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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2009 7:05 am Post subject: How to stop the drug wars |
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An excellent editorial from The Economist.
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=13237193
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Prohibition has failed; legalisation is the least bad solution
A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission�just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a �drug-free world� and to �eliminating or significantly reducing� the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.
That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.
Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.
�Least bad� does not mean good. Legalisation, though clearly better for producer countries, would bring (different) risks to consumer countries. As we outline below, many vulnerable drug-takers would suffer. But in our view, more would gain.
Nowadays the UN Office on Drugs and Crime no longer talks about a drug-free world. Its boast is that the drug market has �stabilised�, meaning that more than 200m people, or almost 5% of the world�s adult population, still take illegal drugs�roughly the same proportion as a decade ago. (Like most purported drug facts, this one is just an educated guess: evidential rigour is another casualty of illegality.) The production of cocaine and opium is probably about the same as it was a decade ago; that of cannabis is higher. Consumption of cocaine has declined gradually in the United States from its peak in the early 1980s, but the path is uneven (it remains higher than in the mid-1990s), and it is rising in many places, including Europe.
This is not for want of effort. The United States alone spends some $40 billion each year on trying to eliminate the supply of drugs. It arrests 1.5m of its citizens each year for drug offences, locking up half a million of them; tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American men spend some time behind bars. In the developing world blood is being shed at an astonishing rate. In Mexico more than 800 policemen and soldiers have been killed since December 2006 (and the annual overall death toll is running at over 6,000). This week yet another leader of a troubled drug-ridden country�Guinea Bissau�was assassinated.
Yet prohibition itself vitiates the efforts of the drug warriors. The price of an illegal substance is determined more by the cost of distribution than of production. Take cocaine: the mark-up between coca field and consumer is more than a hundredfold. Even if dumping weedkiller on the crops of peasant farmers quadruples the local price of coca leaves, this tends to have little impact on the street price, which is set mainly by the risk of getting cocaine into Europe or the United States.
Nowadays the drug warriors claim to seize close to half of all the cocaine that is produced. The street price in the United States does seem to have risen, and the purity seems to have fallen, over the past year. But it is not clear that drug demand drops when prices rise. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that the drug business quickly adapts to market disruption. At best, effective repression merely forces it to shift production sites. Thus opium has moved from Turkey and Thailand to Myanmar and southern Afghanistan, where it undermines the West�s efforts to defeat the Taliban.
Al Capone, but on a global scale
Indeed, far from reducing crime, prohibition has fostered gangsterism on a scale that the world has never seen before. According to the UN�s perhaps inflated estimate, the illegal drug industry is worth some $320 billion a year. In the West it makes criminals of otherwise law-abiding citizens (the current American president could easily have ended up in prison for his youthful experiments with �blow�). It also makes drugs more dangerous: addicts buy heavily adulterated cocaine and heroin; many use dirty needles to inject themselves, spreading HIV; the wretches who succumb to �crack� or �meth� are outside the law, with only their pushers to �treat� them. But it is countries in the emerging world that pay most of the price. Even a relatively developed democracy such as Mexico now finds itself in a life-or-death struggle against gangsters. American officials, including a former drug tsar, have publicly worried about having a �narco state� as their neighbour.
The failure of the drug war has led a few of its braver generals, especially from Europe and Latin America, to suggest shifting the focus from locking up people to public health and �harm reduction� (such as encouraging addicts to use clean needles). This approach would put more emphasis on public education and the treatment of addicts, and less on the harassment of peasants who grow coca and the punishment of consumers of �soft� drugs for personal use. That would be a step in the right direction. But it is unlikely to be adequately funded, and it does nothing to take organised crime out of the picture.
Legalisation would not only drive away the gangsters; it would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated. Governments would tax and regulate the drug trade, and use the funds raised (and the billions saved on law-enforcement) to educate the public about the risks of drug-taking and to treat addiction. The sale of drugs to minors should remain banned. Different drugs would command different levels of taxation and regulation. This system would be fiddly and imperfect, requiring constant monitoring and hard-to-measure trade-offs. Post-tax prices should be set at a level that would strike a balance between damping down use on the one hand, and discouraging a black market and the desperate acts of theft and prostitution to which addicts now resort to feed their habits.
Selling even this flawed system to people in producer countries, where organised crime is the central political issue, is fairly easy. The tough part comes in the consumer countries, where addiction is the main political battle. Plenty of American parents might accept that legalisation would be the right answer for the people of Latin America, Asia and Africa; they might even see its usefulness in the fight against terrorism. But their immediate fear would be for their own children.
That fear is based in large part on the presumption that more people would take drugs under a legal regime. That presumption may be wrong. There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes (notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer. Embarrassed drug warriors blame this on alleged cultural differences, but even in fairly similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same addiction rates. Legalisation might reduce both supply (pushers by definition push) and demand (part of that dangerous thrill would go). Nobody knows for certain. But it is hard to argue that sales of any product that is made cheaper, safer and more widely available would fall. Any honest proponent of legalisation would be wise to assume that drug-taking as a whole would rise.
There are two main reasons for arguing that prohibition should be scrapped all the same. The first is one of liberal principle. Although some illegal drugs are extremely dangerous to some people, most are not especially harmful. (Tobacco is more addictive than virtually all of them.) Most consumers of illegal drugs, including cocaine and even heroin, take them only occasionally. They do so because they derive enjoyment from them (as they do from whisky or a Marlboro Light). It is not the state�s job to stop them from doing so.
What about addiction? That is partly covered by this first argument, as the harm involved is primarily visited upon the user. But addiction can also inflict misery on the families and especially the children of any addict, and involves wider social costs. That is why discouraging and treating addiction should be the priority for drug policy. Hence the second argument: legalisation offers the opportunity to deal with addiction properly.
By providing honest information about the health risks of different drugs, and pricing them accordingly, governments could steer consumers towards the least harmful ones. Prohibition has failed to prevent the proliferation of designer drugs, dreamed up in laboratories. Legalisation might encourage legitimate drug companies to try to improve the stuff that people take. The resources gained from tax and saved on repression would allow governments to guarantee treatment to addicts�a way of making legalisation more politically palatable. The success of developed countries in stopping people smoking tobacco, which is similarly subject to tax and regulation, provides grounds for hope.
A calculated gamble, or another century of failure?
This newspaper first argued for legalisation 20 years ago (see article). Reviewing the evidence again (see article), prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it. |
This depression, combined with what is happening in Mexico (America's potential Gaza, but with 110,000,000 people), and a president who I think understands the situation will I hope provide fertile ground for a full-on reconsideration of drug policy. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2009 10:02 am Post subject: |
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http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/shut+about+drugs/1359088/story.html
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How to get me to shut up about drugs
The illicit drug trade is, despite its illicitness, a trade. It is an economic activity. "It's like in any marketplace," RCMP Superintendent Pat Fogarty told the Globe and Mail this week. The only difference is that "these guys don't resolve things through a court process."
The guys in question are the Vancouver-region gangsters whose brazen and brutal bloodshed has shocked Canadians and prompted the federal government to promise tougher laws. And Supt. Fogarty is right. Fundamentally, the drug trade is best understood not in terms of criminal law. It's economics that count.
Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Harvard University, has been studying the drug trade for 15 years. He stresses that "drug-related violence" has little to do with drugs.
Prohibition of "any commodity for which there's demand leads to violence because the market is driven underground," he said in an interview. "It has relatively little to do with the commodity that is prohibited. It has almost everything to do with the fact that if you make it illegal, people are going to resolve their disputes with violence, not lawyers.
"If we banned coffee, we'd have a huge black market in coffee." And thugs in the coffee trade would be blasting away at each other in the street.
Miron stresses that prohibition is not, as most people assume, like an on-off switch: either a commodity is illegal or it is not. It is a matter of degree. Drugs like cocaine are illegal everywhere but the extent to which the law is enforced and offenders are punished varies widely from country to country. It also varies over time.
That fact is important to researchers like Miron. If prohibition is causing violence, countries that are less strict in enforcing the law should see less violence, while those that take a harder law should see more. Changes in law enforcement over time should be correlated with violence as well.
And that's just what Miron and two colleagues found in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Examining data spanning countries and decades, Miron and his colleagues found things like arrest rates, capital punishment and gun laws didn't explain the numbers. But "the hypothesis that drug prohibition generates violence," they concluded, "is generally consistent with the long time-series and cross-country facts."
Miron's conclusion is sobering: If governments respond to gang violence with tougher laws and crackdowns, they will ultimately produce more violence.
Among western nations, none has fought the drug trade harder than the United States. And none has a murder rate close to that of the U.S. Miron thinks that's not a coincidence. "I have one set of estimates that maybe 50 per cent of homicides in the U.S. are due to the prohibition of drugs."
The best way to make a significant and lasting reduction in gang violence, Miron contends, is to remove drugs from the black market. They can be strictly regulated using any of a hundred different policy models. But they must be legalized.
Of course, the police scoff at this. Legalization wouldn't hurt organized crime, they say. Gangsters would just move on to some other lucrative enterprise.
But this assumes there are lucrative enterprises available to organized crime that gangsters are not now exploiting -- in defiance of economic theory and common sense.
It's also contrary to historical experience. "We definitely see crime fall when we make things legal," Miron says.
The most spectacular example can be seen on a chart of the American homicide rate through the 1920s and 1930s. Through the first 13 years of that two-decade period, the murder rate rises steadily -- from seven per 100,000 population to almost 10. But then, in 1933, it begins a steep decline -- hitting six per 100,000 population by 1940.
So a 40-per-cent rise in murders until 1933 is followed by a 40-per-cent decline. What changed in 1933? It wasn't the economy. It was terrible before and terrible after. Anything else? No. There were no significant changes in 1933 that could explain the turnaround -- nothing except the legalization of alcohol and the end of the 13-year mistake known as Prohibition.
Look, I know the police are sick of me writing that their hard work is worse than useless. To be honest, I'm sick of writing it, too. So let's make a deal. Canada spends an estimated $2 billion a year enforcing the drug laws and yet we have very little solid research examining the effectiveness of what we're doing. Not since the LeDain commission issued its report in 1972 has the government taken a serious look at drug policy.
Surely we can all agree that's irresponsible. Drug policy is a critical factor in issues ranging from crime to disease, mental health, civil liberties and international development. At this very moment, Canadian soldiers are dying in a narco-state. Surely it is time for a serious examination of drug policy, from top to bottom.
So let's have a commission of inquiry that can gather the best evidence from all over the world, analyze it properly, and draw conclusions without regard to political expediency.
Let the evidence decide. If the police and other supporters of the status quo are confident they are right, they should welcome an inquiry as a chance to silence the critics.
In fact, that's the deal I'm offering. Call for the creation of an inquiry. Demand wide terms of reference, a serious research budget, and a respected voice to lead it.
Do that and I'll shut up. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Fri Mar 06, 2009 12:23 pm Post subject: |
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"Do that and I'll shut up."
In other words, listen to me and do what I want because I know best. Otherwise, I shall become a temper-tantrum-throwing muckraker and make your lives hell... |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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Insidejohnmalkovich
Joined: 11 Jan 2008
Location: Pusan
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 3:48 pm Post subject: |
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People who conduct blazing gun battles in the downtown streets of civilized cities (I refer to the mayhem in Vancouver and Toronto) are bloody-minded outlaws, plain and simple. They need to be eradicated.
In most cases wars are a struggle for power. Decent people accept the power and authority of their government. Rebellious punks would rather kill and steal and corrupt the youth. And petty neighbourhood tyrants would rather form miniature armies (not so minaiature in Mexico).
It is illegal for most foreigners to teach private lessons in Korea, but I suspect that even if the Korean government became stricter in its enforcement of that law, we would not see foreign teachers suddenly shooting at policemen and innocent bystanders.
I have been unfailingly critical of the mass of foreign teachers in Korea, but I will say this much on their behalf: none of them strike me as murderers. |
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JMO
Joined: 18 Jul 2006
Location: Daegu
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 7:37 pm Post subject: |
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| Insidejohnmalkovich wrote: |
People who conduct blazing gun battles in the downtown streets of civilized cities (I refer to the mayhem in Vancouver and Toronto) are bloody-minded outlaws, plain and simple. They need to be eradicated.
In most cases wars are a struggle for power. Decent people accept the power and authority of their government. Rebellious punks would rather kill and steal and corrupt the youth. And petty neighbourhood tyrants would rather form miniature armies (not so minaiature in Mexico).
It is illegal for most foreigners to teach private lessons in Korea, but I suspect that even if the Korean government became stricter in its enforcement of that law, we would not see foreign teachers suddenly shooting at policemen and innocent bystanders.
I have been unfailingly critical of the mass of foreign teachers in Korea, but I will say this much on their behalf: none of them strike me as murderers. |
If the amount of money available in privates was much much higher, and it was possible to nail down a territory with force(say an apartment building complex) then the amount of murders would rise.
It is about money. Everywhere in the world, where there is competition for control in the drug business, there is violence on varying scales. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 7:55 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| No no. Dan Gardner has been criticized for... |
But it remains the same problem.
What is the difference between a journalist and a lobbyist or a wannabe policymaker, Mises? Same goes for most so-called intellectuals in Academe these days. It is all activist-inspired advice literature. Much of it produced by elitists who condescend, sneer, and snicker. That is it and there is apparently nothing more to know about what we read in books, in the press, and see in film and on television: people reaching out into the world around them and trying to force it to bend to their will through this or through that, through "race, class, and gender," through endless theoretical jiujitsu, always backed up by a selective reading of the facts.
Is there truly nothing more than this? This represents the limits of what we are as far as knowledge-production goes. Depressing. End of rant. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 8:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Yeah, fair enough. But I strongly agree with the guy so it is a great deal easier to swallow. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 9:03 pm Post subject: |
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| Apparently that is how it is for all of us. That makes these discussions more arbitrary than I am comfortable with, however. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 9:08 pm Post subject: |
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It was a very small piece of the article, anyways.
Of the many things that can no longer be afforded, prohibition is king. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 9:16 pm Post subject: |
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| Who is to say? I think your conclusion that that is so rests on your belief that analogies to the other Prohibition remain valid. But I, for one, would not class cocaine, crystal meth, and heroine with whisky. |
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Hater Depot
Joined: 29 Mar 2005
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 9:33 pm Post subject: |
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| It is all activist-inspired advice literature. Much of it produced by elitists who condescend, sneer, and snicker. |
Condescending, sneering, and snickering is bad, sure, but I don't what's wrong with being an activist for what you see as good public policy. I certainly don't see anything else in Mr. Gardner's pieces. On the other hand, every poster here including yourself is guilty of it, but you keep coming back.
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| This represents the limits of what we are as far as knowledge-production goes. Depressing. |
What's supposed to be the alternative to open debate? You're sounding like the impossible-dream idealists you can't stand. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 9:35 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| Who is to say? I think your conclusion that that is so rests on your belief that analogies to the other Prohibition remain valid. I would not class cocaine, crystal meth, and heroine with whisky. |
Well, why not? The toxicity and addictive properties of coke, to take one example, are seriously overblown. It is possible to recreationally use even hard drugs without a serious risk to ones health. Tens of millions of people will do so tonight. The risks that do exist come from the consumers inability to trust the contents of the substance being consumed, which certainly isn't a problem with beer, and the fact that one has to go to a criminal to purchase the product. -I feel I should add a disclaimer that I'm a beer man, and only beer-.
Dealers will offer very strong product (crack) in 'at risk' areas (ghettos) to create a permanent customer base, and weaker stuff (blow) to yuppies looking for an interesting Friday night. In an environment where firms were able to research safe and less-addictive ways to get high, chemical garbage like meth wouldn't exist, crack wouldn't be prevalent and 'designer drugs' of much safer quality would take their place. These could be bought from a druggist, who can advise on quantity, risks of mixing and offer advice about abuse and treatment. There would still be addictions and the social costs associated with addictions, but the overall level of violent crime would decrease significantly.
And anyways, the use of these substances is already very wide spread. The burden of the war on drugs falls on junkies, blacks and poor people. More than anything, I see the war on drugs (in the US) as an assault on blacks, and in Canada on similarly placed minority groups/poor people. It is just damn unfair. Given the human tendency to seek intoxication, the problems associated with intoxication will always be with us. I know this, having been hit by drunk drivers two times (in one case the other, totally drunk, driver was killed). I'll go for an early morning walk tomorrow and see the damage a booze filled night out does to key parts of the city (broken windows, broken bottles, vomit, blood on the sidewalk etc). Making something legal will not remove all harm, but we can reduce the harm cause by the illegality. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Mar 07, 2009 10:08 pm Post subject: |
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| I like this article. Its a sober and sensible analysis of how to proceed. Legalization will not be a cure-all, but I think its time to shift our priorities to treatment over criminalization/incarceration. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Thu Mar 12, 2009 11:42 am Post subject: |
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http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/03/12/eu_report_drug_war_is_failing
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A report released on Tuesday by the European Commission "found no evidence that the global drug problem was reduced...from 1998 to 2007."
The UN, now meeting in Vienna for the first time in 10 years to reassess global drug policy, is reaching even more dramatic conclusions: It's worse than mere inertia.... drug policy is making matters worse, not better. UN Office of Drug and Crime's head, Antonio Maria Costa, "acknowledged that drug control policies had, as an unintended consequence, led the growth of organized crime," as the BBC put it.
The good news is, as former Brazilian President Cardoso told FP in a recent Seven Questions, there's a credible way forward. And with the calamitous results of past policy now so publicly exposed, it just might be politically palpable. Cardoso suggests focusing more on public health -- moving towards the "tobacco" model to educate and treat users, decreasing demand. Law enforcement is best used only to stop trafficking, not pick up petty users. Of course, we could always just legalize it. |
Good news. |
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