As Matthew Feeney
noted this morning, a new report from the London School of
Economics (LSE) criticizes “a militarised and enforcement-led
global ‘war on drugs’ strategy” that “has produced enormous
negative outcomes and collateral damage.” The people who signed
onto the call for reform in the report’s foreword include five
Nobel-winning economists as well as statesmen such as former U.S.
Secretary of State George Shultz (also an economist, and a longtime
critic of the war on drugs), former Polish President Aleksander
Kwasniewski, and former E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
Like the 2011
report from the self-appointed Global Commission on Drug
Policy, the LSE report is encouraging as an indicator of opposition
to the status quo. But while the new report is much more
substantive, offering detailed analyses from leading drug policy
experts, it suffers from a similar timidity.
Although the LSE report is titled
Ending the Drug Wars, that is not what it actually
recommends. Rather than condemning the use of force to stop people
from consuming arbitrarily proscribed intoxicants, the report calls
for a more judicious use of force, based on more realistic goals,
coupled with more drug treatment, a greater emphasis on harm
reduction, and tolerance of “global policy pluralism,” possibly
including experiments with various forms of marijuana legalization.
This vision amounts to a decided improvement on current policy, but
it would be more accurately described as a de-escalation than “an
end to the ‘war on drugs,'” as the LSE’s
press release calls it.
John Collins, coordinator of the LSE’s International
Drug Policy Project, leads off with a chapter that explains how
international cooperation in this area came to be dominated by
“a
moralistic and supply-centric vision” that left little room for
experimentation with other approaches. “The system was built
largely upon the assumption that by controlling
supply it could control and eventually eradicate
‘non-medical and non-scientific’ use of drugs,” Collins writes.
Hence the 1998 attempt “to reinvigorate international
efforts by embarking on ambitious targets for
demand and supply reduction under the slogan ‘a
drug-free world, we can do it!'”
Such efforts are doomed, Collins explains, by the economics
of prohibition. Attacks on supply may temporarily raise retail
prices, but “in a footloose industry like illicit
drugs, these price increases incentivise a new
rise in supply, via shifting commodity supply
chains. This then feeds back into lower
prices and an eventual return to a market
equilibrium similar to that which existed prior
to the supply-reduction intervention.” (University of Maryland
criminologist Peter Reuter considers evidence of such adaptation in
a subsequent chapter on the “balloon effect hypothesis.”)
“Decades of evidence conclusively show
that the supply and demand for illicit drugs
are not something that can be eradicated,”
observes Collins, who recommends “a more rational and
humble approach to supply-centric policies.”
What would that entail? “If prohibition is to
be pursued as a means to suppress the supply of
certain drugs deemed incompatible with
societal well-being,” Collins says, “care must be
taken to ensure that enforcement is resourced
only up to the point of drastically raising
marginal prices to the point where consumption is
measurably reduced. After this, additional
spending is wasteful and likely damaging.” He also
cites “a clearly emerging academic consensus
that moving towards the decriminalisation of
personal consumption, along with the effective
provision of health and social services, is a far
more effective way to manage drugs and prevent the
highly negative consequences associated with
criminalisation of people who use
drugs.”
In the second chapter, Jonathan Caulkins, a professor of public
policy at Carnegie Mellon, argues that the war on drugs may not be
a failure after all (at least when it comes to “final market”
countries such as the U.S.; in another chapter, Daniel Mejia,
director of Colombia’s Research Center on Drugs and
Security, and Pascual Restrepo, a graduate student in economics at
MIT, argue that “prohibitionist drug
policies are a transfer of the costs of the drug problem from
consumer to producer and transit countries,”
where they result in violence, corruption, and instability).
Caulkins agrees that the goal of eradicating the
illicit drug trade is “not realistic”; instead, he says, the aim
should be to “drive the activity underground
while controlling collateral damage created
by the markets.”
Although prohibition cannot eliminate drug abuse,
Caullkins says, it can discourage consumption. Based on that more
modest goal, he claims, “plausible” analyses suggest
that the benefits of prohibition outweigh the costs even in the
United States, which has enforced prohibition in “a particularly
pigheaded way,” oblivious to diminishing returns. While
“prohibition is extraordinarily expensive on multiple dimensions,”
he says, so is drug abuse, so it’s possible that the net impact of
the war on drugs is positive.
To illustrate that possibility, Caulkins engages in some
half-serious cost-benefit analysis that involves prohibition
premiums, demand elasticities, drug use survey data, and
quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs). He suggests a scenario in
which legalization doubles cannabis dependence while tripling
dependence on cocaine, heroin, and cocaine. If you assign a value
of $100,000 to each QUALY and assume a “QALY loss per case” of
0.1 for cannabis and 0.2 for the other drugs, Caulkins says, you
can show that “prohibition may prevent enough
drug dependence to warrant spending as much as $112 billion per
year, well in excess of the roughly $50 billion per year now spent
on drug control.” Even if you throw in $25 billion for the QALY
losses of “almost 500,000 drug law violators behind bars” (a
subject that Columbia epidemiologist Ernest Drucker considers in
his chapter on mass incarceration), prohibition still looks like a
bargain, Caulkins says—provided you ignore every other cost
associated with the war on drugs, including several that are
difficult or impossible to quantify. (Alejandro Madrazo Lajous, a
professor of legal studies at the Mexican research center CIDE,
discusses some of those hard-to-calculate costs in a chapter about
the impact of the drug war on civil liberties in Mexico, Colombia,
and the U.S.)
Caulkins admits that his calculation
“is extremely rough,” although “it has
the virtue of being parsimonious.” He emphasizes
that “the purpose of this calculation is certainly not
to argue that prohibition offers a net benefit of
$112 billion – $50 billion = $62 billion,” since “for
many reasons it is not possible to make such
a calculation.” He explains that
“there is enormous uncertainty surrounding every
component of the calculations, and intelligent people can disagree
about what value to place on averting a year of dependence vs. a
year of incarceration.” (In their chapter on marijuana
legalization, UCLA public policy professor Mark Kleiman and Jeremy
Ziskind, an analyst at BOTEC, Kleiman’s consulting firm, make a
similar point: “It is possible to imagine doing
an elaborate cost-benefit analysis of legalising
cannabis, but doing so in practice would require
one to predict the extent of changes in variables
that cannot even be accurately measured in
the present, and to perform implausible feats of
relative valuation.”) The main impression left by
Caulkins’ discussion is that you can make calculations like this
demonstrate anything you want about prohibition, depending on which
costs and benefits you decide to include, the way you measure them,
and the weights you assign to them.
As Caulkins notes, these decisions are unavoidably influenced by
value judgments. For someone who rejects coercive paternalism on
moral grounds, no amount of drug abuse prevention can justify
forcibly preventing people from engaging in pleasurable activities
that harm no one, exposing undeterred drug users to the hazards
associated with prohibition, or arresting and
imprisoning people for engaging in peaceful, consensual
transactions. These burdens are analogous to the costs borne by
source and transit countries, since they are imposed on people who
do not benefit from them even under paternalistic
assumptions.
While the LSE report mentions “human rights” a few dozen times,
it emphasizes abuses that occur as side effects of prohibition, as
opposed to the violations of liberty inherent in trying to dictate
which substances people may put into their bodies. It suggests that
criminal penalties for drug users are unfair, or at least
misguided, but does not question the justice or wisdom of punishing
their suppliers. In the introduction, Collins claims “this
report sets out a roadmap for finally ending
the drug wars.” Yet instead of challenging the
moral premises underlying the war on drugs, it ends up advocating
what Caulkins calls “a kinder, gentler prohibition.”
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/RpwAei
via IFTTT