Commentary: Legalize drugs to stop violence

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Have you ever heard of the phrase "easier said than done"? Do you honestly think it's as simple as waving a magic wand and saying "more manpower"? Just how fucking stupid are you, seriously?

It actually makes me think of that mythical anecdote regarding Napoleon seeing a proposal for the defense of France by spacing regiments at regular intervals along the entire border by some idiotic Colonel appointed by one of the prior revolutionary governments out of political reliability rather than his capability. Napoleon's words were supposedly roughly "What are you trying to do? Stop smuggling?" It just made me think of that because the DEA would probably have to be the size of the US military to completely stop drug violence in this country, and by the time they were done we'd be as totalitarian as Stalinism.

[Darth Wong]

I'm getting the impression that Rahvin really is just as stupid as he seems to be. So let's go over this: you cannot simply say "more manpower" because you need to recruit and train new people, and set up a much larger bureaucracy. Simply "expanding" an existing organization is much more difficult than it sounds on paper, because there are practicalities involved: before you hire and train new people, you need to hire and train new people to hire and train the new people. You'll need more offices, more buildings, more administrators, more managers too. And what are you going to train them on, until the laws and regulations are hammered out? Where are the procedural manuals? Are they going to be identical to those for alcohol and tobacco? How likely is that, when the drugs are different and the laws regarding various drugs will also be different?

Moreover, the fact that an agency currently oversees alcohol and tobacco does not mean it can easily do the same for drugs. You need to have health inspectors and test labs which examine the quality of legally grown marijuana, for example. You need to work out accepted regulatory test regimes for each type of drug, and you suddenly dumped dozens of new drugs into their laps. It's taken years for Health Canada to start up its project to regulate NHPs (natural health products), and they're still so hopelessly backlogged that they're years away from inspecting anyone for compliance. Regulations and expectations have been revised several times. And that's for an existing industry with an existing bureaucracy where relatively limited enforcement is required because the industry is not historically involved with organized crime.

But oh no, in the idiot-simple world of people like Rahvin, all you do is say "more manpower" and the problem is solved.

[Dark Hellion]

Frankly, I think Rahvin is pulling a "left Limbaugh" on us. By using lots of buzzwords that left-wing people respond to he has obfuscated and then weaseled out of answering a number of big questions.

1) Where are the cartels going to go? They will not simply disappear because you cut their money away. In fact, cutting away the funds of most organization like that only makes them desperate and more violent. But no real solution has been offered for the short-term. Simply the long-term truism that it will seriously cripple most narco-syndicates to legalize the vast majority of their illegal profits. However, as stated previously and never answered with any rigor by Rahvin is that the mafia still exists, despite its primary income source being legalized. The cartels have every opportunity to do similar unless other actions are considered.

2) How do you deal with the fact that certain drugs have very little if any ability to allow the user social functionality. Crack, Crystal Meth, PCP, etc. all have severe side effects even in very pure controlled forms. You cannot simply wave away these effects by saying doctors will control the dosage. Bartenders control the dosage of liquor, usually have store policies that they cut off people too drunk or remove the keys of those who are too drunk, and IIRC can be held criminally responsible in some states if they knowingly serve liquor to someone who intends to drive. Yet drunk driving is still endemic. Doctors and pharmacists may be under stronger ethical sanction but the pretense that there will not be widespread abuse is comical given the abuse of such substances as Oxy and Vicadin by people like soccer moms.

By waving away these two giant problems with buzzwords, repetition and accusals that the opposition is strawmanning (again a buzzword on this site) Rahvin has avoided giving any real policy, simply an ideological position. Just like Limbaugh Republicans do for many situations.

[Kanastrous]

You need to have health inspectors and test labs which examine the quality of legally grown marijuana, for example.

Some of this already exists. The DEA/FDA maintain marijuana farms to serve the small number of Federally-authorized marijuana using patients, and together with companies developing medications like Marinol that's just the kind of research they conduct.

[Punarbhava]

Maybe we could use the $60 billion spent annually by the DEA and state governments and all the personnel involved in fighting the drug war in enforcing a new drug policy.

However, as stated previously and never answered with any rigor by Rahvin is that the mafia still exists, despite its primary income source being legalized.

Yeah 'cause the mafia switched over to other illegal drugs. And weapons. And there's always extortion.

How do you deal with the fact that certain drugs have very little if any ability to allow the user social functionality.

If someone commits a criminal act while on drugs, they should be punished appropriately for that act. It's the responsibility of the individual to regulate himself and his actions, not others'. No special 'dealing' required. Meth and cocaine, two of the drugs you mentioned, are already legal to prescribe; for ADHD and anesthesia. Doctor prescription abuse doesn't seem to be a big problem. Everyone just uses it illegally, with no oversight of any kind (something legal avenues could provide-- many addicts of those stronger drugs recognize their problem and want help, but are scared of the authorities and incarceration) So so many things available over the counter have 'sever side effects'. FFS, eat a dozen or so raw potatoes and you might die. In that aspect it comes down to harm reduction.

Drunk driving is endemic and alcohol is legal. All these other drugs are already heavily used with no oversight, regulation, or control of any kind. I don't really see how any of what you said has any bearing on harm reduction as it's being discussed in the thread.

Doctors and pharmacists may be under stronger ethical sanction but the pretense that there will not be widespread abuse is comical given the abuse of such substances as Oxy and Vicadin by people like soccer moms.

something those soccer moms probably wouldn't do if they could go down to the convenience store to buy a pack of joints to relieve stress/pain/to relax.

[Jalinth]

Some of this already exists. The DEA/FDA maintain marijuana farms to serve the small number of Federally-authorized marijuana using patients, and together with companies developing medications like Marinol that's just the kind of research they conduct.

This is more theoretical than actual. The one authorized place only produces small quantities of very weak amounts that isn't accessible to researchers. The DEA has been stonewalling additional research production for years http://www.boston.com/news/health/blog/ ... s_uma.html.
Go to the ACLU and look up "Lyle Cracker". They have copies of the actual DEA administrative law judge's ruling and other documents, so you can read these yourself without having to accept ACLU's view of things.

[Punarbhava]

If you honestly think you could just legalize drugs and instantly kill the drug trade overnight, you must be on drugs yourself. It might be a good idea in the long run, but it would not have the dramatic immediate effects that you seem to think it would. In the short run, nothing would perceptibly change at all. Do you really think businesses are going to leap at the chance to pour capital into such a risky new venture so quickly, when they have no idea if you'll turn around and recriminalize it tomorrow?

1) Phillip Morris has already looked at 'the chance to pour capital' into marijuana. They've copyrighted 500-something street names for marijuana in case it becomes legal, and referenced the drug many times in memos.

2) Marijuana growing is actually a really stable business, regardless of its legality. You should read "Marijuana Production in the United States", by Jon Gettman (link). The numbers are solid, and they say marijuana is the biggest cash crop in the US. It's grown largely indoors with great efficiency and a 1-2 month turnaround time from sowing the seeds to harvest. The only threats are violence/theft/incarceration, and that would greatly diminish if the legality changed.

[Erik von Nein]

Yeah, you'll notice he wasn't talking about marijuana strictly, or even necessarily at all.

How many marijuana drug gangs are there, exactly? Most of the real heavy violence seems imported from South America/Mexico which deals largely in cocaine.

[Punarbhava]

Yeah, you'll notice he wasn't talking about marijuana strictly, or even necessarily at all.

Hrm. You're right. For some reason inbetween hitting "reply" and actually typing my post I jumbled the message. In any case, the basics of what I said apply to almost every single drug known to humans. Some examples:

- Methamphetamine, arguably one of the most dangerous chemicals to ever interact with humans, is already legal. It's Schedule II (some accepted medical use), which is interesting because marijuana (and all the hallucinogens) are Schedule I (no medical value)--methinks it's politics, not science. It's manufactured currently by Ovation Pharma under the trade name Desoxyn. And that's just in the US. There are at least a dozen labs in India, China, and across the world set up to produce large amounts of ephedrine and methamphetamine. Unless something has happened recently, the countries hosting them refuse to acquiesce to the US government's demands to shut them down.

- Heroin along with all the derivatives and synthetic opioids are produced synthetically by pretty much every Big Pharma company. Oxycontin comes to mind, as does Fentanyl, the opiate lollipop. Heroin itself is Schedule I, but a lot of the synthetics are Schedule II. In England, heroin is Schedule II, or so says wiki. And of course, all throughout the middle east and south america and china are opium farmers growing it in large amounts to supply the illegal trade-- IIRC there are even a few instances where opium is the only profitable thing for farmers to grow due to US trade policy and/or their own country's situation; if we legalized it but didn't let them start selling their crops legally, they'd have no way to support themselves.

- LSD was produced by Sandoz for a good while, and I guarantee they have all the equipment to start producing it again. The illegal supply sharply dropped around 2001 after the guys in the missile silo in kansas who apparently produced like 95% of the world's supply got caught, but it's still produced on a local scale by someone. Damned if I have any idea who and how though.

- Ecstasy was also produced by Sandoz, and maybe others. It was used up until a few decades ago (I wanna say the 70s but don't quote me) as a psychotherapeutic catalyst. One of the textbooks behind me quotes some psychologist calling it "a year's worth of therapy in one six hour session". It's also produced illegally on a huge scale, and apparently isn't too terribly hard to make.

- "research chemicals", like 2C-B and 5-MeO-AMT, are produced on the smallest of scale by psychopharmacologists like Alexander Shulgin for study both inside and outside the US. It's tightly controlled though. They're mostly hallucinogens and they're all Schedule I or banned for being an "analog". Most of the chemicals are either hard or not very profitable to produce, apparently, because it's very rarely seen.

- Cocaine is Schedule II in the US, and I swear it's legally produced somewhere in the country but I can't find where. Wiki says its use wasn't completely prohibited until the Controlled Substance Act in the 70s.

To restate: Almost all drugs are or have been at one point mass-produced legally. All drugs are mass-produced illegally.

To move on: Given the addiction aspect of drugs, ie a near-constant increase in demand, drug production isn't a very risky venture at all, especially for an established drug producing company (alcohol, tobacco, pharmaceuticals). Aaand, I'm not arguing "dramatic immediate effects".

How many marijuana drug gangs are there, exactly? Most of the real heavy violence seems imported from South America/Mexico which deals largely in cocaine.

I don't think there are many marijuana-specific drug gangs, but any big drug gang deals in marijuana. I believe the violence relates to the desire to maximize profit tinged with the criminality of the situation much much more than any specific drug or the fact that it's drugs they're trafficking.

[Darth Wong]

If you honestly think you could just legalize drugs and instantly kill the drug trade overnight, you must be on drugs yourself. It might be a good idea in the long run, but it would not have the dramatic immediate effects that you seem to think it would. In the short run, nothing would perceptibly change at all. Do you really think businesses are going to leap at the chance to pour capital into such a risky new venture so quickly, when they have no idea if you'll turn around and recriminalize it tomorrow?

1) Phillip Morris has already looked at 'the chance to pour capital' into marijuana. They've copyrighted 500-something street names for marijuana in case it becomes legal, and referenced the drug many times in memos.

Oooooh, they copyrighted a bunch of names (something which costs less than the cost of catering a typical meeting at Phillip Morris HQ)and "looked at" the idea. The Pentagon has "looked at" psychic teleportation too; it doesn't mean they're serious about it, or that they would rush to invest big money in it.

[Punarbhava]

If you honestly think you could just legalize drugs and instantly kill the drug trade overnight, you must be on drugs yourself. It might be a good idea in the long run, but it would not have the dramatic immediate effects that you seem to think it would. In the short run, nothing would perceptibly change at all. Do you really think businesses are going to leap at the chance to pour capital into such a risky new venture so quickly, when they have no idea if you'll turn around and recriminalize it tomorrow?

1) Phillip Morris has already looked at 'the chance to pour capital' into marijuana. They've copyrighted 500-something street names for marijuana in case it becomes legal, and referenced the drug many times in memos.

Oooooh, they copyrighted a bunch of names (something which costs less than the cost of catering a typical meeting at Phillip Morris HQ)and "looked at" the idea. The Pentagon has "looked at" psychic teleportation too; it doesn't mean they're serious about it, or that they would rush to invest big money in it.

aw for fuck's sake. my browser just ate a 1000 word post. I'll try this again later.

[Garibaldi]

The underground trade would continue because at a bare minimum, we would put age restrictions on legal usage. That means all of the underage kids who want to do drugs would still have to go to illegal dealers.

Actually I would bet that in a world with legalized drugs, kids would simply get them through straw purchases from older friends, relatives, hobos, and unscrupulous convenience stores. After all, that's how underage kids get alcohol; they don't hit up the local moonshiners (maybe in the Ozarks, I dunno).

Just a heads up in case you have any kids.

[Punarbhava]

I promise I'll respond to this in more detail in the next couple of days, but for now everyone interested in this topic should watch these pundits talk for 6min, 43sec. It goes over a lot of the arguments put forth here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adeknSq7Cac

The related videos are good, too.

[FSTargetDrone]

NPR presented a hypothetical scenario about the legalization of marijuana. There is an audio link on the page for anyone interested.

[Vendetta]

I thought it would be worth bringing this back up with This article about decriminalisation in portugal.

Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It's not the Netherlands.)

Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.

At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.

The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."

Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.

Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.

"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.

At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country's number one public health problem, he says.

"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.

Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.

The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate."

In short, user level decriminalisation (not all out legalisation) achieved far more than prohibition in at least Portugal. Nonenforcement in Holland also had the net effect of decreasing cannabis use.

It doesn't remove the enforcement burden for removing the large scale international drug trade, but it does reduce the harm done by drugs and the side effects of their culture, especially the more dangerous ones like heroin.

[Sea Skimmer]

Oooooh, they copyrighted a bunch of names (something which costs less than the cost of catering a typical meeting at Phillip Morris HQ)and "looked at" the idea. The Pentagon has "looked at" psychic teleportation too; it doesn't mean they're serious about it, or that they would rush to invest big money in it.

While you are correct that they may no be serious, why wouldn't they be? Phillip Morris is already setup to roll, package and distribute the product, and tobacco sales are declining meaning they likely have surplus machinery time to work with. Also they already sell a horribly deadly product and were forced in federal court to essentially pay to advertise against themselves, so its not like public relations are a serious concern if the law was quickly reversed. Whats the backlash going to be, people quit smoking faster?

The new investment required would be primarily on the end of growers, not distributors like Phillip Morris. I don’t think the US is going to have any shortage of farmers willing to sacrifice an acre of corn or wheat for one of pot even if its a risk. The size of illicit grow operations is already pretty massive, estimated at 10,000 tons of pot produced in the US alone in 2006 worth 35 billion dollars, though of course not all of it actually got sold. Estimates are the Feds kill around 5 million plants per year before harvesting… out of at least 60 million being grown. A pretty big chunk of US pot comes from Canada and Mexico too, some from even further.