Still the Poster Child for Stupid Policy

The most recent newsletter of the ACLU has a report on the costs of incarceration, including the staggering amounts paid to enforce marijuana prohibition. In 2010, the states spent 3.6 billion dollars and made one pot arrest every 37 seconds. And how did this aggressive enforcement work out? Marijuana use increased.

Think about that next time state governments wail about not having enough money to support public education, pave highways, or provide other necessary services.

As I have noted previously, the nation could save an amount equal to the cuts made by sequestration just by substituting sensible regulations for our disastrous drug war.

Current laws are wildly illogical for all sorts of reasons.

The biggest problem with the War on Drugs is that it is being fought on the wrong battlefield. Drug abuse is a public health issue. Behaviors connected to the use of drugs–driving while impaired, theft to support a habit, etc.–should be addressed by the criminal law, but the mere use of a substance deemed harmful is a health issue, and should be addressed as a health issue.  (Speaking of health, marijuana is actually less harmful to users than tobacco, yet we have wildly different approaches to pot and tobacco use–undoubtedly the result of a much more effective tobacco lobby. According to police officers I know, people who use pot are significantly less likely to become violent than people who abuse alcohol, yet we outlaw pot, but regulate and tax alcohol and tobacco.)

Current laws are financially ruinous. The US spends roughly 60 billion dollars annually on drug prohibition, and we get virtually no bang for those bucks because the “war” is ineffective. We also forgo collection of billions of dollars in potential tax revenues that we would collect if we simply taxed pot like we treat alcohol and tobacco. We waste criminal justice resources that would be better used elsewhere, to treat drug abuse or to deter nonconsensual crimes that actually harm others.

Drug prohibition has focused disproportionately on African-American and Latino neighborhoods, exacerbating racial tensions. Black people are almost four times more likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana than their white neighbors, despite statistics confirming comparable levels of use–and the ACLU reports that the disparity in some counties grows to as much as 30 times!

We’ve lost this war. Not that the War on Drugs has ever been effective; the percentage of Americans who use hard drugs is pretty much the same as it has always been. Pot use has ebbed and flowed over time, providing the only real changes in the numbers. Thirty plus years of research has consistently demonstrated the utter failure of American drug policy, and the error of the premises upon which it has been constructed. (Pot smokers become hard drug users in about the same percentages as milk drinkers do, and we don’t outlaw milk as a “gateway drug.”) The only thing the Drug War has done effectively is ruin the lives of (disproportionately black) teenagers who are imprisoned for non-violent drug crimes.

What is frustrating is the number of policymakers who respond to this mountain of evidence with a renewed enthusiasm for measures that have consistently failed.

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I Should Probably Stick to the Comics….

I love leisurely Sunday mornings. I still get the newspapers (Star and New York Times) on paper, and while I have long since gone to electronic receipt of the “funnies,” I will never be as comfortable with online formats as I am with old-fashioned newsprint.

That said, it’s impossible to read the news without being forcibly reminded how quickly and dramatically the world is changing, how complicated our reality is, and how difficult it is for many of us to accept those changes or deal with them.

Three totally different articles from today’s Star underscored the pace of change, the resistance to it, and not incidentally, our need to be sure we are asking the right questions in order to deal with it.

Least important, but telling, was the Varvel cartoon portraying the upcoming arguments over same-sex marriage in the Indiana General Assembly by drawing a castle with a moat around it. I’m not entirely sure what he thought he was saying with this image–presumably that our legislature is impervious to outside opinions–but it inadvertently (and accurately) portrayed our lawmakers as residents of the 17th Century.

The question is, how do legislatures or citizens who are firmly ensconced in the past deal with things like bitcoins?  The business section had a fairly lengthy article about this new currency, composed of nothing more than computer code, and not backed by the “full faith and credit” of any government. This is one of many spontaneous new ways of doing business via the internet, a method that allows for anonymity and avoids the problems of foreign exchange. Its value is entirely determined by market forces (and that value has been extremely volatile). I have no idea whether bitcoins are a harbinger of our future, or an experiment that will fizzle–but the very concept has to be unsettling to the “gold standard” folks who populate talk radio and TV and are currently encouraging everyone to buy gold or trade in their paper money for silver coins. If they still don’t understand that money gets its value from people’s willingness to accept it, they are going to have a lot of trouble dealing with bitcoin and its progeny.

Less arcane, perhaps, was the article about rapidly changing attitudes toward marijuana. I’ve written before about the insanity of our drug war, and evidently, a lot of people have come to realize how self-defeating our approach to drug use has been. The problem is, as the article demonstrated, we are still asking the wrong questions–still in thrall to an approach that fails to distinguish between use and abuse.

Both sides of this debate are drawing wrong conclusions from wrong questions. The reason attitudes about pot are changing is that so many people have used marijuana occasionally, much as they have a drink or two occasionally, with no deleterious effect. That leads them to believe pot is harmless and should be legalized. Opponents of legalization point to the (relatively few) addicts, and see danger.

This focus on the substance being abused misses the point. People with addictive personalities can abuse anything–alcohol, tobacco, freon from the air conditioner, grandpa’s heart medicine, inhalents…It is literally impossible to ban everything someone might abuse. With alcohol and tobacco–thanks less to common sense and more to corporate lobbyists–we’ve found a workable middle ground: we regulate, tax and inform. And it works; in most places, it is much easier for teens to get drugs than it is for them to buy alcohol. (As one drug war critic noted, when was the last time you saw the owner of the local liquor store hanging around the schoolyard saying “Psst, kids. We got a new shipment of Stoly in today”?)

The world isn’t only changing. Thanks in no small part to science and technology, it’s getting more complicated.

If we stay in that 17th-Century castle protected from reality by a moat of our own construction, we’re not going to be able to deal with 21st Century challenges.

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While We Are Wringing Our Hands….

While we wait for the impact of sequestration to hit, we might ponder this: In an interview with Spiegel Online, a Harvard economist insisted that we could save an amount equal to the sequestration cuts every year  just by ending the War on Drugs.

“The prohibition of drugs is the worst solution for preventing abuse,” said Professor Jeffrey Miron. “Firstly, it brings about a black market that is corrupt and costs human lives. Secondly, it constrains people who wouldn’t abuse drugs. Thirdly, prohibiting drugs is expensive.”

I have made this point before.

The direct costs of our counterproductive drug war have been estimated at more than 60 billion dollars a year. And yet, in all the years we have pursued this war, we have not reduced the percentage of Americans using hard drugs. Instead, that sixty billion dollars a year has destroyed lives, incentivized criminal activity, increased police corruption, laid waste to several South American countries, and decimated inner city neighborhoods.

If our elected officials are really so intent upon reducing the national debt, wouldn’t it make more sense to stop spending enormous sums for a failed policy, and use at least some of the savings for treatment? Better still, we could legalize marijuana–which medical experts tell us is less dangerous than booze–and tax it.

I don’t know whether we’d save more than the sequester, but abandoning a failed, horrifically expensive program would be a far more rational approach than taking an indiscriminate, meat ax approach to the budget.

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Pot and Kettle

Yesterday, the head of Indiana State Police did something police officers rarely do: he gave a candid answer to a question posed by a legislative study committee. State police Superintendent Paul Whitesell told members of the State Budget Committee on Tuesday that he had followed the issue during 40 years in law enforcement and believed we should legalize and tax possession of small amounts.

Whitesell had the guts to say publicly what numerous police officers and judges have said privately for years. The “War on Drugs” is a failure by any measure you want to apply: it’s illogical, expensive, and ineffective. The inclusion of marijuana in that war–in contrast to hard drugs–makes even less sense.

Current laws are illogical for a number of reasons. Drug abuse (which, by the way, is nowhere defined in our drug laws, which focus on any use of a “scheduled” substance) is a public health issue. Behaviors connected to the use of drugs–driving while impaired, theft to support a habit, etc.–are matters to be addressed by the criminal law, but the mere use of a substance deemed harmful is a health issue, and should be addressed as a health issue. Marijuana is less harmful to users than tobacco, yet we have wildly different approaches to pot and tobacco use–undoubtedly the result of a much more effective tobacco lobby. According to police officers I know, people who use pot are significantly less likely to become violent than people who abuse alcohol, yet we outlaw pot, but regulate and tax alcohol and tobacco.

Current laws are fiscally wasteful. The US spends roughly 60 billion dollars annually on drug prohibition, and we get virtually no bang for those bucks (see ineffective, below). We also forgo collection of billions of dollars in potential tax revenues that we would collect if we simply taxed pot like we treat alcohol and tobacco. We waste criminal justice resources that would be better used elsewhere, to treat drug abuse or to deter nonconsensual crimes that actually harm others. (Whitesell made this point in his testimony.)

We’ve lost this war. Not that the War on Drugs has ever been effective; the percentage of Americans who use hard drugs is pretty much the same as it has always been. Pot use has ebbed and flowed over time, providing the only real changes in the numbers. Thirty plus years of research has consistently demonstrated the utter failure of American drug policy, and the error of the premises upon which it has been constructed. (Pot smokers become hard drug users in about the same percentages as milk drinkers do, and we don’t outlaw milk as a “gateway drug.”) The only thing the Drug War has done effectively is ruin the lives of (disproportionately black) teenagers who are imprisoned for non-violent drug crimes.

What is frustrating is the number of policymakers who respond to this mountain of evidence with a renewed enthusiasm for failed interventions.

What would you think of a doctor who had performed a certain operation 200 times, with the same result: all the patients died. How convinced would you be by his conviction that he just needed to do more of that operation?

When are we going to learn from our mistakes?

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What’s the Matter with Kansas Now?

Last night in class, one of my students asked me if I was aware that Topeka, Kansas had decriminalized domestic violence, to save the cost of prosecution.

She wasn’t hallucinating.

Who was it that decried a society in which people know “the cost of everything and the value of nothing?” How insane has criminal justice policy become when we spend upwards of 40 billion dollars every year on a drug war to (ostensibly) prevent people from harming themselves, but we won’t spend money to prosecute people who harm others?

What do these examples say about our cultural norms?  One possibility: our puritan impulses to insure that our neighbors are behaving “morally” drive policies from blue laws to censorship to alcohol and drug prohibition; while a still-lingering sexism convinces us that a man sometimes has to “assert authority” over his wife? (Never mind that men can also be the victims of domestic violence).

Social priorities really come into focus when money is tight.

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