Drug WarRant

On the drug czar’s “blog” they talk about an “Above the Influence” workshop with the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America (CADCA), where youth engaged in a “tag-it” campaign.

In this workshop, they had pieces of paper with “I am above:” and participants added their own anti-drug message.

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One of the most pathetic elements to prop up prohibition is the uncertainty argument put forth by the so-called academic experts in drug policy in the United States.

“We can’t even talk about legalization,” they wail. “It’s too uncertain.”

They’re fully willing to admit that prohibition itself is destructive and that what we are doing in the United States isn’t working, but as policy-wonks — the very people who should be looking as closely as possible at every alternative to failed policy — they refuse to even seriously consider the one viable alternative.

“We don’t know what will happen,” they moan.

And no, we don’t know for 100% certainty what will happen, largely because the prohibition juggernaut has fought every step of the way to prevent a single fully functioning laboratory of legalization. But that doesn’t mean there’s no data.

We point out Portugal.

“That doesn’t really count,” they complain. “Portugal is a different country. It’s not the United States. Besides, it’s not legalization.”

OK, so how about legalizing marijuana in California? Let’s see what we can learn from that? There’s your lab – a perfect opportunity. “No,” they whine. “We don’t know what will happen and we’re not sure we like the details.”

So don’t worry, Latin America. We won’t be doing anything soon about your drug war problems, because we don’t really want to talk about it.

No reason to talk about drug legalization, expert says

WASHINGTON – Drug legalization in the United States “is not going to happen in our lifetime,” Peter Reuter assured a group of Latin American diplomats and journalists Thursday.

The founder and director of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center from 1989-1993, said it was a “seductive idea” but it will not happen due to the huge uncertainty on the effects such a measure would have on society.

“No one has taken it seriously enough to look for a blueprint of what that would look like,” he said.

Really? Really?

So who should be the one to take it seriously enough to, oh, I don’t know, come up with a blueprint of what that would look like? You’d think maybe a think tank with academic policy researchers might consider doing such a thing.

In fact, they have (though not in the U.S.). They’re called Transform and their serious research paper is even called a “blueprint.” After the War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation It’s even a free download.

That’s what happens when you have researchers who actually research.

But don’t we have think tanks with researchers here who study drug policy in the U.S.?

Let’s take a look at what we have passing for research. RAND produced (co-authored by Peter Reuter) An Assessment of U.S. Drug Problems and Policy in 2005.

Nor do we explore the merits and demerits of legalizing drugs, even though legalization is perhaps the most prominent and hotly debated topic in drug policy. Our analysis takes current policy as its starting point, and the idea of repealing the nation’s drug laws has no serious support within either the Democratic or Republican party. Moreover, because legalization is untested, any prediction of its effects would be highly speculative.

Nothing to see here. Move along. No point talking about it. All you people dying in the drug war? Families broken up by our prison system? People overdosing on bad drugs? Sorry. You’re on your own. We’ve got uncertainty problems here. You couldn’t possibly know what that’s like.

Reuter: I am really struck by the lack of suggestions as to what the Mexican government should do other than just give up. I don’t have any good ideas, and nobody else does, either.

…

I have this mental image of some old sci-fi movie where a massive mechanical monster lays waste to entire cities. The Joint Chiefs are in an underground bunker watching the destruction continue as they futilely try one thing after another to stop the juggernaut. They send in the army to shoot it, but it has no effect. They dig ditches, try fire, and they drop massive bombs, but it only seems to make the monster stronger.

At some point, they realize that they’ve used everything that they have in their arsenal with no positive result and that the destruction of earth is inevitable.

From the back of the room, a janitor who was mopping up some spilled coffee hesitantly speaks up, and says: “I noticed on the monitors that there’s a switch on the side of the monster. Why don’t we just turn it off?”

The government scientist whirls in his chair and yells “My God, man. Are you insane? We have no idea what that would do!”

Another poll:

THIS week’s Economist-YouGov poll contains some exciting news for devotees of the weed. A huge majority of Americans, more than two to one once don’t knows have been excluded, support the legalisation and taxation of marijuana. Even without excluding the don’t knows, a clear majority favours treating the drug equivalently to tobacco and alcohol.

The data (see chart) reveal some interesting patterns. In every age group, more people favour than oppose legalisation. Predictably enough, the young are very strongly in favour, but babyboomers are almost as strongly so; and even those over 65 are narrowly in favour as well. Breaking the poll down by party, one finds that Republicans as well as Democrats are in favour, though the former much more narrowly so.

If our poll is right, then it can only be a matter of time before laws start to change, at least in the more liberal states.

Pretty.

… and I’m not talking about the people who use it.

Teen’s medical marijuana fight escalates as school says he cannot come back to class after going home for medicine

The saga of a Colorado Springs teenager struggling with a rare neurological condition best controlled with medical marijuana lozenges became a little more surreal when Harrison School District 2 informed the student’s father that the child cannot return to school on any day that he consumes medical marijuana.

“They say if he takes his medicine he cannot come back to school,” the teenager’s father told The Colorado Independent. The boy attends Sierra High School.

The child missed most of the last school year when he was diagnosed with diaphragmatic and axial myoclonus, which causes seizures that can last for 24 hours or more. He spent extensive periods of time hospitalized and used morphine and other narcotics to control the seizures until doctors discovered that THC works better than any other medication.

He was able to return to school in January but as the district would not allow him to possess or consume his prescribed medicine on campus, he transferred to a school closer to home so that he could walk home as needed to take his medicine.

After the district’s latest salvo was delivered, the teen’s father said he spoke with both the district superintendent and the district attorney and that neither were receptive to his arguments that his son needs the medicine to function, does not get high and does not smell like marijuana.

The district has refused to comment to us, other than for a spokesperson to say that the district intends to follow the letter of the law, which is that no student may possess or consume medical marijuana on school grounds.

Here’s a kid where a sane school district should be bending over backwards to help make it possible for him to attend, and a student who really wants to learn. But no, they make him stay home.

The school, by the way, has clarified that the teen can come to school after taking vicodin, but not THC.

Hopefully, this will change.

Best reaction:

Senator Greg Brophy, R-Wray, reached by email, said this: “Tragic. Zero tolerance policies are for people with zero intelligence.”

Indiana has a zero tolerance per se drugged driving law. This is a horribly unjust kind of law that doesn’t actually care about whether drivers are impaired, but rather whether they have evidence of a particular drug in their bloodstream. Since marijuana tends to leave that evidence longer (up to weeks), this kind of law can have a devastating impact — drivers in an accident often end up in prison merely due to the metabolites in their blood.

This also means that people are convicted and sent to prison entirely based on the results of a drug test.

Well apparently there were some red flags about some of the results of drug tests from the state’s main Toxicology Lab, and so the Governor’s Council on Impaired and Dangerous Driving undertook a “quiet” inquiry to re-examine some past test results.

The Indianapolis Star got wind of it and it became something the state couldn’t hide.

Now the first round of results have been completed.

Errors found in Ind. state drug-test lab

An Indiana state lab wrongly reported 1 in 10 marijuana cases as positive, including some that were deliberately manipulated, an audit report indicated. […]

The audit’s findings showed errors in about 200 of 2,000 marijuana tests reported to law enforcement as having positive results, the Star said. This includes about 50 results the report said were consciously manipulated by lab workers.

Numerous verdicts could be overturned and cases dismissed, Newman said, although it was not clear if every error led to a wrongful conviction.

The revelations are “shocking” and “inexcusable,” state Public Defender Council Executive Director Larry Landis told the newspaper.

“If they’re manipulating data, how can you rely on anything they do?” he said. “We’re talking about people’s lives.”

The audit, conducted by outside scientists, was originally going to cover every case with a positive lab result from 2007 to 2009 — more than 10,000 overall.

But the initial findings are so troubling Newman will probably extend the audit back to 2006, he told the Star.

The lab, established in the Indiana University School of Medicine in 1957, seeks to provide “science-based support for the impaired and dangerous driving program and other criminal justice efforts for the State of Indiana,” the lab’s Web site says.

Let the lawsuits begin.

Jennifer Corbett Dooren in the Wall Street Journal subjects us to a particularly vapid article: Study Tracks Drug-Related Teen Suicides

Teenage girls are about three times as likely as boys to attempt suicide for drug-related reasons, according to an analysis of emergency-room visits. A government study also found boys are far more likely to attempt drug-related suicide in the month of December, while the suicide rate for girls stays fairly steady throughout the year.

The study, conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, found an average of 178,423 ER visits a year from 2004 to 2008 for drug-related suicide attempts involving people age 12 or older. The study looked at the percentage and timing of such attempts among adolescents ages 12 to 17, adults ages 18 to 49 and adults age 50 and older. The study also tracked the number of visits each month to see if there was seasonal variation in the data.

Other research has suggested depression, which is a risk factor for suicide attempts, can worsen in the fall or around major holidays. But the study found that for the population as a whole, there was little seasonal variation in drug-related suicide attempts.

It continues on with such fact-filled, but content empty nonsense for a couple more paragraphs and ends:

The study didn’t look at the reasons behind suicide attempts and only included drug-related suicide attempts that resulted in an ER visit.

Nobody reading that article can possibly come away knowing what drug-related teen suicides are. She even contradicts herself in her opening and closing sentences. “three times as likely as boys to attempt suicide for drug-related reasons… study didn’t look at the reasons”

The best you can do as a reader is to go to the SAMHSA site and find the study yourself (because of course, not having the integrity of a blogger, she doesn’t link to it). I’m guessing this is it (or at least one relevant report from the same study type). There you learn:

DAWN data can be used to examine ED visits for drug-related suicide attempts. Although DAWN includes only suicide attempts that involve drugs, these attempts are not limited to drug overdoses. If there is drug involvement in a suicide attempt by other means (e.g., cut wrists while drinking alcohol), the case is included as drug related. Excluded are suicide attempts with no drug involvement and suicide-related behaviors other than actual attempts (e.g., suicidal ideation or suicidal thoughts).

In other words, not extraordinarily useful information. But Dooren needed to make dull data seem “newsworthy,” without bothering to actually, you know, learn what it meant.

Aren’t there any standards for reporters at the Journal?

“Name something that gets passed around…”

Hilarious. But I miss Richard Dawson. He would have considered it a perfectly proper answer (which, of course, it is).

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.