Tsar admits: we've lost the war on drugs

The Scotsman ^ | Sun 18 Jun 2006 | MARCELLO MEGA AND KATE FOSTER

[Nate505]

Nah, he's not that psychotic. He just wouldn't care and would approve if someone else killed his daughter. Sheesh, give the man some credit.....

[robertpaulsen]

The ONDCP budget is around $12 billion. That's about .5% of the federal budget.

Half that money is spent on enforcement, drug interdiction, overseas drug eradication programs, and local border control. The other half is spent on anti-drug advertising, drug education, and drug treatment programs.

Success is measured in a number of different areas -- interdiction is only one. Personally, I measure success by the percentage of the population that uses drugs. AND, I allow for the possibility that, under our form of government, we may only be able to reduce this number to a certain percentage and no further -- we may already be at that point.

[tortoise]

IF we are committed to winning the war on drugs, then we must find a better way to fight it. Executing people for possession is the only solution I see to winning the War on Drugs.

Except that this has been tried in police states where they can kill just about anyone they like, and it has never worked. Part of the problem is that humans rarely make judgments of risk that are remotely reasonable, rational, or correct, a fundamental characteristic of our cognitive architecture. A solution predicated on humans routinely making good judgments and evaluating risk even vaguely correctly is ipso facto useless.

[A CA Guy]

Drug Tsar in Scotland says WOD there is lost.

They should copy our system and confiscate all the drug lord's earthly possessions.

They must be a social mess to let drugs get that much out of control.

[tacticalogic]

Personally, I measure success by the percentage of the population that uses drugs. AND, I allow for the possibility that, under our form of government, we may only be able to reduce this number to a certain percentage and no further -- we may already be at that point.

So you'd consider a situation where half of the adult population smokes a joint a week, but doesn't drink or use any other recreational drugs to be a substantially worse situation than we have now?

[Energy Alley]

that was the end result of a drug crackdown in Thailand a few years ago. It just turned into a bloody street war with lots of dead crooks, cops and innocent bystanders.

[tacticalogic]

Part of the problem is that humans rarely make judgments of risk that are remotely reasonable, rational, or correct, a fundamental characteristic of our cognitive architecture. A solution predicated on humans routinely making good judgments and evaluating risk even vaguely correctly is ipso facto useless.

That POV seems to cast considerable doubt on the ideas of democracy and self-government.

[robertpaulsen]

"So you'd consider a situation where half of the adult population smokes a joint a week, but doesn't drink or use any other recreational drugs to be a substantially worse situation than we have now?"

You're saying this would happen if we legalized marijuana? Where do you get a scenario like this?

You're as bad as Zon with your hypotheticals: Geez, robertpaulsen, if everyone quit doing hard drugs and alcohol and only smoked one joint a week in the privacy of their home, what's wrong with that? Why are you against that, robertpaulsen?

First, make the claim that would happen. Second, support that claim. Then I'll comment.

[Energy Alley]

I never thought I would see a performance of The Oresteia on Free Republic.

[tacticalogic]

You're saying this would happen if we legalized marijuana? Where do you get a scenario like this?

I'm just trying to get a handle on what appears to be a grossly oversimplified standard of "success". Are we really talking about the percentage of the population that uses drugs, or the percentage of the population that complies with the regulations about which ones?

[tortoise]

Why is the fact that drugs are still used a reason for no longer trying to eliminate them?

The simple argument is that we are spending billions of dollars on it every year and getting no results for the investment. The money would be better spent in a fashion that actually does generate a measurable improvement for society.

It is similar to the argument against the bloated education budgets in the US. Public education used to be cheap in the US, good results with relatively little expenditure. The teacher's unions promised even better results if only we spent more money. Fast forward many decades and we spend vastly more per student with the same or worse results despite spending more per student than the rest of the industrialized world on education. That investment in public education was a waste -- vastly more expensive, no measurable improvement.

The problem is the government never has to justify its expenses in terms of return on investment. If we spend money, we should expect to get something for it. If we increase spending, we should expect to get more of what we were already getting. Any program that does not meet these expectations should be dismantled immediately, the money reallocated to other programs at worst or returned to the taxpayer at best. The War on Drugs is unambiguously one of these programs -- lots of money creatively spent and no real positive results.

In typical government fashion, they completely ignore the systems theory that governs this type of regulation and try to brute force their way through problems that can really only be solved by shifting the equilibrium of the system such that it settles into a more satisfactory state under its own weight, but that takes more brains than a typical bureaucrat can frequently muster.

[mysterio]

Looks like Scotland is years ahead of America in the ability to see that the drug "war" can't be won. It can be lost though, year after year. Time to stop beating our head against the wall and find a different strategy.

[mugs99]

Sure it does. It says that there's around 450,000 in prison on drug offenses out of 2,019,234 -- that's 22%.

The figures given in the article you cited are identical to the Butterfield report (458,000 & 2,019,234) in the NY Times in 1991. I noticed you didn't use Department of Justice statistics...

We now have well over 2 million in prison and another 820,000 in jail. In total, over 7 million are currently on probation, parole or locked up.
Look at the incarceration rate over the decade 1995 to 2005, the get tough on drug crimes decade: The state incarceration rate rose 14 percent, and the federal rate rose 72 percent...Attributed almost entirely to the drug war.
During this decade the prison industry ballooned into a $40-billion-a-year industry...and drugs are still cheap and plentiful in every town in America.

Your 70-80% drug-related offenses include those who possessed drugs or were high on drugs when they committed the crime they were charged with. They'd be arrested even if drugs were legal, so I don't see how we can count them.

LOL!
Not true. Drug related offenses do not include those who were in possesssion or high when they committed other crimes...You're grasping at straws. The 758% surge in the female incarceration rate is almost entirely attributed to the drug war.

The War On Drugs is a total failure that has brought nothing but the spread of violence and crime. It's time to stop this national disgrace.
.

[mugs99]

LOL!

[robertpaulsen]

I thought we were talkling about measuring the success of the WOD. I'm saying that a measure of its success is tracking the percentage of the population over 12 years old that uses illegal recreational drugs.

Did I confuse you? Did you think I was talking about alcohol use or prescription drug use?

[robertpaulsen]

In response to the poster who claimed half the people in prison are there because of drug crimes, I said 22% were in prison because of drug crimes and backed up that percentage with a link.

You came along and said "The numbers range from 70% to over 80% depending on which source you want to believe". Where did you get that percentage?

"The War On Drugs is a total failure"

Measured how? What do you mean, total failure?

[tortoise]

That POV seems to cast considerable doubt on the ideas of democracy and self-government.

Not really, but it depends on what you mean by the above terms. In short, there are a number of stable self-regulating systems that generate relatively optimal outcomes even if individuals in such a system routinely make poor judgments or make frequent irrational (or marginally rational) decisions. Provably so. Free markets (in the classical economic sense) are an example of a stable system well-suited for marginally rational actors. Democracy is in fact unstable as a general point of theory, but the initial state has a large impact on how fast it decays.

The problem, of course, is that humans rarely have the education or the penchant for designing durable social constructs in the first place that are not enforced by biology. Short term gain often trumps long term benefit if they think they can setup the rules to their personal benefit when given the opportunity to do such things.

[robertpaulsen]

"The simple argument is that we are spending billions of dollars on it every year and getting no results for the investment."

So you're saying that if we ended this War on Drugs and stopped spending these billions, drug use would not increase? We're getting NO results today?

[Zon]

Four posts from you and you have not been able to explain how a person home alone smoking marijuana harms another person or their property, because it doesn't.

[Zon]

The very fact that laws cannot eliminate murder, assault, rape, robbery, illicit drug possession, guns, alcohol and etc., it's most beneficial to persons and society as a whole to retain only laws that prohibit initiating harm or threat of harm against an individual or their property. Since it is impossible for any law(s) to eliminate adults harming themselves those laws must be repealed.

When Lt Jack Cole of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition ( LEAP) gives presentations at colleges he asks the audience, "How many of you don't do drugs because they're against the law?", seldom does even one person raise their hand.