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| Friday, June 19, 2009 (16:25:00) - Prescription Drug Abuse - Part 2 |
Michael Gilbert was asked the question, Prescription drugs are legal,
but drug dealers are still selling them on the street. How would
legalizing drugs fix that? Here is his response:
There is no perfect system to control access to drugs; but, there are
systems that are clearly and demonstrably worse, with highly
destructive impacts on society. There are no benefits associated with
the war on drugs, only costs (see Arthur Benavie's new book Drugs: America's Holy War for an economic and social analysis of the impacts ISBN 978-0-7890-3841-8). By any measure prohibition is an ineffective, counterproductive and highly destructive policy.
There will always be a small segment of the population who circumvent
any regulatory system. This happens to some degree with alcohol and
tobacco products. However, because these substances are legally
accessible, very few users are willing to take risks associated with
using illegal purchased products (trafficking, adulteration, criminal
networks, etc.). This may change for tobacco if prices continue to
escalate sharply and create conditions that open space for a black
market in lower priced tobacco.
Despite marginal leakages in any regulatory system, there is far more
control and far fewer adverse impacts associated with mechanisms that
allow regulated legal access than under prohibition. There is little
evidence to support any assertion that illegal substances would or
could be more readily available than they are currently under
prohibition. Illegal drugs are readily and easily accessible to
people of any age under prohibition. Under prohibition a grade school
kid could be given money and sent to the corner by his parent
to score drugs for them from a dealer and would probably return with the
drugs. It is hard to argue that a regulated system of legalized
access would provide easier access to psychoactive drugs.
There will always be some diversion of substances and illegal sales of
fraudulent drugs. But given the available evidence (and there is a
lot of evidence available) it is unlikely that (a) illegal sales of drugs diverted from the regulated system, (b) illegally produced substances or (c) fraudulent substances will be
as serious or destructive as the incredible array of problems produced by the war on drugs. |
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Comments (8) |
| Monday, February 12, 2007 (05:52:48) - Some thoughts on the National Drug Control Strategy 2006 |
 Every year The White House, Office of National Drug Control Policy publishes a report titled the National Drug Control Strategy. It is interesting to watch how the rhetoric and evidence presented ebb and flow with the political winds of the country.
The Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) came into existence during the first Bush administration. Its mission was easily summarized as a “war on drugs”. This slogan set an aggressive, enforcement oriented tone for interdiction, eradication, suppression, and enforcement actions designed to disrupt illegal drug markets. Their basic goals were to reduce drug use by increasing the costs to users and the risks to traffickers. If successful, street prices would rise and purity would fall as illegal drugs became harder to get.
In the mid-1990’s the Clinton administration embraced demand-side drug prevention strategies as an essential, but underutilized, element of drug control policy. This perspective was reflected in the 1998 National Drug Control Strategy (pp. 3-4):
The metaphor of a “war on drugs” is misleading. Although wars are expected to end, drug control is a continuous challenge. … to reduce demand for drugs, prevention efforts must be ongoing. The chronically addicted should be held accountable for negative behavior and offered treatment to help change destructive behavior patterns. Addicts must be helped, not defeated….
Cancer is a more appropriate metaphor for the nation’s drug problem. It requires the mobilization of support mechanisms – medical, educational, and societal – to check the spread of disease and improve prognosis. The symptoms of the illness must be managed while the root cause is attacked. The key to reducing both drug abuse and cancer is prevention coupled with treatment. (Italics added)
This modest change in rhetoric was important but its practical effects were limited because the bulk of the resources still flowed to supply-side drug efforts for the “war on drugs.” The funds allocated for prevention were largely committed to public relations ads on television to deglamorize drug use.
The second Bush administration reverted quickly to the “war on drugs” language. The policy emphasis on demand reduction largely disappeared from subsequent annual National Drug Control Strategy reports published after 2002.
However, a much more important change found its way into the annual reports. With the publication of the 2003 report, the ONDCP excluded the statistical tables at the end of the report. These tables had presented data from a variety of sources. They covered many years and revealed long-term trends related to patterns of drug use, global drug production trends, street drug price, etc. These data could be used by readers to critically examine policy claims within the report. Earlier reports were written cautiously so as to be somewhat consistent data presented at the end of report.
Subsequent reports have been much less cautious in their claims and have used measures of drug control activity rather than impact. Data presented in these later reports focus on such things as the amount of drugs seized, acres of crops destroyed, number of drug arrests made, number of extraditions to the United States. Data reflecting long-term trends associated with impacts of drug control policies are largely absent. Here are a couple of examples from the 2006 National Drug Control Strategy where the claims exceed the evidence and imply that meaningful and sustainable gains in the “war on drugs” have been realized:
We are beginning to see the results of our market disruption strategy in the United States. Cocaine prices and purity at the retail level have reversed a three year trend of increasing purity and decreasing price. Worldwide seizures of cocaine… reached record levels of more than 400 metric tons annually in 2003 and 2004. These unprecedented removals… (are) beginning to an effect in the United States. (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2006, p. 18)
In… Columbia… the government reported spraying more than 138,000 hectares of coca and manually eradicated more than 31,000 hectares in 2005. These efforts have reduced cultivation by one-third since 2001 and reduced potential pure cocaine production from 700 metric tons in 2001 to 430 metric tons in 2004. (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2006, pp. 19-20)
The reader has no way to know whether these claims are credible or honest because the data needed to support such statements is missing.
Interestingly, the National Drug Threat Assessment 2007 presents a quite different assessment of the situation in Columbia (National Drug Intelligence Center, 2007, p. 3).
Despite the… highest recorded level of cocaine interdiction and seizure… in 2005—the fifth consecutive record-setting increase—there have been no sustained cocaine shortages or indications of stretched supplies in domestic drug markets. These seemingly inconsistent trends suggest greater source-country supply than was previously estimated, an assertion supported by a recent upwardly revised cocaine production estimate for 2005….
In the areas surveyed during 2004, coca cultivation declined from 114,100 hectares in 2004 to 105,400 hectares in 2005. But countrywide, cultivation increased because an additional 39,000 hectares of coca was discovered outside the previously surveyed areas. As a result of the discovery of these new coca fields, the estimated amount of pure cocaine that could have been produced in the Andean region increased from 640 metric tons in 2004 to 780 metric tons in 2005….
With regard to opium, a recent report titled Afghanistan’s Drug Industry (Buddenburg & Byrd, 2006) produced by the United Nations, Office on Drugs and Crime and the World Bank estimated that the opium harvest in Afghanistan for 2006 would yield about 6,100 metric tons of opium compared to 4,100 metric tons in 2005. It is estimated that amount would be sufficient to supply 90% of global demand for opium and exceed annual illegal consumption by 30%.
Contrary to the 2006 National Drug Control Strategy report, it appears unlikely that there will be shortages of either cocaine or opiates on the streets of the United States. The effects they report, if they ever existed, should be viewed as normal fluctuations within longer trends rather than validation that the “war on drugs” is achieving its goals. The accumulated weight of evidence continues to refute such claims. The “war on drugs” has and continues to fail to attain its basic goals.
The ONDCP often uses the annual report to tell the story it prefers. There is an old saying “You have a right to your own opinions but you don’t have a right to your own facts.” As taxpayers we should demand, at the very least – honest reporting of evidence and facts when the reporting organizations are funded by our taxes. Michael J. Gilbert, Ph.D.
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Comments (2) |
| Saturday, January 20, 2007 (20:57:54) - The "War on Drugs" cannot be won |
Hi. This is my first LEAP blog entry, and I look forward to vigorous discussion about our nation’s drug control policies. After spending nearly 40 years working in and around the justice system as corrections professional, criminal justice consultant and professor, I have come to view drug prohibition policies as deeply dysfunctional, extraordinarily destructive to our society, and fundamentally immoral. For me, speaking out against prohibition drug control policies has become a moral issue. This is why I joined LEAP, began to speak out again prohibition as a drug control policy and am participating in this blog.
The “War on Drugs” cannot be won. Estimates suggest that between 40%-50% of our population have used an illegal drug at least once in their lifetime. This means that somewhere between 120,000,000 and 150,000,000 American residents could have been arrested, charged and convicted of a “drug defined crime” had they been caught. The “enemies” in this war are our relatives – our sons, daughters, wives, husbands, parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. We are at war with ourselves and the war is killing or damaging the lives of more people than the illegal drugs being used.
The public stereotype of a drug user is either that of a gang-affiliated minority living in poverty or a destabilized homeless street addict. Yet, studies consistently reveal that the typical drug user is white, middle class and fully employed. They are “hidden users” who do not come to the attention of the criminal justice system. The 2-3 million drug offenders under correctional supervision – in prison, jail or under community supervision – are not representative of hidden users. Yet, the drug – crime association that prohibition advocates use to support the “War on Drug” generalizes from offender populations to all users.
The crime that surrounds illegal drugs is an artificial creation produced by our laws because they have created extraordinarily lucrative black markets in a wide array of mood altering substances to satisfy consistent demand among our citizens. The violence seen along the Mexican side of the United States border is an extreme example but it highlights the role of prohibition policies in creating both crime and violence. Drug cartels are at war with one another in a struggle for control over access to IH-35. This smuggling route runs from Monterrey to Nuevo Laredo on the Mexican side of the border and continues on the American side from Laredo, TX to Duluth, MN. It crosses every major interstate highway in the United States and is perhaps the most efficient route for drug distribution in the nation. Prohibition policies and consistent demand for illegal drugs make control of the IH-35 drug smuggling route enormously lucrative. This is what the war between Mexican drug cartels is about.
Millions of hidden users have used illegal drugs regularly for decades. They remain hidden because their buying and use patterns sharply reduce their risks of being observed by police. They use legally earned income to buy drugs. They rarely make drug buys in the open on the street preferring to make purchases discretely through intermediaries or regular dealers. Their drugs are often delivered to them. When they do buy, they often buy larger amounts than street users, and consequently buy less often than street users. Hidden users tend to store their drugs and use them intermittently overtime – much like one would consume an expensive scotch whiskey. They are neither addicted or drug dependent and are able to maintain this use pattern indefinitely provided their use pattern does not escalate beyond intermittent use. On the surface they appear to have a “drug fee” lifestyle, raising families, paying their taxes and maintaining their careers. If they do come to the attention of police, as the actor Robert Downey did a few years ago, it is largely because they have escalated their use pattern beyond intermittent use, become dependent, gone on binges, or made drug buys in the open.
Claims by advocates of prohibition that the “War on Drugs” is being won are a product of selective use of short-term fluctuations in data when long term data trends tell a very different story. By every measure, the evidence fails to support claims that we are making progress. We see just the opposite what we should see if prohibition worked. There is more use, greater availability, lower street prices, increased purity and less control over access to prohibited drugs.
Prohibition produces counterproductive harms that are far worse than drug use. No one in authority appears willing to recognize the “800 pound gorilla in the room” – drug prohibition is an ineffective drug control strategy, and is a socially destructive policy. The incarceration rates for African American males are over 4,000 per 100,000 – several times higher than the incarceration rates for Blacks in South Africa during the White apartheid regimes.
If we want to reduce illegal drug use, we must remove the black market and provide mechanisms for legalized access under a regulatory structure. In 1933, alcohol prohibition was repealed after 13 years. The impacts of prohibition were widely recognized as worse than the health and social impact of alcohol use. The repeal of prohibition alcohol required the repeal of a constitutional amendment – a much more difficult task than changing drug control laws today. With the repeal of prohibition, access to alcohol was legalized and placed under a regulatory structure to restrict access to adults and control product quality. These policy changes did not eliminate health problems related to alcohol abuse, but it did eliminate the black market in alcohol as well as the crime and violence surrounding alcohol production, distribution and sales.
Today we live with the consequences of a policy error. Drug use is a health and educational policy problem. Unfortunately, our policies view drug use as a criminal justice problem. As a result, our responses are viewed almost solely through a punitive justice lens. In the end this policy error fails to reduce drug use, to improve public safety, and devolves control over access to illegal drugs to the black market.
I look forward to your comments and questions, as well as a vigorous discussion of these issues.
Michael J. Gilbert, Ph. D.
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