:

It seems to me that to some extent Jon Caulkins on the one hand and the Erowids and Jacob Sullum on the other are talking past one another. […]
Jonathan and the others are feeling different parts of the elephant. No surprise that they offer different reports about its nature.

Yes, except that the Erowids and Sullum are talking about the nature of an elephant, while Jonathan is telling us that it’s actually a coconut.
Kleiman really seems to want to re-define the argument to allow better treatment of his favorite drugs, and more demonization of the one in particular that always seems to make him lose all reason — cocaine. Certainly there’s an important place for discussing the specific differences in each drug regarding use, abuse, regulation, harm reduction, effectiveness of education, etc. But I think Kleiman’s thesis is, in fact, a diversion from the intent of the lead essay, not a clarification of it.
Here’s where it really gets interesting. Kleiman is willing to sign on to Caulkin’s balancing of the good and evil of drugs:

Still, I think Caulkins could make a plausible case that the decision to start to use alcohol or tobacco or cocaine or heroin or methamphetamine (in other than pill form) is an ex ante bad decision, because the relatively modest gain from successfully controlled use, multiplied by the probability of achieving controlled use, is outweighed by the very heavy losses from falling into even relatively transient abuse and the extreme losses from falling into chronic abuse, multiplied by those probabilities. The expected value of the gamble may well be negative, even if most people who take the gamble come out somewhat ahead of the game, because the average loser loses more than the average winner gains.

If he stopped here, that would be fine. That is, in fact, a fine discussion to have regarding the free choice of the individual. To weigh the potential upsides and potential downsides, assess the risks soberly (with proper evidence-based information), and make a decision.
But he doesn’t stop there. He moves right on to:

Thus Caulkins has a reasonable argument that voters might reasonably decide to protect their fellow citizens from the risk of falling into substance abuse disorder, even at the expense of missing the pleasures of moderate use.

And he has moved right down the path to supporting prohibition.
But you see, once you add prohibition, the equation changes dramatically. No longer is it a balanced choice. What Kleiman fails to address, pretty much every time he talks about drug policy, is that he is assuming that prohibition works and that prohibition is essentially free.
Sure, he pays some lip service to the costs of prohibition, but never really factors those costs into the equation. To him, there is no reason to consider the costs of prohibition vs. no prohibition, because the lack of prohibition is simply not an option in his mind. He and Caulkins won’t even discuss it.
Therefore, prohibition is a constant, and merely nibbling around the edges of its costs is then a “good thing,” and you never have to justify the total cost in dollars, lives, morality, or anything else.

Caulkins and I could probably go on at length about all the ways in which the costs of the current prohibitions, especially in the forms of violence, incarceration, and infectious disease, could be reduced without allowing the massive increases in abuse levels that would surely result from commercialization. [Boyum and Reuter 2005; MacCoun and Reuter 2001] To offer three specifics: We could reduce violence and drunken driving by raising alcohol taxes [Cook 2007, Cook forthcoming], we could shrink the illicit drug markets and reduce recidivism by using drug testing and swift, automatic, and mild sanctions to force probationers to stop using expensive illicit drugs [Kleiman 1998, Hawken and Kleiman 2007, Schoofs 2008], and we could break up street drug markets, thus protecting neighborhoods, with low-arrest drug crackdowns [Kennedy 2008, Schoofs 2008].

I’ve read most of these, and they are bandaids on the cancer of prohibition. If you’ve already decided that anything other than prohibition is not an allowed topic of discussion, then many of them are not bad ideas.
But what kind of messed up policy discussion eliminates options?
Sure, I suppose it’s nice to be able to discuss drug policy without having to factor in the ravages of prohibition or consider alternatives. But it’s dishonest and unproductive.
Even though the United State has legal and voluntary restrictions on the advertising of alcohol, and even though we have, through education, regulation, and public opinion dramatically reduced the abuse of legal tobacco, Mark Kleiman “recoil[s] in horror” at the thought of how American business would market cocaine, as though we’re powerless to do anything about it — that it’s so completely impossible to even imagine regulations that he has no choice but to “recoil in horror toward the current state of affairs.”
That would be the current state of affairs that has people dying right and left from drug war violence, that has enabled huge black market profits, and spawned massive corruption, dysfunctional foreign policy, and incredible damage to rights, families, cities, the integrity of law enforcement and government (the list goes on and on).
I’m sorry, but the current state of affairs is what makes me recoil in horror. And I have enough imagination to believe that we can come up with a way to legalize and regulate drugs without being required to have a Joe Nose Camel poster over a display of shrink-wrapped Kiddie Krack on the 7-11 checkout counter.
Oh, and yes, this is a drug war rant (or perhaps even a “drug policy reform” rant).
But as Ethan said in comments below:

It’s pretty amazing how narrow the debate about drug policy is, even in a forum like Cato. I rarely–if ever–hear about the huge percentage of non violent offenders in federal and state prisons; the fact that violent offenders are literally “crowded out” of prisons because of the vast number of non violent offenders in these facilities; the politicized science that drives policy making on drugs (ie, Ricaurte’s research on Ecstasy); the increasing costs of the drug war in Mexico (ie, widespread corruption and a fairly staggering murder epidemic down there now); the steadily declining costs of drugs like cocaine on the streets (when our drug policy is supposed to make these drugs more expensive, not less so) the decimation of African American families thanks to a system that imprisons an astonishing one in nine African American men between the ages of 20 and 34. I could go on and on but I’ve gotta say that I’ve been really disheartened by this discussion; reminds me of the “debate” over the Iraq war (where hawkish Dems like Ken Pollack get tons of space on op-ed pages and we never hear from the likes of Scott Ritter.)

Update: Some may wonder why I tend to be so harsh towards the Mark Kleimans and Jonathan Caulkins of the world. After all, they’re no John Walters or Mark Souder. It’s because they’re not. Because they’re academics and they’re smart and I expect more from them. Because I also work in academia and I hate to see talent wasted due to self-imposed limited thinking.
Further Update: Scott Morgan has more

The final response over at Cato Unbound is in: Mark Kleiman with Drug Policy in Principle, and in Practice

Cato Unbound is to be commended for having assembled a symposium free both of the usual drug war rant and of the usual ‹drug policy reformŠ rant.

I don’t have time to talk about it now, but I’ll be discussing it in depth here tonight. Feel free to start off the discussion.

Jane Bussey of McClatchy Newspapers generously demonstrates her own cognitive disfunction (and perhaps that of portions of the Mexican population) in Mexico’s Calderon takes popular and dangerous stand against cartels
With all the violence and death that has occurred since Calderon’s crack-down, the question is how people can possibly support it. Here’s how:

Mexicans have lost faith in many of their institutions, recent polls show, but not in President Felipe Calderon, who boosted his shaky presidency by launching a military offensive against drug traffickers.
The results have been mixed Ö violence is on the rise with the nearly 2,700 killings in eight months, equal to all of the violent deaths in 2007. News of 10 people or more slaughtered in single incident is not unusual.

Results have been mixed? Nowhere in the article does Bussey indicate any actual positive result (other than some seizures and extraditions, which are not shown to have had any effect). The only result seems to be slaughtering. Apparently launching a military offensive within your own country is a good thing, in and of itself, regardless of the results.

“Finally one government Ö the Felipe Calderon government Ö is doing something about it (the violence),” said Victor Lachica , chief executive of Cushman & Wakefield Mexico, a commercial real-estate firm.

And what is that something? Anything beyond simply escalating the violence? Wait, maybe this is it:

Beyond mobilizing some 40,000 troops, who have confiscated drugs, weapons and destroyed illegal marijuana and poppy plants, Calderon has kept a high profile in the war; attending funerals of fallen law-enforcement agents, visiting troops and warning that the war to regain peace will be long, costly and probably mean a considerable loss of life.

Ah yes. He has also attended funerals and told people that there will be lots of death. That’ll certainly put violence in its place.

Calderon has tied his name to a war with no end is in sight. “We are determined to leave the country much more secure,” he said in a Sept. 2 radio interview.

My brain hurts just reading that paragraph.

Washington has embraced Calderon’s anti-drug offensive, …

Of course it does.

An interesting article about college students going to Amsterdam to study drug policy. Logical, right?
But I was struck by this fascinating passage in the article:

Marijuana isn’t legal in Amsterdam. Rather, it’s decriminalized. It’s similar to Americans going into a bar to drink. In Amsterdam, they go into coffee shops to smoke.
“You’d think that the availability of it would make it out of control,” Lutt said. “It was a lot more of a social thing.”
No craziness. No crime. Nobody walking around stoned or drunk. At least not Amsterdam natives.
“I saw Americans out of control,” Lilleholm said.
Which leads her to believe that such policies probably wouldn’t work here. Make marijuana as easy to obtain as alcohol, and people are going to overindulge.

The dysfunctional mental process there is breathtaking. First of all, the idea that making marijuana as easy to obtain as alcohol would lead to overindulging is directly contradicted by the previous observed facts.
And while there certainly are national and cultural differences in the popular reaction of different populations to certain drugs, there’s an obvious apples-and-oranges problem when comparing the natives or Amsterdam and the tourists of America in their dealings with decriminalized marijuana.
Of course the tourists would seem more out-of-control than the natives. It’s a function of tourism.
The characteristics of drug tourism are the result of prohibition in the visitor’s home country, not an indicator that sane policy wouldn’t work.
If chocolate was outlawed in the U.S., you’d probably see American tourists a little out of control with their cocoa consumption in Switzerland compared to the natives.

You’ve probably heard about how more and more prescription drugs are being found in the water supply. The government made some noises about how people need to be more careful about disposing of prescription drugs.
However, it turns out that the DEA (and their continued desire to make medicine a law enforcement issue) could be largely to blame.

North Memorial Medical Center pours 50 gallons of controlled substances into its drains annually rather than pay $25,000 to handle and haul it away for safer disposal, says regulated waste coordinator Jerry Fink.
Part of the cost is due to federal rules that state anyone who handles controlled substances, other than a user, must be certified as a police officer or registered with the DEA. That goes for pharmacists, distributors, even waste handlers.

YouTube has bowed to pressure to remove certain categories of videos, based on demands by Joe Lieberman in his efforts to protect us from the terrorists. I’m not sure how it was supposed to work for the terrorists — maybe they were using funny YouTube videos to distract us at work in order to bring down America’s productivity — but obviously Deputy Droopy Dog is out there watching out for us…

Among the other changes handed down was a prohibition of videos containing “drug abuse”–a phrase that, like other parts of YouTube’s rule set, comes with no context, elucidation, examples, or anything else that would help users figure out what “abuse” might actually mean in practice. […]
Not until drug videos do begin disappearing will we be able to tell if there’s any rhyme or reason to the application of the rule. But as far as a drug purge goes, count me as a skeptic. I doubt if YouTube tries to smoke out every last pot, Salvia, and alcohol video from its giant database. It’d be too much work, and with all that stuff already in its system, I doubt YouTube would have the motivation anyway.

Banning videos of “drug abuse” will have no more affect on reducing drug abuse (or terrorism) than banning videos of Joe Lieberman would have on reducing the number of cowardly un-American politicians.

Oh, yeah.

The debate over legalization really is dull. That‰s because it‰s over with. The prohibitionists have lost in all important respects, and I suspect they know it.

I love to travel. However, Indonesia will never make my list.

109. Mr. Zulfiqaraw, aged 40, from Lahore, Pakistan, was arrested at Jakarta Airport in November 2004 on allegations of drug related offences. While he was abroad the police raided his apartment in Jakarta which he shared with a friend who possessed drugs. Despite the friend‰s confession and assurances that Mr. Zulfiqaraw was not involved in any drug related matter, the police took Mr. Zulfiqaraw from the airport to a private house, where he was tortured for three days. He was frequently punched, kicked and threatened with being shot unless he would confess. Nobody knew his whereabouts. After three days his health deteriorated so much that he had to be taken to the police hospital, where he was treated for 17 days.
Subsequently, he was transferred to Polda Jakarta where he spent two and a half months in official police custody. The prosecutor in charge, Mr. Hutagaol, offered to drop any charges for a payment of 400 million IDR (about 42,700 $US).
Mr. Zulfiqaraw perceived his ensuing trial as strikingly unfair and biased against him since he is a foreigner. No convincing evidence was presented; during the trial session his judge fell asleep. He did not receive any legal aid although he was not able to finance a lawyer; his embassy was wrongly informed and failed to support him. He was sentenced to death.

More here

Over at Cato Unbound, in the discussion of the Erowid article Towards a Culture of Responsible Drug Use, Jonathan Caulkins was the first respondent with Is Responsible Drug Use Possible? — a thoroughly out-to-lunch response (which I discussed here –be sure to read the comments as well). It was embarrassing in its display of logical fallacies and falsehoods.
Now Jacob Sullum has provided his resonse to Caulkin’s mess with True Temperance

To say that ‹modern humans must learn how to relate to psychoactives responsibly,Š as Earth and Fire Erowid do, is not the same as ‹denying or denigrating an individual‰s right to choose temperance,Š as Jonathan Caulkins suggests. First of all, what the Erowids are preaching is temperance. Aristotle defined that virtue this way:

The temperate man holds a mean position with regard to pleasures. . . . Such pleasures as conduce to health and bodily fitness he will try to secure in moderation and in the right way; and also all other pleasures that are not incompatible with these, or dishonorable, or beyond his means. . . . The temperate man desires the right things in the right way and at the right time.[1]

Sullum does a nice polite job of debunking Caulkins (and from what reactions I’ve found so far, it seems to be unanimous that Caulkins really screwed the pooch on this one). Sullum also takes a moment to differentiate two distinct political philosophies…

I see the drug laws as unjust because they go beyond the proper function of government by punishing people for actions that violate no one‰s rights. By likening drug use to speeding and to driving while intoxicated, Caulkins obscures the distinction between self-harming behavior and behavior that endangers others. Still, he clearly believes it‰s appropriate to forcibly protect people from risks they voluntarily assume, whether by using drugs, ‹riding a motorcycle without a helmet, driving without a seatbelt, or swimming when there is no lifeguardŠ (even in your own swimming pool?). I see ‹laws designed to protect people from their own poor choicesŠ as unethical impositions and dangerous precedents, based on an open-ended rationale for government intervention that logically leads to totalitarianism.

I’m glad that Cato has provided this opportunity and look forward to the next installment (Kleiman) as well as the open discussion that I believe is scheduled to begin next week.

“bullet” An uplifting PostSecret card:

To the border patrol agent who ignored the pot in my car in NY in 1973 – I did become a math teacher, I did get married and have a family, and so much more. Thank you so much for letting me live my life.

“bullet” Ever wonder why, if Venezuela is doing so badly in the war on drugs, the U.S. hasn’t decertified them (supposedly that’s what we do with non-cooperative countries). Well…

“If they were to decertify Venezuela, the Senate of the United States would have to suspend its financial assistance provided to the opposition NGO’s for its alleged fight against drug trafficking. Therefore, over the past three years they just say that we do not cooperate with US anti-drug authorities,” said Reverol.

Yep, it’s so the U.S. can, under the guise of drug enforcement, fund groups in opposition to Chavez.
But of course, John Walters claims that DEA spying and other such activities are out of the question

“The DEA does not engage in any activity but counternarcotics. … A country’s sovereignty is always observed by DEA “

Right.
“bullet” Getting High for your Health — in Popular Science.
“bullet” “drcnet”