The idea that drug laws cause crime doesn't fit the evidence very well.
You have many polities with harsh drug laws and enforcement with little crime, and many polities with loose drug laws and enforcement with lots of crime.
When a drug is legalized, like say marijuana, you don't see any drop-off in crime or arrests. Many people who were getting busted on marijuana charges end up getting busted on something else (often the whole reason they were busted on a drug charge is because its easier to prove or a plea bargain, but they are violent criminals).
Young low IQ men form gangs and like to participate in violent tournaments. They need little excuse to do this, and where you legalize one drug they can choose another, or hoes, or dice, or protection rackets, or who dissed who at a party or on social media. It's enlightening to actually witness trials related to why people kill each other in the ghetto. If you removed drug illegality as an excuse, which many jurisdiction have de sure or de facto, they just use some other excuse.
The main issue with drugs is that it lower IQ and inhibition in users and especially addicts. Such people are a lot more likely to commit crimes under the influence. If you legalize drugs you will get more users and more addicts, which isn't a good for crime.
The simplest way to stop crime is to demonstrate clearly to young low IQ men that:
1) They will be caught with a high degree of certainty every time they commit a crime of any kind.
2) The punishment will be very harsh and thus not worth the risk of getting caught.
If you can demonstrate this effectively then through a mixture of deterrence and incarceration you can eliminate crime, even in terrible demographic circumstances. The question is whether the stakeholders in the state of the willpower to do this.
There are high-IQ street criminals, too- and illicit drugs dealing makes for a particularly attractive place for them to employ their intelligence, notwithstanding the recklessness of the decision, which is typically made by immature young people who haven't made a serious appraisal of the long-term consequences. Yes, smart people can still make bad choices and wrong decisions. (But it's like Disney's Pinocchio: Pleasure Island. You're 15. You're poor. Wouldn't you?)
That undercuts @fp123's argument, but it's obvious that he prefers to view the situation as cut and dried. And, perhaps, using the categorical "low IQ" as a euphemism, rather than just coming right out and saying what he really means. Although even if his labeling is sincerely intended, it's a huge error to exploit IQ measurements as a criterion for public policy initiatives.
It hasn't quite become fashionable yet to question the validity of IQ scores as a measurement of "general intelligence", but I'll get out in front on that by asserting that given what's recently been learned about the limitations of the univariate model of neurotypicality, we should know better. When a sizeable number of individuals on the autistic spectrum perform two standard deviations better on the RPM test than the WISC test- and both of those tests allegedly measure the same "Spearman's g", aka "general intelligence"- that ought to tell us something.
Much of the material on IQ tests like the Weschler is more accurately tests of academic skill sets; RPM is more focused on specific proficiencies at detecting patterns using abstract spatial logic. There are no IQ tests for the acute sensitivity required to proficiently read and respond to interpersonal social cues. And a "high IQ" scoring group of Western academics would probably die before they could pick out a path through a rain forest that an indigenous child could read by the age of nine, using real-world spatial logic. Practice makes perfect, particularly under the neuroplastic conditions associated with early childhood development.
That said, to return to the topic of cannabis: I think it has a strong tendency to get in the way of learning practically any skill, particularly in the initial stages. Pot use by elementary school age and high school age kids is a bad thing, and it needs to be discouraged and prevented. Cannabis can provide creative inspiration and hone performance for (some) people who are already proficient at an intellectual, artistic, or athletic skill- but it's practically always the case that they've already achieved competence without the influence of pot. If someone gets involved with using weed regularly early on, they may never even get as far as learning the basics. This is particularly important in the case of the scholastic skills- literacy and numeracy. It has to be emphasized that without basic competence in those skills, the modern world is a very unfriendly place. And if someone is showing up in class high all the time from an early age, it isn't the fault of the school if they're unable to learn to read, write, and figure.
That's a primary reason why I think cannabis should be legalized- in order to put the market into a realm where age restrictions can be effectively enforced. Under illicit conditions, the retail trade is in the hands of members of the teenage peer group! This is the case everywhere- "gang-related" has nothing to do with it. It's a bad situation when adults find that the best way to score marijuana in a strange town is to ask a teenager.
Cannabis definitely has some drawbacks, and the harm reduction and education situation is something that needs to be worked out in conjunction with legalization. In particular, regular use at an early age gets in the way of acquiring all sorts of skills at the stage when they're most effectively learned. The SAMHSA statistics- which I trust, mostly- indicate that the group that most often uses marijuana the most frequently are males in their teen to mid-twenties years. Sometimes even younger. The vast majority of marijuana users begin in their teens, and by and large their attitudes toward it are adolescent attitudes. That's the wrong way to get acquainted with the substance. Teenagers are a population that needs to have their use reduced to the experimental or occasional basis, at most. I don't hold with the folklore that pot is harmless, just because it doesn't cause the physical impairment of alcohol. The fact that someone can be high on pot without being sloppy does not mean that their learning skills aren't impaired.
I've recently been reading literature on gangs and crime going back to the 19th century, through the early 20th century, the Alcohol Prohibition era, the mid-20th century, late 20th century, and up to today. The role of gangs in American crime- and their power, their financial influence- surged during Alcohol Prohibition, and then in the 1980s, with the street retail trade in crack cocaine.
In particular, there' no comparison between the numbers of gang members in the 1960s and 1970s and what's happened since then.
"...The 100-page 2011 тАЬNational Gang Threat AssessmentтАЭ claimed criminal gangs pose a growing threat in communities throughout the United States.
тАЬThe most notable trends for 2011 have been the overall increase in gang membership and the expansion of criminal street gangsтАЩ control of street-level drug sales and collaboration with rival gangs and other criminal organizations,тАЭ according to the report.
While there was no data related to how the economy might factor into growth in gangs, more aggressive recruiting and cultural and ethnic factors may have contributed to the increase in gang membership.
Although overall crime in the United States has continued to decline over the past three years, the relative amount of crime inflicted by gang members appears to have increased. The new FBI report claims that gangs are responsible for 48% of violent crime, on average, in most jurisdictions..."
Not just in "the ghetto", either. There are gangs in small towns across America, these days.
Many drugs have been made either outright legal or de facto legal (you can do business un-harassed in many open air drug markets today, and people wander the streets obviously high and nobody does anything). Yet gangs persist, in fact they are more common in those districts with lax laws and enforcement.
By contrast Singapore puts people to death for carrying too much pot and its got no crime at all.
An interesting thing with prohibition is it didn't spring into existence in 1920. Most of New England and NY and the Upper Midwest banned alcohol in the 1850s (it was repealed during the Civil War to raise money for the war effort).
Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s many states, counties, and localities passed various prohibition legislation long before prohibition. If you looked at a map of the US in 1905 huge swaths of the country were effectively already under prohibition, but the crime rate was low, and it was lower in the dry areas then the wet areas. Most gangs were in the big cities amongst immigrant communities, that were thoroughly "wet". Gang and criminal activity was on the rise from 1900-1920, before prohibition, and mostly in the wet areas. The murder rate increased by a factor of 600% from 1900-1920, and only 66% or so during prohibition.
I generally think that prohibition was a net negative:
1) It tried to ban a "soft" drug with deep roots in the culture
2) The ban itself was harsher then many of its supporters expected (most people thought prohibition would ban alcohol content above 3.0%, light beer level, and that it was mainly supposed to prevent binge drinking of hard liquor).
3) The enforcement was basically non-existent. There was no plan for enforcement and few resources applied to it. Local governments, especially those in the cities where people voted wet and didn't want prohibition anyway, did basically nothing. The federal response was more or less stillborn from the start for a wide variety of reasons you can read about.
4) There was a rise in crime associated with prohibition, but there was a bigger rise in crime before prohibition. In a way the prohibition era is just a continuation of the trends of immigration (both from Europe and blacks from the south) and urbanization which you would expect to increase crime rates. Before prohibition Sicilian mobsters were finding other ways to commit crime. And places with prohibition but without Sicilian mobsters seemed to go along peacefully enough.
In short, while I wouldn't endorse prohibition, I don't really consider the be all explanation for crime trends in America at the time, and one quick fix to solve it all. Nor do I think that meth or crack being illegal is the primary driver of crime today.
You want to make the US into Singapore? How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?
Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement, consider the practical differences. Singapore has 280 square miles of land area. The US has 2,959,064 square miles of land area, just in the lower 48 states.
Singapore imposes its panopticon surveillance state on a population of roughly 6 million people. The US has 335 million. Around 100 million US citizens are armed. That's a lot heavier lift than policing a postage stamp sized area of docile residents offering a social consensus of consent to a regimented existence out of the pages of A Wrinkle In Time, because Low Taxes.
"Many drugs have been made either outright legal or de facto legal (you can do business un-harassed in many open air drug markets today, and people wander the streets obviously high and nobody does anything)."
That is not "legal."
Legal doesn't mean "we have criminalization statutes, but they're unenforceable, which means that we've handed over a de facto monopoly to career criminals while reserving enforcement to local whims, political posturing, and corruption."
Legal means "we have regulated the supply and marketing of the commodity for purity and safety, and the trade is in the hands of licensed and accountable taxpayers" and "we are allowing medical professionals to do their jobs as they see fit, including allowing the prescription of controlled substances for addiction maintenance while maintaining centralized supervision of the practice in order to prevent diversion through patient abuses like doctor shopping and physician abuses like prescription profiteering." You know, the dereliction of enforcement that allowed the legal opioid problem to get out of hand so badly in the 1990s, because the Federal government had no central database of prescriptions and providers of DEA Schedule II "controlled substances." (I don't blame the DEA for that particular problem, incidentally; they tried to get the funding for an effective centralized Federal prescription drug monitoring program, but the request was shot down in Congressional committee hearings.)
"Yet gangs persist"
The present-day drugs market is similar to the failed experiment of Federal alcohol Prohibition, only exponentially worse. Criminal gangs have been provided a de facto monopoly over the supply chain for the vast majority of the forbidden substances in the country. Americans were spending more on illicit drugs than they spent on food 40 years ago, and if that situation has changed, it's only because food has become more expensive, while the forbidden substances have become cheaper. The illicit drugs industry became a cornerstone of the economy in many parts of the country- not just in the inner city neighborhoods, but in rust belt towns and rural regions from coast to coast.
"they [the gangs] are more common in those districts with lax laws and enforcement."
You are talking through your hat with unsupported- and unsupportable- claims. Ignoring the history of gang expansion in the US, which began in the 1980s, not just with "the cartels" in the 2010s. "The gangs" are the reason that the state of California expanded its prison system to hold a 300% increase in the prison population in the late 1980s and 1990s. It didn't put out the fire. It dumped gasoline on it.
And now, 40 years later- unlike alcohol Prohibition, which only required 14 years to get called off- Gangland has gone dynastic. Children who grew up with their fathers in prison, recruited into gang life. And the children of those children. Recruited into gang life, fueled by the de facto monopoly over a trade that runs to the tens of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, the West Coast and Sun Belt are swamped with addict populations that are 2nd and 3rd-order impacts of an opioid epidemic that began 30 years ago in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. And while in the 1960s, gangs were confined to a half-dozen US cities, now there are chapters from coast to coast, in places like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Omaha, Nebraska.
Are those gangs going to go away, as long as they've been granted a de facto monopoly over the illegal drugs trade? Did they go away during alcohol Prohibition? Of course not. They go into prison, they get more organized, and they go back on the streets.
I have a hunch about the final solution you have in mind to take care of that problem. You already alluded to it with your praise for "crime-free" (unless you count money laundering) Singapore. I prefer a more modest set of legal reforms.
Your potted history of the alcohol Prohibition era is ludicrous. Alcohol Prohibition produced a windfall for organized crime that protection rackets and gambling could never match. And you go on to post wooden-headed nonsense like this, with your bare face hanging out:
"...places with prohibition but without Sicilian mobsters seemed to go along peacefully enough."
That statement right there shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. Shotgun dry law enforcement killed more than 1200 people in raids across the country over the course of the mid-1920s. One of the main paramilitary enforcement auxiliaries of the Prohibition effort in rural areas was the Ku Klux Klan. Until the Grand Dragon of Indiana was convicted of the rape and murder of a young girl, that is, and the Klan lost its social clout and respectability as purity crusaders.
You've also ignored that elephant in the room, Corruption. The topic that takes up so many pages in Okrent's book Last Call, and McGirr's book The War On Alcohol. The corruption that's persisted and spiraled out of control during the Drug War, as well:
I wouldn't be surprised if you ignored any mention of those links in any reply you might offer. After all, they're so inconvenient to your argument.
But the facts are the facts. The enormous amount of easy money in the all-cash business of illegal drugs is an attractive nuisance of staggering proportions that has ensnared top-ranking officers and entire units of the country's most elite law enforcement divisions. How are poor people supposed to behave any better?
"How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?"
1) Because there is more to Singapore then crime.
2) Because it's on the other side of the planet and I'm not a citizen, nor are any in my family. Because it's not clear we could get jobs there.
"Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement"
Yes, people who visit Singapore routinely refer to it as a totalitarian hellhole. It's like they are in North Korea.
Myself, I enjoyed my visit. You should get out more.
"Singapore has 280 square miles of land area."
Singapore is a city. The appropriate comparison for Singapore would be large American cities. However, we could basically substitute any Asian country including big ones like Japan. Tough drug laws and criminal justice systems, lack of crime.
"you know, the dereliction of enforcement that allowed the legal opioid problem to get out of hand so badly in the 1990s,"
You are all over the place here dude. Opioids were legal and regulated like you want and they became a total mess. Is the problem legality or illegality? You can't seem to make up your mind here. Except that somehow an exactly perfect system should have done exactly the right thing, and you call me utopian.
What we learned is that doctors will push drugs that are bad for people if they have an incentive and that they can create their own demand (just like drug dealers). In fact it was worse because lots of people with better sense then to deal with drug dealers would trust their doctors.
If you think legal opioids were a mess I don't see how legal meth is going to go down any easier for you. The same dynamic will go down.
I expect basically every attempt to legalize drugs to go down the way opioids did, but worse the worse the drug is.
"Shotgun dry law enforcement killed more than 1200 people in raids across the country over the course of the mid-1920s."
Like police killings today, this is dramatically less then the # of people being murdered during the same time.
Total spending on prohibition enforcement in 1923 amounted under $9,000,000 in 2023 adjusted dollars. This amounted to $0.08 per person in 2023 dollars using the 1923 population. 0.0006% of GDP. This was not a serious attempt.
But more importantly I'm asking a simple question. Given that the period from the late 1800s until 1920 saw some parts of the country go dry and some stay wet, shouldn't we see a difference in crime rates between them? Shouldn't the dry areas have seen a huge increase in crime during this era? Shouldn't the crime in wet areas outperform them? This is as closed to a randomized trial as we can get.
I don't like prohibition because I think it was the wrong law and it failed most in the places that never wanted it in the first place. But I don't think drug prohibition is the reason for crime, and if you legalized every drug I would still expect to see crime (perhaps worse since addicts are more prone to criminality).
Your tourist endorsement of the Singapore regime of perpetual panopticon surveillance is duly noted. Singapore fans would probably embrace North Korea, too, if it were Rich. In that regard, I'm also definitely noting much more sympathy for the PRC system than ever before.
"You are all over the place here dude. Opioids were legal and regulated like you want and they became a total mess. Is the problem legality or illegality? You can't seem to make up your mind here. Except that somehow an exactly perfect system should have done exactly the right thing, and you call me utopian."
No, you've failed to comprehend my comment, and you're supplying your own misreading of its inferences.
Opioids (excepting heroin- a decision of caprice rather than rational justification) were- and still are- legal substances intended to be controlled by prescription. That control failed, because the DEA was tasked to emphasize raiding marijuana plantations over providing Federal supervision of the regulation of those substances- that control was left to the individual States!
I'm still looking into the particulars of the origin and development of the centralized Federal database- but the important thing to note is that the participation of the States was voluntary! As recently as the mid-2010s, the majority of the 50 States had not signed on to compliance with it! (My most recent reading indicated that there were still two holdouts.) Some of the states that had the least accountability on controlled substance prescriptions and pharmacy stocks were the states with the most draconian laws against illicit drugs. In those states, doctor shopping, multiple prescriptions, and script-doc profiteering became an industry overnight. (Meanwhile, California, which had much more liberal attitudes toward marijuana, had very tight accountability controls- and a low rate of Schedule II prescribed substance diversion and use.)
The DEA tried to tighten controls to obviate the problem of diversion, but the Congressional committee responsible for funding that effort refused to fund it adequately.
So the problem of inconsistency you're noticing isn't my fault; it's the fault of lawmakers with their heads up their ass. And that problem cuts in more than one way.
The origin of the prohibition of addiction maintenance goes back 100 years, to Supreme Court decisions that forbade physicians prescription for that purpose. The individual cases that led to that decision do appear to have involved profiteering "script docs"- but the blanket ban on allowing ANY physician to prescribe for addiction maintenance went too far, and that's what inaugurated the lucrative illicit marketplace for opioids in the US. ALL of that demand was driven from the doctor's offices into the streets.
The problem of slipshod enforcement of Schedule II prescription substances began in the aftermath of the DEA Schedule system- a Federal regulatory regime where enforcement was left entirely to the whims of the States. It was only a matter of time before that system was exploited- and that time came when the Sacklers- the original innovators in the mass-market advertising of prescription drugs (now widely accepted in TV ads)- applied their sales expertise to their newly ordained product, Oxycontin. Oxycontin became so ubiquitously prescribed- and, crucially, so easily diverted- that in only a few years, it generated an opioid problem that dwarfed the heroin market.
And then, some time in the 2010s, with the horse having already left the barn and millions of addicts having been generated, the Feds decided to crack down on opioid prescriptions. And since the rule against addiction maintenance still applied, all of those addicts were consigned to the heroin market- and, following the Gresham's Law analog that applies to illicit drug markets, eventually to fentanyl (which, in due time, is likely to be followed by carfentanil, and similarly superpotent opioid analogs...)
Yes, I'm in favor of prescription controls over opioids, and tight accountability over prescriptions. But I'm also in favor of addiction maintenance by qualified professionals who provide regulated supplies to confirmed addicts- not just to anyone who shows up claiming that they have a back sprain.
That isn't being "all over the place." I'm advocating rational controls over some particularly powerful substances in line with the goals of harm reduction. The inconsistency is to be found in the insistence on over-controlling substances in a punitive moralist attempt to punish addicts, coupled with a history of patchwork lax enforcement and non-enforcement of the provisions intended to prevent profiteering and diversion.
That history isn't just a matter of less than perfect enforcement of the rules. It's studied negligence by institutional power, disdaining the practical necessity of stabilizing addicts in one breath while deferring to a paradigm that maximizes the profits of Big Pharma through enabling mass-marketing campaigns, shilling, and physician rewards for maximizing prescription on the other.
If you think Singapore is North Korea your basically off your rocker.
I like freedom. Getting mugged is the opposite of freedom. Having huge portions of cities being considered places you can't go isn't freedom. You can ride the subway in Singapore and not live in terror. Anarcho-tyranny is not freedom.
And being a drug addict is not freedom, its being ensalved to a drug.
"because the DEA was tasked to emphasize raiding marijuana plantation"
This is getting pathetic.
I worked in the drug insurance industry. And I worked on finding pharmacy fraud. Marijuana had ZERO to do with it. People were making money and consumer were happy (for a time). Nobody asked questions until so many bodies piled up that political hill could be made out of it.
Pharmacy fraud is still ultra rampant in everything that isn't opioids because they don't care how much money the government loses as long as nobody is calling their senator because their husband died.
And it will go exactly the same way with the next addictive drug we let people sell legally.
"it's the fault of lawmakers with their heads up their ass."
They always have their heads up their ass! Have you met a lawmaker? A regulator? YOU CAN NOT TRUST THEM TO DO ANYTHING COMPLICATED OR SUBTLE OR PREDICT THE FUTURE IN ANY WAY OR CARE ABOUT ANYONE! That's why we write simple laws that are hard to loophole...like that dangerous addictive drugs are illegal.
You're the one who brought up North Korea. If only North Korea was wealthy, it would resemble Singapore more than it does the US.
You obviously prefer to extract stray statements out of context in preference to centering an argument on the issue content (fwiw, I have zero interest in being drawn into an off-topic exchange on the merits of Singapore vs. the DPRK). You also moan nonsensical takes like "this is getting pathetic" to yourself, as if you were mounting a germane argument.
fwiw, this really did happen in the year 2000, just as the Oxy epidemic was getting out of hand:
"I worked in the drug insurance industry. And I worked on finding pharmacy fraud...[deleted as irrelevant and superfluous] People were making money and consumer were happy (for a time). Nobody asked questions until so many bodies piled up that political hill could be made out of it."
I'm not sure what "political hill" is. I'm also not sure that you had any business working to find pharmacy fraud, if you're going to be that cynical about it.
"Pharmacy fraud is still ultra rampant in everything that isn't opioids because they don't care how much money the government loses as long as nobody is calling their senator because their husband died."
That doesn't really sound like the sort of pharmacy fraud that I've been referring to. But are you ever cynical. Although when it comes to the War on Drugs, you continue to be a...well, you don't really sound like a convinced idealist on that, either. You're more like a terminally cynical apologist for Power, exercised on behalf of punitive moralism. As long as it doesn't hit too close to home. As long as it focuses on the "low IQ" menace.
"They always have their heads up their ass! Have you met a lawmaker? A regulator? YOU CAN NOT TRUST THEM TO DO ANYTHING COMPLICATED OR SUBTLE OR PREDICT THE FUTURE IN ANY WAY OR CARE ABOUT ANYONE!"
Whoa.
It's interesting to hear that vote of utter and complete lack of faith in government's ability to do anything right. Anything other than punish with draconian prohibitions, that is, which is when somehow everything suddenly works so much more efficiently:
"That's why we write simple laws that are hard to loophole [sic]...like that dangerous addictive drugs are illegal."
LOL!!! You actually wrote that garbage!!!
@fp123...even given the recent over-tightening of restrictions on opioid prescriptions, they're still some of the most heavily prescribed substances in existence. Hydrocodone, oxycodone's slightly less powerful cousin, is the 16th most heavily prescribed drug (of any kind) in the US:
You want a ban on that? If you want a ban on all "dangerous addictive drugs", that's what you support. Because that's what a "simple law" would prohibit. Along with a complete ban on morphine, Dilaudid, Demerol, Methadone, buprenorphine, Tramadol, Oxycodone (still available with prescription), fentanyl (still available with prescription)...to say nothing of the benzodiazepines, which produce a worse physical dependency than opioids when used daily for extended periods of time; or the psychostimulants like amphetamines and methylphenidate, which also qualify as addictive substances, although they aren't nearly as lethally dangerous as the opioids or the benzos; and the SSRI medications, which can produce such seriously mind-bending psychic withdrawal symptoms on discontinuance that it's now admitted that many long-time SSRI users who wish to get off of them require a slow tapering off period of a year or more.
You sound like the White Queen, from Alice In Wonderland: the only thing a government can possibly accomplish is "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!!!"
But, well, you have a link to pictures of some bootleg meth users who were criminalized, pushed into a corner and poked with sticks, after consuming unregulated and poisonous products made with a witches brew of bootleg chemicals like hydriotic acid, muriatic acid, iodine, mercury chrloride, P-2-P, and lye. So, case closed, according to that weighty logic:
"I really do not think something that does this should be legal."
On that we're agreed: I don't think that poisonous bootleg meth should be legal, either. Fortunately the methamphetamine sold in American pharmacies doesn't have those problems. Because its manufacture is regulated by the FDA, as an approved Schedule II drug that's legal by prescription. A fact that I've already mentioned, that you've evidently overlooked.
fine to stop discussing. your equivalence talk just makes me think your deranged and ideological. please talk to some people from both places.
"You want a ban on that?"
I don't think Oxycontin ever should have been sold to people that weren't chemo patients or had back surgery. The Sackler's convinced everyone that "pain" was under diagnosed and under treated, and they were able to convince people because it just happened that everyone's incentives were to do so. Doctor's were given "discretion" to determine what people needed outside of those clear cases, and it turned out they needed whatever made the doctors money. Insurance was bought off with manufacturer rebates. Patients obviously liked how it made them feel.
I could say a lot of the same about SSRIs. Way more people are allowed on them in the first place than should be. All the financial incentives are the same.
The basic problem is that these medicines should only be used in extreme medical cases, but it was decided everyone with an achy shoulder or a bad thought should get whatever they want. We gave doctors "discretion" and they always exercise discretion in the direction of their pocketbook.
That's what I think will happen with any drug that makes people feel good. The patients will want it. The doctors, manufacturers, and insurance companies can be bought off with government insurance money. In general I think the entire incentive structure that makes it profitable for all these parties to engage in this needs to be attacked. As long as people make money there will only be pushback against "discretion" after the bodies pile up.
"I don't think that poisonous bootleg meth should be legal, either"
So you're a PROHIBITIONIST. Bootleg meth has willing suppliers and willing buyers. And you're off prohibiting it, you puritan. Don't you know that if you make things people want illegal they will turn to crime and gang wars.
Once you've decided that it's GOOD to make certain drugs illegal we are just arguing over what those drugs are and what the regulations should be. And unless your answer is "everything legal and no regulations" then there is going to be an incentive for an illegal drug trade of some kind. The question is what to do about it.
"I don't think Oxycontin ever should have been sold to people that weren't chemo patients or had back surgery."
Chemically, Oxycontin is merely time-released oxycodone- which was prescribed for decades for acute pain relief as Percodan, typically in 5mg amounts. It's only marginally more powerful than hydrocodone- 20%-50% more powerful. Hydrocodone is Vicodin- the more common mainstay for acute pain problems like wisdom tooth extraction, back sprain, and shingles outbreak. As with Percodan, 5-10mg is typically all most people require for those pain conditions.
The problem that launched the Oxy epidemic was not related to any sinister property of oxycodone, per se. It's due to the fact that it was compounded for extended release, often in amounts as large as 40mg, 80mg, or even 120mg. And all users had to do to get the instant release was to chew them!
5-10mg of oxy makes for a good pain reliever. When chewed for fast release, 40mg of oxy compares favorably with a bag of street heroin.
"The Sackler's convinced everyone that "pain" was under diagnosed and under treated, and they were able to convince people because it just happened that everyone's incentives were to do so."
Not "everyone's incentives." The real problem there isn't any particular drug- it's the "marketing innovations" of the Sacklers, which go back to the 1950s, when old man Sackler got the brainstorm that prescription pharmaceuticals could be marketed just like soda pop, by using full-page ads in magazines and commission-sales pitches to physicians. I think this was an idea gone horribly wrong. But the answer is not to ban the drugs- it's to ban the commercialization, advertising, and commission sales pitch techniques. And the doctors need to get a lot more education about medications- particularly about pain and addiction medicine.
"Doctor's were given "discretion" to determine what people needed outside of those clear cases, and it turned out they needed whatever made the doctors money."
Many of the doctors were sincerely misled- they trusted the sales people, and the threadbare, slipshod studies that provided the basis of the sales hype for Oxy. The doctors should have had more skepticism, simply due to the amounts of opiods compounded in each pill. But pain, addiction, and pharmaceutical side effects have been given such short shrift in the curricula of medical schools that the doctors were naifs. (Except for the unethical ones.)
There are no direct kickbacks to physicians from every prescription that they write. But pharma companies have been known to reward physicians who prescribe brand-name products beyond a given level with bonuses all the time. That's another practice that needs to be banned. But it isn't the fault of any particular drug.
Scrip docs make their money as private practitioners catering to one particular clientele (like "pain patients") with cash visits, in and out, as fast as possible, like an assembly line. It's an unethical practice that would have easily been detected if a nationwide database of accountability had been in place in the 1990s and 2000s. The fact that it wasn't is not a failure of regulation- it's a failure of un-regulation. A bug in the regulatory scheme, not a feature. And overcompensating by choking off supplies after the damage has been done is not an evidence-based response; it's political posturing.
"Insurance was bought off with manufacturer rebates."
This is more like a problem of the US health care system in general. Notwithstanding my support for private markets for consumer products, pharma is different: I'm not averse to the notion of nationalizing pharmaceutical manufacture. Drugs are not soda pop, or televisions, or shampoo. They're generic chemicals, identical except for occasional minor changes in compounding. We should consider a public option for their manufacture. We definitely don't need ads for them on TV.
"Patients obviously liked how it made them feel."
Yes, but that sometimes came as a surprise; the way Oxy (and fentanyl) got marketed in the 1990s is approximately as deceptive as the way opioid-based patent medicines were marketed, prior to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Read the book Dopesick. I've read hundreds of books on drugs, but that book had me staring at the ceiling all night after I read it. Read the book Dreamland, too- it isn't quite as harrowing, but it's a telling account of what happens when powerful substances with supplies that are supposed to be controlled and accountable slip the leash, due to a complete failure to effectively implement a regulatory system.
In my opinion, the subtext for that failure was Respectability and Prestige Power (including campaign donations.) Congress failed to take the DEA seriously, because they couldn't quite comprehend the notion that opioids manufactured and sold by their Big Pharma donors and lobbyist buddies could actually be as harmful as the opioids sold by "the gangs" on the illicit street market.
After all, like Peter Schweizer says, the real corruption in Washington isn't what's illegal- it's about what IS legal. Surely you've read Roger Morris' 1996 book Partners In Power...remember the three chapters entitled "Washington I/II/III"? Here- refresh your memory with this free download: https://archive.org/details/partnersinpowerc0000morr_c3r1
The Oxy epidemic- and its aftermath- isn't the fault of any particular chemical compound. Opiods- including fentanyl and oxycodone- continue to be the legitimate mainstay of pain management medicine. Because they're the most effective class of compounds, for many pain sufferers.
Yes, I'm in favor of prohibiting some substances. And tightly regulating others- that process that you seem to regard as a corrupt feature of government, rather than a process with some bugs. However, I think that civil confiscation of unsafe products is typically a more practical solution than getting the criminal courts involved.
"Bootleg meth has willing suppliers and willing buyers."
I've already told you twice: amphetamines- including methampetamines- are LEGALLY REGULATED. No one would buy the bootleg garbage if they could get a pure supply. Come on, this is basic. But we're dealing with a medical-legal regime that won't even attempt to experiment with amphetamine maintenance for meth addicts- not even a program like methadone maintenance, where users would show up for a daily dose of oral medication. Many of those folks have undiagnosed ADD (which is a real ailment, fwiw.) But if someone is criminalized prior to diagnosis, they're sunk. They're "meth freaks."
I'd be a lot more dubious about Schedule II amphetamine prescription- something like 13 million Americans have an amphetamine or methylphenidate script- if it was driving large numbers of people on to the street to bang 100mg loads of crystal ten times a day. But it isn't a problem the way over-prescribed Oxy was. Because it isn't the same substance. Dependency and ill health effects from amphetamine pills are a personal liability- the warning signs of overuse need to be heeded. But it isn't a public health menace. Whether over-prescribed or not, people aren't dropping dead left and right from their Adderall prescriptions. There isn't an epidemic of doctor shopping and wholesale diversion of industrial quantities to the street market so that people can gobble/snort/shoot mass quantities of amphetamine pills to cope with an escalating tolerance and an intensifying addiction.
The basis of my drug policy positions is that I follow the evidence.
"Once you've decided that it's GOOD to make certain drugs illegal we are just arguing over what those drugs are and what the regulations should be."
Well, yeah. But unlike myself, you've just spent half of your post content arguing that regulatory controls are corrupt and ineffective, and that the only answer should be "simple laws, with no loopholes" to work as blanket prohibitions over a wide array of substances, including marijuana, a nontoxic herb that's less poisonous than many of the products in stock on a kitchen spice rack.
Which is to say, you're all over the place on this.
So am I- but I'm basing the differences in my policies on rational assessment of harm to public health and safety. Whereas you're still thrashing around like the White Queen from Alice In Wonderland.
Hopefully, my last post cleared up your confusion in regard to my position on the proper regime for controlling opioid prescription.
Now, on to another point:
"If you think legal opioids were a mess I don't see how legal meth is going to go down any easier for you. The same dynamic will go down."
Meth (aka methamphetamine aka Desoxyn) is already legal. Schedule II*. What, nobody told you? The statistics on how many legal meth prescriptions are written annually have proved resistant to my inquiries. But it's well-known that as a class, the amounts of prescribed amphetamines are in the hundreds of millions annually- they're almost as common as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Fortunately, there's little evidence of a public health problem resulting from that situation. Notwithstanding the fact that amphetamine pills aren't exactly free of harm or addiction liability, their widespread prescription in recent decades hasn't led to the disastrous effects of the Oxycontin epidemic. However, if the Drug Warriors want another illicit street drug disaster on their hands, they'd get one soon enough if they were to decide to choke off the prescription of amphetamines the way they did prescription opioids.
It's worth noting that the last time the Federal government took measures to drastically limit the prescription of amphetamines in the early 1970s, the user demand swiftly shifted over to another product that was coincidentally just arriving on the heels of the burgeoning nationwide retail marijuana market: cocaine. This time around, the illicitly sourced methamphetamine market is much more mature. So I'd anticipate that the two commodities would have to fight it out for the newly expanded street demand. The increase in the consumer base resulting from a crackdown on amphetamine prescriptions would almost certainly be massive, however.
Meanwhile, the current medical-legal regime in the US is even more rigidly opposed to providing a daily regime of oral amphetamine maintenance for people with meth problems than it is to providing controlled amounts of opiods to opioid addicts. Go figure.
[ *Cocaine and fentanyl are also DEA Schedule II controlled substances, fwiw. ]
You really don't see a connection between the war on drugs and crime?
That's hard to believe. Are you familiar with the deeds of drug cartels and gangs?
The idea that drug laws cause crime doesn't fit the evidence very well.
You have many polities with harsh drug laws and enforcement with little crime, and many polities with loose drug laws and enforcement with lots of crime.
When a drug is legalized, like say marijuana, you don't see any drop-off in crime or arrests. Many people who were getting busted on marijuana charges end up getting busted on something else (often the whole reason they were busted on a drug charge is because its easier to prove or a plea bargain, but they are violent criminals).
Young low IQ men form gangs and like to participate in violent tournaments. They need little excuse to do this, and where you legalize one drug they can choose another, or hoes, or dice, or protection rackets, or who dissed who at a party or on social media. It's enlightening to actually witness trials related to why people kill each other in the ghetto. If you removed drug illegality as an excuse, which many jurisdiction have de sure or de facto, they just use some other excuse.
The main issue with drugs is that it lower IQ and inhibition in users and especially addicts. Such people are a lot more likely to commit crimes under the influence. If you legalize drugs you will get more users and more addicts, which isn't a good for crime.
The simplest way to stop crime is to demonstrate clearly to young low IQ men that:
1) They will be caught with a high degree of certainty every time they commit a crime of any kind.
2) The punishment will be very harsh and thus not worth the risk of getting caught.
If you can demonstrate this effectively then through a mixture of deterrence and incarceration you can eliminate crime, even in terrible demographic circumstances. The question is whether the stakeholders in the state of the willpower to do this.
Can we please apply your theory to high IQ white-collar criminals too?
There are high-IQ street criminals, too- and illicit drugs dealing makes for a particularly attractive place for them to employ their intelligence, notwithstanding the recklessness of the decision, which is typically made by immature young people who haven't made a serious appraisal of the long-term consequences. Yes, smart people can still make bad choices and wrong decisions. (But it's like Disney's Pinocchio: Pleasure Island. You're 15. You're poor. Wouldn't you?)
That undercuts @fp123's argument, but it's obvious that he prefers to view the situation as cut and dried. And, perhaps, using the categorical "low IQ" as a euphemism, rather than just coming right out and saying what he really means. Although even if his labeling is sincerely intended, it's a huge error to exploit IQ measurements as a criterion for public policy initiatives.
It hasn't quite become fashionable yet to question the validity of IQ scores as a measurement of "general intelligence", but I'll get out in front on that by asserting that given what's recently been learned about the limitations of the univariate model of neurotypicality, we should know better. When a sizeable number of individuals on the autistic spectrum perform two standard deviations better on the RPM test than the WISC test- and both of those tests allegedly measure the same "Spearman's g", aka "general intelligence"- that ought to tell us something.
Much of the material on IQ tests like the Weschler is more accurately tests of academic skill sets; RPM is more focused on specific proficiencies at detecting patterns using abstract spatial logic. There are no IQ tests for the acute sensitivity required to proficiently read and respond to interpersonal social cues. And a "high IQ" scoring group of Western academics would probably die before they could pick out a path through a rain forest that an indigenous child could read by the age of nine, using real-world spatial logic. Practice makes perfect, particularly under the neuroplastic conditions associated with early childhood development.
That said, to return to the topic of cannabis: I think it has a strong tendency to get in the way of learning practically any skill, particularly in the initial stages. Pot use by elementary school age and high school age kids is a bad thing, and it needs to be discouraged and prevented. Cannabis can provide creative inspiration and hone performance for (some) people who are already proficient at an intellectual, artistic, or athletic skill- but it's practically always the case that they've already achieved competence without the influence of pot. If someone gets involved with using weed regularly early on, they may never even get as far as learning the basics. This is particularly important in the case of the scholastic skills- literacy and numeracy. It has to be emphasized that without basic competence in those skills, the modern world is a very unfriendly place. And if someone is showing up in class high all the time from an early age, it isn't the fault of the school if they're unable to learn to read, write, and figure.
That's a primary reason why I think cannabis should be legalized- in order to put the market into a realm where age restrictions can be effectively enforced. Under illicit conditions, the retail trade is in the hands of members of the teenage peer group! This is the case everywhere- "gang-related" has nothing to do with it. It's a bad situation when adults find that the best way to score marijuana in a strange town is to ask a teenager.
Cannabis definitely has some drawbacks, and the harm reduction and education situation is something that needs to be worked out in conjunction with legalization. In particular, regular use at an early age gets in the way of acquiring all sorts of skills at the stage when they're most effectively learned. The SAMHSA statistics- which I trust, mostly- indicate that the group that most often uses marijuana the most frequently are males in their teen to mid-twenties years. Sometimes even younger. The vast majority of marijuana users begin in their teens, and by and large their attitudes toward it are adolescent attitudes. That's the wrong way to get acquainted with the substance. Teenagers are a population that needs to have their use reduced to the experimental or occasional basis, at most. I don't hold with the folklore that pot is harmless, just because it doesn't cause the physical impairment of alcohol. The fact that someone can be high on pot without being sloppy does not mean that their learning skills aren't impaired.
You sound like you're talking through your hat.
I've recently been reading literature on gangs and crime going back to the 19th century, through the early 20th century, the Alcohol Prohibition era, the mid-20th century, late 20th century, and up to today. The role of gangs in American crime- and their power, their financial influence- surged during Alcohol Prohibition, and then in the 1980s, with the street retail trade in crack cocaine.
In particular, there' no comparison between the numbers of gang members in the 1960s and 1970s and what's happened since then.
In 2011, the FBI estimated that there are 33,000 gang chapters, and 1.4 million gang members. https://www.cnn.com/2011/10/21/justice/gang-membership-increase/index.html
"...The 100-page 2011 тАЬNational Gang Threat AssessmentтАЭ claimed criminal gangs pose a growing threat in communities throughout the United States.
тАЬThe most notable trends for 2011 have been the overall increase in gang membership and the expansion of criminal street gangsтАЩ control of street-level drug sales and collaboration with rival gangs and other criminal organizations,тАЭ according to the report.
While there was no data related to how the economy might factor into growth in gangs, more aggressive recruiting and cultural and ethnic factors may have contributed to the increase in gang membership.
Although overall crime in the United States has continued to decline over the past three years, the relative amount of crime inflicted by gang members appears to have increased. The new FBI report claims that gangs are responsible for 48% of violent crime, on average, in most jurisdictions..."
Not just in "the ghetto", either. There are gangs in small towns across America, these days.
There 200,000 gang members in prison alone. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/using-restrictive-housing-manage-gangs-us-prisons
Many drugs have been made either outright legal or de facto legal (you can do business un-harassed in many open air drug markets today, and people wander the streets obviously high and nobody does anything). Yet gangs persist, in fact they are more common in those districts with lax laws and enforcement.
By contrast Singapore puts people to death for carrying too much pot and its got no crime at all.
An interesting thing with prohibition is it didn't spring into existence in 1920. Most of New England and NY and the Upper Midwest banned alcohol in the 1850s (it was repealed during the Civil War to raise money for the war effort).
Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s many states, counties, and localities passed various prohibition legislation long before prohibition. If you looked at a map of the US in 1905 huge swaths of the country were effectively already under prohibition, but the crime rate was low, and it was lower in the dry areas then the wet areas. Most gangs were in the big cities amongst immigrant communities, that were thoroughly "wet". Gang and criminal activity was on the rise from 1900-1920, before prohibition, and mostly in the wet areas. The murder rate increased by a factor of 600% from 1900-1920, and only 66% or so during prohibition.
I generally think that prohibition was a net negative:
1) It tried to ban a "soft" drug with deep roots in the culture
2) The ban itself was harsher then many of its supporters expected (most people thought prohibition would ban alcohol content above 3.0%, light beer level, and that it was mainly supposed to prevent binge drinking of hard liquor).
3) The enforcement was basically non-existent. There was no plan for enforcement and few resources applied to it. Local governments, especially those in the cities where people voted wet and didn't want prohibition anyway, did basically nothing. The federal response was more or less stillborn from the start for a wide variety of reasons you can read about.
4) There was a rise in crime associated with prohibition, but there was a bigger rise in crime before prohibition. In a way the prohibition era is just a continuation of the trends of immigration (both from Europe and blacks from the south) and urbanization which you would expect to increase crime rates. Before prohibition Sicilian mobsters were finding other ways to commit crime. And places with prohibition but without Sicilian mobsters seemed to go along peacefully enough.
In short, while I wouldn't endorse prohibition, I don't really consider the be all explanation for crime trends in America at the time, and one quick fix to solve it all. Nor do I think that meth or crack being illegal is the primary driver of crime today.
You want to make the US into Singapore? How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?
Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement, consider the practical differences. Singapore has 280 square miles of land area. The US has 2,959,064 square miles of land area, just in the lower 48 states.
Singapore imposes its panopticon surveillance state on a population of roughly 6 million people. The US has 335 million. Around 100 million US citizens are armed. That's a lot heavier lift than policing a postage stamp sized area of docile residents offering a social consensus of consent to a regimented existence out of the pages of A Wrinkle In Time, because Low Taxes.
"Many drugs have been made either outright legal or de facto legal (you can do business un-harassed in many open air drug markets today, and people wander the streets obviously high and nobody does anything)."
That is not "legal."
Legal doesn't mean "we have criminalization statutes, but they're unenforceable, which means that we've handed over a de facto monopoly to career criminals while reserving enforcement to local whims, political posturing, and corruption."
Legal means "we have regulated the supply and marketing of the commodity for purity and safety, and the trade is in the hands of licensed and accountable taxpayers" and "we are allowing medical professionals to do their jobs as they see fit, including allowing the prescription of controlled substances for addiction maintenance while maintaining centralized supervision of the practice in order to prevent diversion through patient abuses like doctor shopping and physician abuses like prescription profiteering." You know, the dereliction of enforcement that allowed the legal opioid problem to get out of hand so badly in the 1990s, because the Federal government had no central database of prescriptions and providers of DEA Schedule II "controlled substances." (I don't blame the DEA for that particular problem, incidentally; they tried to get the funding for an effective centralized Federal prescription drug monitoring program, but the request was shot down in Congressional committee hearings.)
"Yet gangs persist"
The present-day drugs market is similar to the failed experiment of Federal alcohol Prohibition, only exponentially worse. Criminal gangs have been provided a de facto monopoly over the supply chain for the vast majority of the forbidden substances in the country. Americans were spending more on illicit drugs than they spent on food 40 years ago, and if that situation has changed, it's only because food has become more expensive, while the forbidden substances have become cheaper. The illicit drugs industry became a cornerstone of the economy in many parts of the country- not just in the inner city neighborhoods, but in rust belt towns and rural regions from coast to coast.
"they [the gangs] are more common in those districts with lax laws and enforcement."
You are talking through your hat with unsupported- and unsupportable- claims. Ignoring the history of gang expansion in the US, which began in the 1980s, not just with "the cartels" in the 2010s. "The gangs" are the reason that the state of California expanded its prison system to hold a 300% increase in the prison population in the late 1980s and 1990s. It didn't put out the fire. It dumped gasoline on it.
And now, 40 years later- unlike alcohol Prohibition, which only required 14 years to get called off- Gangland has gone dynastic. Children who grew up with their fathers in prison, recruited into gang life. And the children of those children. Recruited into gang life, fueled by the de facto monopoly over a trade that runs to the tens of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, the West Coast and Sun Belt are swamped with addict populations that are 2nd and 3rd-order impacts of an opioid epidemic that began 30 years ago in Appalachia and the Rust Belt. And while in the 1960s, gangs were confined to a half-dozen US cities, now there are chapters from coast to coast, in places like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Omaha, Nebraska.
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/03/not-just-a-city-problem-gang-activity-increases-in-harrisburgs-suburbs.html
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/03/us/us-marshals-anti-gang-operation-omaha-arrests-nebraska/index.html
Are those gangs going to go away, as long as they've been granted a de facto monopoly over the illegal drugs trade? Did they go away during alcohol Prohibition? Of course not. They go into prison, they get more organized, and they go back on the streets.
I have a hunch about the final solution you have in mind to take care of that problem. You already alluded to it with your praise for "crime-free" (unless you count money laundering) Singapore. I prefer a more modest set of legal reforms.
Your potted history of the alcohol Prohibition era is ludicrous. Alcohol Prohibition produced a windfall for organized crime that protection rackets and gambling could never match. And you go on to post wooden-headed nonsense like this, with your bare face hanging out:
"...places with prohibition but without Sicilian mobsters seemed to go along peacefully enough."
That statement right there shows that you have no idea what you're talking about. Shotgun dry law enforcement killed more than 1200 people in raids across the country over the course of the mid-1920s. One of the main paramilitary enforcement auxiliaries of the Prohibition effort in rural areas was the Ku Klux Klan. Until the Grand Dragon of Indiana was convicted of the rape and murder of a young girl, that is, and the Klan lost its social clout and respectability as purity crusaders.
https://www.history.com/news/kkk-terror-during-prohibition
https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/the-kkk-supported-prohibition/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/murder-wasnt-very-pretty-the-rise-and-fall-of-dc-stephenson-18935042/
You've also ignored that elephant in the room, Corruption. The topic that takes up so many pages in Okrent's book Last Call, and McGirr's book The War On Alcohol. The corruption that's persisted and spiraled out of control during the Drug War, as well:
https://stopthedrugwar.org/topics/drug_war_issues/criminal_justice/policing/police_corrupti
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-secret-service-agent-sentenced-scheme-related-silk-road-investigation
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-dea-agent-sentenced-extortion-money-laundering-and-obstruction-related-silk-road
https://apnews.com/article/soccer-sports-la-liga-money-laundering-puerto-rico-38aed2da8cd0ac237aca28aa39321105
I wouldn't be surprised if you ignored any mention of those links in any reply you might offer. After all, they're so inconvenient to your argument.
But the facts are the facts. The enormous amount of easy money in the all-cash business of illegal drugs is an attractive nuisance of staggering proportions that has ensnared top-ranking officers and entire units of the country's most elite law enforcement divisions. How are poor people supposed to behave any better?
"How about you move there, instead of implying that you find its system superior to the US?"
1) Because there is more to Singapore then crime.
2) Because it's on the other side of the planet and I'm not a citizen, nor are any in my family. Because it's not clear we could get jobs there.
"Setting aside the totalitarian implications of that endorsement"
Yes, people who visit Singapore routinely refer to it as a totalitarian hellhole. It's like they are in North Korea.
Myself, I enjoyed my visit. You should get out more.
"Singapore has 280 square miles of land area."
Singapore is a city. The appropriate comparison for Singapore would be large American cities. However, we could basically substitute any Asian country including big ones like Japan. Tough drug laws and criminal justice systems, lack of crime.
"you know, the dereliction of enforcement that allowed the legal opioid problem to get out of hand so badly in the 1990s,"
You are all over the place here dude. Opioids were legal and regulated like you want and they became a total mess. Is the problem legality or illegality? You can't seem to make up your mind here. Except that somehow an exactly perfect system should have done exactly the right thing, and you call me utopian.
What we learned is that doctors will push drugs that are bad for people if they have an incentive and that they can create their own demand (just like drug dealers). In fact it was worse because lots of people with better sense then to deal with drug dealers would trust their doctors.
If you think legal opioids were a mess I don't see how legal meth is going to go down any easier for you. The same dynamic will go down.
I expect basically every attempt to legalize drugs to go down the way opioids did, but worse the worse the drug is.
"Shotgun dry law enforcement killed more than 1200 people in raids across the country over the course of the mid-1920s."
Like police killings today, this is dramatically less then the # of people being murdered during the same time.
Total spending on prohibition enforcement in 1923 amounted under $9,000,000 in 2023 adjusted dollars. This amounted to $0.08 per person in 2023 dollars using the 1923 population. 0.0006% of GDP. This was not a serious attempt.
But more importantly I'm asking a simple question. Given that the period from the late 1800s until 1920 saw some parts of the country go dry and some stay wet, shouldn't we see a difference in crime rates between them? Shouldn't the dry areas have seen a huge increase in crime during this era? Shouldn't the crime in wet areas outperform them? This is as closed to a randomized trial as we can get.
I don't like prohibition because I think it was the wrong law and it failed most in the places that never wanted it in the first place. But I don't think drug prohibition is the reason for crime, and if you legalized every drug I would still expect to see crime (perhaps worse since addicts are more prone to criminality).
Your tourist endorsement of the Singapore regime of perpetual panopticon surveillance is duly noted. Singapore fans would probably embrace North Korea, too, if it were Rich. In that regard, I'm also definitely noting much more sympathy for the PRC system than ever before.
"You are all over the place here dude. Opioids were legal and regulated like you want and they became a total mess. Is the problem legality or illegality? You can't seem to make up your mind here. Except that somehow an exactly perfect system should have done exactly the right thing, and you call me utopian."
No, you've failed to comprehend my comment, and you're supplying your own misreading of its inferences.
Opioids (excepting heroin- a decision of caprice rather than rational justification) were- and still are- legal substances intended to be controlled by prescription. That control failed, because the DEA was tasked to emphasize raiding marijuana plantations over providing Federal supervision of the regulation of those substances- that control was left to the individual States!
I'm still looking into the particulars of the origin and development of the centralized Federal database- but the important thing to note is that the participation of the States was voluntary! As recently as the mid-2010s, the majority of the 50 States had not signed on to compliance with it! (My most recent reading indicated that there were still two holdouts.) Some of the states that had the least accountability on controlled substance prescriptions and pharmacy stocks were the states with the most draconian laws against illicit drugs. In those states, doctor shopping, multiple prescriptions, and script-doc profiteering became an industry overnight. (Meanwhile, California, which had much more liberal attitudes toward marijuana, had very tight accountability controls- and a low rate of Schedule II prescribed substance diversion and use.)
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-dukes-of-oxy-how-a-band-of-teen-wrestlers-built-a-smuggling-empire-226940/
The DEA tried to tighten controls to obviate the problem of diversion, but the Congressional committee responsible for funding that effort refused to fund it adequately.
So the problem of inconsistency you're noticing isn't my fault; it's the fault of lawmakers with their heads up their ass. And that problem cuts in more than one way.
The origin of the prohibition of addiction maintenance goes back 100 years, to Supreme Court decisions that forbade physicians prescription for that purpose. The individual cases that led to that decision do appear to have involved profiteering "script docs"- but the blanket ban on allowing ANY physician to prescribe for addiction maintenance went too far, and that's what inaugurated the lucrative illicit marketplace for opioids in the US. ALL of that demand was driven from the doctor's offices into the streets.
The problem of slipshod enforcement of Schedule II prescription substances began in the aftermath of the DEA Schedule system- a Federal regulatory regime where enforcement was left entirely to the whims of the States. It was only a matter of time before that system was exploited- and that time came when the Sacklers- the original innovators in the mass-market advertising of prescription drugs (now widely accepted in TV ads)- applied their sales expertise to their newly ordained product, Oxycontin. Oxycontin became so ubiquitously prescribed- and, crucially, so easily diverted- that in only a few years, it generated an opioid problem that dwarfed the heroin market.
And then, some time in the 2010s, with the horse having already left the barn and millions of addicts having been generated, the Feds decided to crack down on opioid prescriptions. And since the rule against addiction maintenance still applied, all of those addicts were consigned to the heroin market- and, following the Gresham's Law analog that applies to illicit drug markets, eventually to fentanyl (which, in due time, is likely to be followed by carfentanil, and similarly superpotent opioid analogs...)
Yes, I'm in favor of prescription controls over opioids, and tight accountability over prescriptions. But I'm also in favor of addiction maintenance by qualified professionals who provide regulated supplies to confirmed addicts- not just to anyone who shows up claiming that they have a back sprain.
That isn't being "all over the place." I'm advocating rational controls over some particularly powerful substances in line with the goals of harm reduction. The inconsistency is to be found in the insistence on over-controlling substances in a punitive moralist attempt to punish addicts, coupled with a history of patchwork lax enforcement and non-enforcement of the provisions intended to prevent profiteering and diversion.
That history isn't just a matter of less than perfect enforcement of the rules. It's studied negligence by institutional power, disdaining the practical necessity of stabilizing addicts in one breath while deferring to a paradigm that maximizes the profits of Big Pharma through enabling mass-marketing campaigns, shilling, and physician rewards for maximizing prescription on the other.
If you think Singapore is North Korea your basically off your rocker.
I like freedom. Getting mugged is the opposite of freedom. Having huge portions of cities being considered places you can't go isn't freedom. You can ride the subway in Singapore and not live in terror. Anarcho-tyranny is not freedom.
And being a drug addict is not freedom, its being ensalved to a drug.
"because the DEA was tasked to emphasize raiding marijuana plantation"
This is getting pathetic.
I worked in the drug insurance industry. And I worked on finding pharmacy fraud. Marijuana had ZERO to do with it. People were making money and consumer were happy (for a time). Nobody asked questions until so many bodies piled up that political hill could be made out of it.
Pharmacy fraud is still ultra rampant in everything that isn't opioids because they don't care how much money the government loses as long as nobody is calling their senator because their husband died.
And it will go exactly the same way with the next addictive drug we let people sell legally.
"it's the fault of lawmakers with their heads up their ass."
They always have their heads up their ass! Have you met a lawmaker? A regulator? YOU CAN NOT TRUST THEM TO DO ANYTHING COMPLICATED OR SUBTLE OR PREDICT THE FUTURE IN ANY WAY OR CARE ABOUT ANYONE! That's why we write simple laws that are hard to loophole...like that dangerous addictive drugs are illegal.
https://www.datocms-assets.com/59248/1648782386-faces-of-meth-3.jpg?auto=format&q=89&w=720
I really do not think something that does this should be legal.
You're the one who brought up North Korea. If only North Korea was wealthy, it would resemble Singapore more than it does the US.
You obviously prefer to extract stray statements out of context in preference to centering an argument on the issue content (fwiw, I have zero interest in being drawn into an off-topic exchange on the merits of Singapore vs. the DPRK). You also moan nonsensical takes like "this is getting pathetic" to yourself, as if you were mounting a germane argument.
fwiw, this really did happen in the year 2000, just as the Oxy epidemic was getting out of hand:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/02/drug-war-comes-rez/
https://journalstar.com/business/lakota-hemp-farmer-left-broke-by-dea/article_4588e603-e0ce-5beb-ae93-0afb463926ca.html
"I worked in the drug insurance industry. And I worked on finding pharmacy fraud...[deleted as irrelevant and superfluous] People were making money and consumer were happy (for a time). Nobody asked questions until so many bodies piled up that political hill could be made out of it."
I'm not sure what "political hill" is. I'm also not sure that you had any business working to find pharmacy fraud, if you're going to be that cynical about it.
"Pharmacy fraud is still ultra rampant in everything that isn't opioids because they don't care how much money the government loses as long as nobody is calling their senator because their husband died."
That doesn't really sound like the sort of pharmacy fraud that I've been referring to. But are you ever cynical. Although when it comes to the War on Drugs, you continue to be a...well, you don't really sound like a convinced idealist on that, either. You're more like a terminally cynical apologist for Power, exercised on behalf of punitive moralism. As long as it doesn't hit too close to home. As long as it focuses on the "low IQ" menace.
To get back to specifics, this the regulation problem that I was referring to: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/60-minutes-ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/
To which your reply is:
"They always have their heads up their ass! Have you met a lawmaker? A regulator? YOU CAN NOT TRUST THEM TO DO ANYTHING COMPLICATED OR SUBTLE OR PREDICT THE FUTURE IN ANY WAY OR CARE ABOUT ANYONE!"
Whoa.
It's interesting to hear that vote of utter and complete lack of faith in government's ability to do anything right. Anything other than punish with draconian prohibitions, that is, which is when somehow everything suddenly works so much more efficiently:
"That's why we write simple laws that are hard to loophole [sic]...like that dangerous addictive drugs are illegal."
LOL!!! You actually wrote that garbage!!!
@fp123...even given the recent over-tightening of restrictions on opioid prescriptions, they're still some of the most heavily prescribed substances in existence. Hydrocodone, oxycodone's slightly less powerful cousin, is the 16th most heavily prescribed drug (of any kind) in the US:
"Hydrocodone/acetaminophen (Lortab, Norco, Vicodin, various others), a narcotic analgesic. Total prescriptions: 30,100,356 representing 8,587,152 patients" https://www.healthgrades.com/right-care/patient-advocate/the-top-50-drugs-prescribed-in-the-united-states
You want a ban on that? If you want a ban on all "dangerous addictive drugs", that's what you support. Because that's what a "simple law" would prohibit. Along with a complete ban on morphine, Dilaudid, Demerol, Methadone, buprenorphine, Tramadol, Oxycodone (still available with prescription), fentanyl (still available with prescription)...to say nothing of the benzodiazepines, which produce a worse physical dependency than opioids when used daily for extended periods of time; or the psychostimulants like amphetamines and methylphenidate, which also qualify as addictive substances, although they aren't nearly as lethally dangerous as the opioids or the benzos; and the SSRI medications, which can produce such seriously mind-bending psychic withdrawal symptoms on discontinuance that it's now admitted that many long-time SSRI users who wish to get off of them require a slow tapering off period of a year or more.
You sound like the White Queen, from Alice In Wonderland: the only thing a government can possibly accomplish is "OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!!!"
Like, you know, Duterte in the Philippines: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/philippines-drugs/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/philippine-court-acquits-top-critic-of-ex-president-dutertes-war-on-drugs/ar-AA1b8LHe
So, how did the "simple" approach work out there?
But, well, you have a link to pictures of some bootleg meth users who were criminalized, pushed into a corner and poked with sticks, after consuming unregulated and poisonous products made with a witches brew of bootleg chemicals like hydriotic acid, muriatic acid, iodine, mercury chrloride, P-2-P, and lye. So, case closed, according to that weighty logic:
"I really do not think something that does this should be legal."
On that we're agreed: I don't think that poisonous bootleg meth should be legal, either. Fortunately the methamphetamine sold in American pharmacies doesn't have those problems. Because its manufacture is regulated by the FDA, as an approved Schedule II drug that's legal by prescription. A fact that I've already mentioned, that you've evidently overlooked.
"Singapore vs. the DPRK"
fine to stop discussing. your equivalence talk just makes me think your deranged and ideological. please talk to some people from both places.
"You want a ban on that?"
I don't think Oxycontin ever should have been sold to people that weren't chemo patients or had back surgery. The Sackler's convinced everyone that "pain" was under diagnosed and under treated, and they were able to convince people because it just happened that everyone's incentives were to do so. Doctor's were given "discretion" to determine what people needed outside of those clear cases, and it turned out they needed whatever made the doctors money. Insurance was bought off with manufacturer rebates. Patients obviously liked how it made them feel.
I could say a lot of the same about SSRIs. Way more people are allowed on them in the first place than should be. All the financial incentives are the same.
The basic problem is that these medicines should only be used in extreme medical cases, but it was decided everyone with an achy shoulder or a bad thought should get whatever they want. We gave doctors "discretion" and they always exercise discretion in the direction of their pocketbook.
That's what I think will happen with any drug that makes people feel good. The patients will want it. The doctors, manufacturers, and insurance companies can be bought off with government insurance money. In general I think the entire incentive structure that makes it profitable for all these parties to engage in this needs to be attacked. As long as people make money there will only be pushback against "discretion" after the bodies pile up.
"I don't think that poisonous bootleg meth should be legal, either"
So you're a PROHIBITIONIST. Bootleg meth has willing suppliers and willing buyers. And you're off prohibiting it, you puritan. Don't you know that if you make things people want illegal they will turn to crime and gang wars.
Once you've decided that it's GOOD to make certain drugs illegal we are just arguing over what those drugs are and what the regulations should be. And unless your answer is "everything legal and no regulations" then there is going to be an incentive for an illegal drug trade of some kind. The question is what to do about it.
"I don't think Oxycontin ever should have been sold to people that weren't chemo patients or had back surgery."
Chemically, Oxycontin is merely time-released oxycodone- which was prescribed for decades for acute pain relief as Percodan, typically in 5mg amounts. It's only marginally more powerful than hydrocodone- 20%-50% more powerful. Hydrocodone is Vicodin- the more common mainstay for acute pain problems like wisdom tooth extraction, back sprain, and shingles outbreak. As with Percodan, 5-10mg is typically all most people require for those pain conditions.
The problem that launched the Oxy epidemic was not related to any sinister property of oxycodone, per se. It's due to the fact that it was compounded for extended release, often in amounts as large as 40mg, 80mg, or even 120mg. And all users had to do to get the instant release was to chew them!
5-10mg of oxy makes for a good pain reliever. When chewed for fast release, 40mg of oxy compares favorably with a bag of street heroin.
"The Sackler's convinced everyone that "pain" was under diagnosed and under treated, and they were able to convince people because it just happened that everyone's incentives were to do so."
Not "everyone's incentives." The real problem there isn't any particular drug- it's the "marketing innovations" of the Sacklers, which go back to the 1950s, when old man Sackler got the brainstorm that prescription pharmaceuticals could be marketed just like soda pop, by using full-page ads in magazines and commission-sales pitches to physicians. I think this was an idea gone horribly wrong. But the answer is not to ban the drugs- it's to ban the commercialization, advertising, and commission sales pitch techniques. And the doctors need to get a lot more education about medications- particularly about pain and addiction medicine.
"Doctor's were given "discretion" to determine what people needed outside of those clear cases, and it turned out they needed whatever made the doctors money."
Many of the doctors were sincerely misled- they trusted the sales people, and the threadbare, slipshod studies that provided the basis of the sales hype for Oxy. The doctors should have had more skepticism, simply due to the amounts of opiods compounded in each pill. But pain, addiction, and pharmaceutical side effects have been given such short shrift in the curricula of medical schools that the doctors were naifs. (Except for the unethical ones.)
There are no direct kickbacks to physicians from every prescription that they write. But pharma companies have been known to reward physicians who prescribe brand-name products beyond a given level with bonuses all the time. That's another practice that needs to be banned. But it isn't the fault of any particular drug.
Scrip docs make their money as private practitioners catering to one particular clientele (like "pain patients") with cash visits, in and out, as fast as possible, like an assembly line. It's an unethical practice that would have easily been detected if a nationwide database of accountability had been in place in the 1990s and 2000s. The fact that it wasn't is not a failure of regulation- it's a failure of un-regulation. A bug in the regulatory scheme, not a feature. And overcompensating by choking off supplies after the damage has been done is not an evidence-based response; it's political posturing.
"Insurance was bought off with manufacturer rebates."
This is more like a problem of the US health care system in general. Notwithstanding my support for private markets for consumer products, pharma is different: I'm not averse to the notion of nationalizing pharmaceutical manufacture. Drugs are not soda pop, or televisions, or shampoo. They're generic chemicals, identical except for occasional minor changes in compounding. We should consider a public option for their manufacture. We definitely don't need ads for them on TV.
"Patients obviously liked how it made them feel."
Yes, but that sometimes came as a surprise; the way Oxy (and fentanyl) got marketed in the 1990s is approximately as deceptive as the way opioid-based patent medicines were marketed, prior to the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Read the book Dopesick. I've read hundreds of books on drugs, but that book had me staring at the ceiling all night after I read it. Read the book Dreamland, too- it isn't quite as harrowing, but it's a telling account of what happens when powerful substances with supplies that are supposed to be controlled and accountable slip the leash, due to a complete failure to effectively implement a regulatory system.
In my opinion, the subtext for that failure was Respectability and Prestige Power (including campaign donations.) Congress failed to take the DEA seriously, because they couldn't quite comprehend the notion that opioids manufactured and sold by their Big Pharma donors and lobbyist buddies could actually be as harmful as the opioids sold by "the gangs" on the illicit street market.
After all, like Peter Schweizer says, the real corruption in Washington isn't what's illegal- it's about what IS legal. Surely you've read Roger Morris' 1996 book Partners In Power...remember the three chapters entitled "Washington I/II/III"? Here- refresh your memory with this free download: https://archive.org/details/partnersinpowerc0000morr_c3r1
The Oxy epidemic- and its aftermath- isn't the fault of any particular chemical compound. Opiods- including fentanyl and oxycodone- continue to be the legitimate mainstay of pain management medicine. Because they're the most effective class of compounds, for many pain sufferers.
"So you're a PROHIBITIONIST."
Yes, I'm in favor of prohibiting some substances. And tightly regulating others- that process that you seem to regard as a corrupt feature of government, rather than a process with some bugs. However, I think that civil confiscation of unsafe products is typically a more practical solution than getting the criminal courts involved.
"Bootleg meth has willing suppliers and willing buyers."
I've already told you twice: amphetamines- including methampetamines- are LEGALLY REGULATED. No one would buy the bootleg garbage if they could get a pure supply. Come on, this is basic. But we're dealing with a medical-legal regime that won't even attempt to experiment with amphetamine maintenance for meth addicts- not even a program like methadone maintenance, where users would show up for a daily dose of oral medication. Many of those folks have undiagnosed ADD (which is a real ailment, fwiw.) But if someone is criminalized prior to diagnosis, they're sunk. They're "meth freaks."
I'd be a lot more dubious about Schedule II amphetamine prescription- something like 13 million Americans have an amphetamine or methylphenidate script- if it was driving large numbers of people on to the street to bang 100mg loads of crystal ten times a day. But it isn't a problem the way over-prescribed Oxy was. Because it isn't the same substance. Dependency and ill health effects from amphetamine pills are a personal liability- the warning signs of overuse need to be heeded. But it isn't a public health menace. Whether over-prescribed or not, people aren't dropping dead left and right from their Adderall prescriptions. There isn't an epidemic of doctor shopping and wholesale diversion of industrial quantities to the street market so that people can gobble/snort/shoot mass quantities of amphetamine pills to cope with an escalating tolerance and an intensifying addiction.
The basis of my drug policy positions is that I follow the evidence.
"Once you've decided that it's GOOD to make certain drugs illegal we are just arguing over what those drugs are and what the regulations should be."
Well, yeah. But unlike myself, you've just spent half of your post content arguing that regulatory controls are corrupt and ineffective, and that the only answer should be "simple laws, with no loopholes" to work as blanket prohibitions over a wide array of substances, including marijuana, a nontoxic herb that's less poisonous than many of the products in stock on a kitchen spice rack.
Which is to say, you're all over the place on this.
So am I- but I'm basing the differences in my policies on rational assessment of harm to public health and safety. Whereas you're still thrashing around like the White Queen from Alice In Wonderland.
Hopefully, my last post cleared up your confusion in regard to my position on the proper regime for controlling opioid prescription.
Now, on to another point:
"If you think legal opioids were a mess I don't see how legal meth is going to go down any easier for you. The same dynamic will go down."
Meth (aka methamphetamine aka Desoxyn) is already legal. Schedule II*. What, nobody told you? The statistics on how many legal meth prescriptions are written annually have proved resistant to my inquiries. But it's well-known that as a class, the amounts of prescribed amphetamines are in the hundreds of millions annually- they're almost as common as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. Fortunately, there's little evidence of a public health problem resulting from that situation. Notwithstanding the fact that amphetamine pills aren't exactly free of harm or addiction liability, their widespread prescription in recent decades hasn't led to the disastrous effects of the Oxycontin epidemic. However, if the Drug Warriors want another illicit street drug disaster on their hands, they'd get one soon enough if they were to decide to choke off the prescription of amphetamines the way they did prescription opioids.
It's worth noting that the last time the Federal government took measures to drastically limit the prescription of amphetamines in the early 1970s, the user demand swiftly shifted over to another product that was coincidentally just arriving on the heels of the burgeoning nationwide retail marijuana market: cocaine. This time around, the illicitly sourced methamphetamine market is much more mature. So I'd anticipate that the two commodities would have to fight it out for the newly expanded street demand. The increase in the consumer base resulting from a crackdown on amphetamine prescriptions would almost certainly be massive, however.
Meanwhile, the current medical-legal regime in the US is even more rigidly opposed to providing a daily regime of oral amphetamine maintenance for people with meth problems than it is to providing controlled amounts of opiods to opioid addicts. Go figure.
[ *Cocaine and fentanyl are also DEA Schedule II controlled substances, fwiw. ]