Drug War Optimism

To try to bolster Brad Plumer's modest optimism that we really might adopt more sensible drug policy options, let me note that the best available alternative to the "war on drugs" mentality is actually pretty "tough." The main alternative Brad discusses, based on David Kennedy's work, has to dow with strictly targeting violent crime and the kind of over open-air drug markets that are associated with violence. A tighter focus of crime control resources on violent murderers and people who destroy neighborhoods with their drug dealing doesn't strike me as something that's particularly "soft" or that politicians need to be afraid of.

Meanwhile, in political terms it's sometimes useful to do things that work. If you're a mayor and you implement a somewhat controversial new policing strategy at the start of your term, and then three years later the murder rate's gone way down, you're in pretty good shape. It often seems to me that there's a general tendency to underrate the political benefits of implementing policies that work. On some issues, of course, the incentives really are perverse because the payoff is very long term, but policing issues aren't really like that -- if you do things that reduce crime, people will be happy. Smarter drug control policies will reduce crime, so politicians have good reason to seek out smarter policies.

Photo by Flickr user kissthis used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

I guess I don't understand. If, say, marijuana was to be legalized, why would there be a concern over open-air drug markets being associated with violence, any more than there are for bars being associated with violence? Why would there even be open-air drug markets-just sell it at CVS.

Posted by jamie | December 3, 2007 5:33 PM

"Smarter drug control policies will reduce crime, so politicians have good reason to seek out smarter policies."

If they manage to last long enough - at the mention of this, their opponents will scream bloody murder and trot out all sorts of victims, claiming said politician doesn't want to enforce responsibility on the druggie that did whatever.

This is a case of where realistic people get accused of being insufficiently hard-ass'ed and the status quo never changes.

Posted by Jeremy | December 3, 2007 5:41 PM

Smarter drug control policies will reduce crime, so politicians have good reason to seek out smarter policies.

Odd words from a man who's done his share of Wire-blogging.

There are very powerful national and state-level structures that prevent local actors from making good decisions for their communities with regard to drugs and crime, unless they take on much larger amounts of risk than you suggest.

Posted by DivGuy | December 3, 2007 5:49 PM

It's all ultimately driven by demand. Harsh, certain punishments for possession and use are a good way of reducing demand.

Posted by Mixner | December 3, 2007 5:53 PM

The violent crime issue is not limited to open air drug markets. The problem is that retail narcotics are a cash business and the product is highly fungible and easy to transport. So, both the cash and the merchandise are highly attractive to armed robbers (see Omar on The Wire). The dealers respond by having armed thugs who protect the stash and cash (see Snoop on The Wire).

If you want to take the violence out of the drug business, you would have to make it possible for drug dealers to count on the police for protection. Simply turning a blind eye to drug transactions behind closed doors might lead to fewer drive-by shootings, but it would lead to more home invasions (many of which would be invasions of homes that were wrongly believed to hold drugs).

Posted by Ephus | December 3, 2007 6:00 PM

I'm not following that: crime rates declined dramatically (like 70%) under Rudy Giuliani, and both Yglesias and McArdle despise him, Yglesias because MOTs don't let friends vote Republican, and McArdle because he isn't cuddly enough. So where's the payoff for "policies that work"?

Posted by y81 | December 3, 2007 6:03 PM

first, "targeting violent crime and the kind of over open-air drug markets that are associated with violence" --> that's fine and all, but that's part of the problem in causing 1 out of 7 young black men to go to prison. white folks buy their cocaine in nice apartments in the village. black folks buy crack out in the streets. crack has obviously different penalties than cocaine (causing the disproportionate racial impact), but in addition, it's always the way we imagine going after drugs in general.

second, y81, guiliani led some great reforms of the nypd but "getting tough" was mostly rhetoric, as has been stated many many times. and, many of the crime declines you talk about began before his administration. guiliani did have some success though with several reforms (communication systems, more local accountability by officers), but his "tough policies" you so obviously are drawn to didn't have the impact on crime you mistakenly believe they did.

Posted by two things | December 3, 2007 7:10 PM

"A tighter focus of crime control resources on violent murderers and people who destroy neighborhoods with their drug dealing doesn't strike me as something that's particularly 'soft' or that politicians need to be afraid of."

True enough. But that doesn't mean this is a good idea. There are two facts relevant to the claim above that should push us toward across-the-board legalization. One is empirical, the other moral.

(1) Most of the violence attendant to the war on drugs is caused by the war on drugs itself.

(2) A liberal conception of autonomy demands that people be in charge of their own bodies.

(1) entails that the best way to reduce violence is to take transactions involving drugs out of the shadows. (2) entails that people should be allowed to do whatever they wish with their own bodies even if it means they make bad choices.

Belle Waring made a good point in her case for legalization:

"Further, there’s a causation/correlation problem. The type of person who, in our current society, tries heroin, is not just like the type of person who does not. Risk-taking, thrill-seeking people who want to get as wasted as possible with the world’s gold-standard high, are not plausibly a control group on which to test questions of relative addictiveness. If it turns out a lot of those people end up in messed-up life situations, well, it might not just be the drugs."

http://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/02/yes-even-heroin/

Posted by Ashish George | December 3, 2007 8:03 PM

It's all ultimately driven by demand. Harsh, certain punishments for possession and use are a good way of reducing demand.

<sarcasm>Gosh, what a great idea. I wonder why no one's ever tried that before.</sarcasm>

Posted by dob | December 3, 2007 8:15 PM

"The main alternative Brad discusses, based on David Kennedy's work, has to dow with strictly targeting violent crime and the kind of over open-air drug markets that are associated with violence"

Ya know, if you could just re-read your posts just *once*, maybe out loud, you could make your points much clearer, and your viewers less confused. Example A: "over open-air drug markets" what the hell is an "over open-air drug market"? And simple mis-spellings like "dow" can also be spotted with one *legitimate* read-over.
Best,
Tom

Posted by Tom | December 3, 2007 8:34 PM

I just marked 15 years as a criminal lawyer, most of it as a prosecutor, in a city recently declared the "most dangerous" in the country, and I can say, with absolute certainty, that repealing the prohibition of all controlled substances is the only sane policy.

Posted by JB2 | December 3, 2007 9:09 PM

Gosh, what a great idea. I wonder why no one's ever tried that before.

Because of people like you?

Posted by Mixner | December 3, 2007 9:13 PM

Yglesias because MOTs don't let friends vote Republican
OK, I give up. What's a MOT?

Posted by guineapigfury | December 3, 2007 9:39 PM

"Gosh, what a great idea. I wonder why no one's ever tried that before.

Because of people like you?"

Did you miss the last 40 years of drug policy? Unless you think punishments weren't harsh enough. We could try public cutting off of hands, I believe that's done in some countries. Or how about public stonings? Because putting chemicals into your body deserves that. But not alcohol, or nicotine, because they're not drugs. No sirree, not chemicals that have any sort of effect on the body whatsoever, and certainly not adverse.

Posted by Jeremy | December 3, 2007 10:07 PM

I can't speak for y-81 up there but where I'm from, it means "Member of the Tribe," aka Jewish people.

Posted by Steve Lieber | December 3, 2007 10:12 PM

Mixner: "It's all ultimately driven by demand. Harsh, certain punishments for possession and use are a good way of reducing demand."

Mixner demonstrating once again that he's all about torture and punishment. Put fifty million Americans in prison for life - that's the ticket!

Christ, what a moron.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 3, 2007 10:13 PM

I don't think Matt really gets it. The point of the drug wars is that they will never be over, there will always be some shadowy "menace".

There will never be any way to declare the problem solved, war over, cut the funding and spend the money somewhere else, because the drug wars are not based on some measurable metric of harm or benefit. If they were, marijuana would be legal, and, conversely, drug warriors fight legalization because if you admit that a drug that does little or no harm should be legal, at least by prescription, there is no reason for any of them to be illegal.

There are mega-tons of money in all of this. Checkout a price list for pain medications and then reflect on the fact that morphine is the safest opiate known, and can be taken as a simple pill. The safest of the other pain medications are just morphine analogues, and the further you get from morphine the more dangerous and less useful the drugs become.

The drug wars aren't really about drugs at all, although they have neatly roped in the liberals by catering to the liberal dislike of smokers. If you legalized pot, which has in fact been the recommendation of every commission that studied the matter, the remaining drug users are well under 1% of our population.

As Amanda would say, "No-o-ot a problem!"

Posted by serial catowner | December 3, 2007 10:16 PM

catowner,

There will never be any way to declare the problem solved, war over, cut the funding and spend the money somewhere else, because the drug wars are not based on some measurable metric of harm or benefit. If they were, marijuana would be legal

Do please produce the "measurable metric" demonstrating that the benefits of legalizing marijuana would exceed the costs. And what about other drugs, like heroin and cocaine and crystal meth? What does the "measurable metric" say about those?

And what, exactly, do you mean by "legal," anyway? What kind of restrictions, if any, on the sale and distribution of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, etc. would you retain? Restrictions similar to those we impose on prescription pharmaceuticals? Alcohol and tobacco? Vitamins? Or what? I assume you have a "measurable metric" for this, too.

Posted by Mixner | December 3, 2007 10:31 PM

"Do please produce the "measurable metric" demonstrating that the benefits of legalizing marijuana would exceed the costs. And what about other drugs, like heroin and cocaine and crystal meth? What does the "measurable metric" say about those?

And what, exactly, do you mean by "legal," anyway? What kind of restrictions, if any, on the sale and distribution of marijuana, heroin, cocaine, etc. would you retain? Restrictions similar to those we impose on prescription pharmaceuticals? Alcohol and tobacco? Vitamins? Or what? I assume you have a "measurable metric" for this, too.

Posted by Mixner | December 3, 2007 10:31 PM"

Hey, why not? Besides, aren't you supposed to be all laissez-faire? How capitalist are we really when one of our biggest cash crops is illegal?

Posted by Reality Man | December 4, 2007 12:18 AM

Wow, I pretty much never agree with serial catowner, but she (he?) 's spot on for this one.

I think drug war pessimism is still warranted as long as both Liberals and Conservatives continue to have an insatiable desire to give a damn even if I just want to put a fag in my mouth.

Posted by Kolohe | December 4, 2007 1:24 AM

Is there a subliminal point with the photo that Bush has so f****d up the dollar that a dime bag now costs a quarter?

Posted by Kolohe | December 4, 2007 1:31 AM

The basic philosophical problem here is that the "war on drugs" attempts to shift blame from people making bad choices in rich countries to dirt-poor farmers in the Third World.

The basic practical problem is that as currently structured, the "wod" is destructive to our most important foreign policy objectives. Columbia is a great example. Every year the government sends billions to the Columbian army to "fight drugs", while citizens send about an equal number of billions to the drug gangs. The resulting civil war is thus unwinnable by either side and perpetual, with the Columbian people caught in the crossfire. There is no single thing we could do that would be more supportive of the Karzai government in Afghanistan than decriminalizing drugs.

There is an irreducible (probably quite small) number of people who will screw up their lives with drugs no matter what. Let them. Attempting to save them from themselves with a gigantic, militarized international prohibition policy keeps supply high, prices low, encourages domestic violence and social breakdown, and fuels civil wars in some of the most important geostrategic regions.

Posted by Robert Powell | December 4, 2007 2:52 AM

I'm not sure the metric is measurable because it is so damn huge. To flesh out what the prosecuting atty up there said, and somebody else up further, the violence associated with drugs - and this is practically all of the non-domestic serious violence out there - is a result of the non-enforceability of the crack [or whatever] contract. Other business people can rely on the courts to solve their differences. When your business is illegal, you have to enforce it with physical force. Actually the courts do that too - the threat of physical force by the police. But when you don't have the police at your back - and in fact have them on your back - people think they can stiff you. You can't let that happen and stay in business.

Also, decriminalization means a whole raft of people won't be spending crazy jail time, crazy because I'm paying for it, A LOT for it, and they're only going to go back, because the time they are spending in jail, coming out a felon, with this big fat hole in their resume at best, does not help them to compete in the non-criminal job market, to put it mildly.

And another thing:
When you put a dealer away, the demand for his product does not go away, and a hole is now created for his job, which will be filled by lower level dealers, whose jobs will then be taken over by kids entering the job market. Somebody's nephew. And these kids then get on the track described above, and/or shot, and - was somebody trying to measure a metric somewhere? Because good luck with that.

Posted by Phoebe | December 4, 2007 4:02 AM

I'm all for legalizing drugs and spending the money on better/more effective drug rehab. We will over the long-term spend less and the social costs, though real, can be contained to the individuals and families of those who actively destroy their lives. Just like alcohol.

I still don't know what legalization would look like -- controlled via pharmacy? special stores (like liquor stores)? or tables on the street corner (like newspapers in NYC)?

In the short term there will be a lot of out of work people who are now dependent on the drug trade.

Posted by mike c | December 4, 2007 9:18 AM

Oppression of cannabis planters and users has been a growth industry since the federal government reauthorized the sale of alcohol and created the marihuana stamp act. The amount of property and other asset forfeiture confiscated from cannabis users or producers over the last 70 years must be staggering. I have not done the research but others have. When you consider that the federal government is giving its own (mostly taxpaying) citizens the Palestinian treatment, stealing their homes and killing them or putting them in jail, because they cultivated, traded, or used a ... plant (and a medicinal, extremely useful ('sativa'), long-cultivated one at that), and all of that to the tune of billions and billions of taxpayer funds in law enforcement, dogs, guns, bullets, armor, helicopters, ATVs and 4WDs, all while the immense, absurdly inflated profits, instead of being regulated and taxed, just accumulate in the hands of the shadiest, deadliest, and best-connected, tax free, it is almost within the realm of genocide--the perpetrators being the federal government, the drug kingpins, the anti-drug industry largely funded by alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals, and the victims being all those disproportionately poor and lower middle class young men of color who thought they should be able to light up a skunky one after a hard day's work, you know, in lieu of the vacations, medical insurance, eating out, all those other perks that the technocrat class discussing this issue enjoys, with or without marijuana, at their leisure. For that thought-crime, they get thousands in lawyer's fees, or jail time, criminal classification.

Cannabis users who really enjoy it naturally wish to trade each other, as cannabis is like roses or orchids and exists in countless diverse varieties. Naturally many are also drawn to this desirable product purely for the profitable aspect, and with legalization, said profits will be less easily gained, as the price will plummet, and the commerce will be taxed, and the industry will be sustained by enthusiasts, medical patients, and i don't know, university students and professors?

The crime element would be almost entirely reduced if commerce in these substances were regulated and afforded taxpayer-funded protection from law enforcement they deserve. Bars don't have to handle robberies without calling the police, nor do pharmacies. Sell cannabis in these locations, to people over the age of 18. Not complicated.

Posted by MM | December 4, 2007 9:40 AM

Of course, by not complicated, I mean: completely impossible, in the current corporatist, two-headed state party system that continues to derive great gain from the drug war status quo.

Where ballot initiative and knowledge of cannabis have recently encountered, the people have already registered their vote. In favor. Result in federal stance: None. Ignored. Debated using high school level disingenuousness and passive-aggressive hysterical propaganda.

Posted by MM | December 4, 2007 9:54 AM

Well said, MM

Posted by Waingro | December 4, 2007 1:48 PM