I think the decades long failure of currently popular drug policy is a good example. The facts are obvious: the policy of making some, but not all, recreational drugs illegal has done nothing to solve any country's drug problem. Many drugs have been illegal in Thailand for decades. Those same drugs are readily available and causing problems all over Thailand, as daily news reports show. If a policy is so clearly a total failure, we must ask why governments persist in it, and why the public continue to support an obvious failure. Why doesn't society demand a new solution, one that might actually help to solve the problems?
One common idea, I think, is that many people believe that legalising a drug increases the use of that drug; and conversely, that criminalising the drug reduces its use. If this is true, it makes sense to keep some drugs illegal. (But why not all? Why not alcohol, surely the most socially harmful of all drugs?)
This proposition about the relationship between the law and drug use certainly sounds reasonable. But, as Ariely has shown, and as Levitt's publishers advise: we must "assume nothing, question everything" (Levitt & Dubner, 2005, cover).
And when we question the common assumption that making a drug illegal reduces use, what do we discover?
Let's follow Ariely and Levitt's lead and see where we're led.
Facts. We need some facts to test the common assumption. Can you help?
__________
Reference
Levitt, S. D. & Dubner, S. J. (2005). Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. London: Penguin.
Sup kindly started this discussion this morning by suggesting that the Chinese experience with opium, in the Chinese Opium Wars with England and other European powers, supports the common belief that making a drug illegal reduces the use of that drug.
ReplyDeleteWhat are some relevant facts?
First, opium was not new to China, where it had been known and used for over 1,000 years before the Europeans arrived to trade ("Opium Wars", 2013). Apparently, the Chinese began using more opium for recreational purposes from around 1650. For all of this time, it was legal. Before the mid-17th century, opium was legal and its use was very low.
The use began to increase slowly around 1650 while opium was still legal. In 1729, opium became illegal in China. In that year, 200 chests of opium were imported, which isn't a lot for such a large country and population. So, while the drug was legal, use was low, although perhaps increasing slowly.
However, in 1790, some 60 years after it had been criminalised, opium use and addiction had increased enormously, from 200 chests to 4,000 chests. The change in China from opium being legal to opium being illegal corresponds to a massive increase in its use of 2,000% after it became and during the period when it was illegal.
None of the most obvious facts about opium use in China support the idea that use was high when it was legal and lower when it was illegal; on the contrary, the Chinese experience suggests the exact opposite: the correlation between Chinese law and opium use is that legal opium corresponds with 1,000 years of no great problem, whilst illegal opium corresponds with a massive and continually increasing drug problem. As the Chinese laws against opium were increased, so to did the use of the drug, and its related problems, increase, until in 1858, 70,000 chests were imported whilst the drug was illegal for Chinese citizens.
The factors affecting drug use, and specifically the Chinese experience with opium, are surely very complex, but the most obvious facts to not support the idea that making the drug illegal helped to reduce its use, and they seem to suggest that the opposite is more likely, however surprising this might be.
I think we need more facts.
Can anyone offer more facts to help us to more confidently settle this question?
Reference
Opium Wars. (2013, February 6). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 10:12, February 12, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Opium_Wars&oldid=536916565
When I wrote yesterday that Thailand's (and the US's and many other countries') approaches to the problems posed by recreational drug use were "clearly a total failure" (¶ 2) I had in mind such evidence as "Huge heroin bust in Northeast" in this morning's Bangkok Post (2013). When such headlines are almost daily news, it is obvious that there are a lot of illegal drugs being traded throughout Thailand, along with the even larger amounts of legal drugs of addiction, and the large amounts that are being bought and used by eager consenting consumers of the products, both legal and illegal.
ReplyDeleteIf the decades long policy had been in any way successful, we would not today be seeing such headlines, nor would the individual and social problems caused by drug use still be as bad as, or even worse, today than they were decades ago. Successful policies actually improve things, they do not make problems worse, as current drug policy normally does, to the enormous harm of citizens and society.
For an example of a decent, respectable Thai citizen who has been harmed by current drug policy, we have a story from yesterday's Bangkok Post: "Reality show singer caught with ya ice" reports on the arrest of Thitinan "Nooknick" Suksom, who now has on her record an arrest that can only harm herself and can be of zero, or less, benefit to any other decent Thai person and to Thai society. Her crime? Hiding "two small plastic bags of ya ice in her bra", part of which was to contribute to her Valentine's Day celebrations tomorrow (2013). I had never heard of this singer before, but her "crime" is hardly any harm to any one else, or even a threat, however much it might harm herself. And when the law is punishing citizens for personal decisions that neither harm nor threaten others, the law is unjust, so in fact, current drug policy is worse than a total failure: it is also totally immoral.
References
Huge heroin bust in Northeast. (2013, February 12). Bangkok Post. Retrieved February 12, 2013 from http://www.bangkokpost.com/breakingnews/335587/b100m-heroin-busted-in-nakhon-phanom
Reality show singer caught with ya ice. (2013, February 13). Bangkok Post. Retrieved February 13, 2013 from http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/local/335535/reality-singer-arrested-with-ya-ice
But I welcome well supported disagreement, either to my major claim that legalizing drugs does not result in higher drug use, or the new claim, that laws against personal drug use by freely choosing adults are immoral.
DeleteI wonder about the statistic which shows the number of drug being traded. Is it possible that while the drug was legal in the past the measurement of collecting the number of drug being sold is not accurate? I mean it does not reflect the real number of drug use because it is hard to keep the record of every house hold trading from home to home or such trading in every local market. In contrast, after it became illegal, every trading is monitored, so the number of trading recorded is higher than before.
DeleteAir raises a good point, but I think it's the opposite situation that is more problematic; that is, it's when something is illegal that reliable figures are more difficult to come by.
DeleteIn the case of China, there was a very well developed bureaucracy keeping records of such things as inter-regional trade. However, in the case of China and opium, we can probably be confident of the figures because the opium was imported and easily tracked through the records of the Western importers at the ports in Shanghai and elsewhere - this is the reason the figures are given in chests.
In the case of alcohol consumption during prohibition, Miron did have a problem: once the sale and use of alcohol was made illegal throughout the US in 1919, there were no longer any reliable records kept for the activity that was now illegal (criminal gangs do not generally publish accounts for the tax department to check). This is the reason Miron had to use cirrhosis incidence rates as a proxy for alcohol use during the Prohibition era in the US.
An important point that Levitt makes in his discussion of the effect of increased use of prison on crime rates in the US in the 1990s is that correlation does not necessarily mean causation: two factors can consistently vary together without one actually causing the other.
ReplyDeleteThis is a point he makes again in his discussion of increased numbers of police. As he notes, it seems obvious that more police on the streets will mean less crime, but "proving that answer isn't so easy" (p. 126).
What we need is the right sort of data to work with. In order to show, as I'm sure you've already read, that increased numbers of police really does "account for approximately 10% of the 1990s crime drop" (p. 127), Levitt analysed statistics for changes in crime and police numbers in US cities that had recently had an election compared with those that had not.
Similarly, investigating the correlation and causal effects of legalisation and criminalisation on drug use requires us to find the right sort of real world facts or statistics to look at. The Chinese experience of opium is a good start: it strongly suggests that making a drug illegal does not reduce use of that drug, and is at least consistent with a massive increase in drug use, but we don't want to fall into the mistake of thinking that the correlation here means that criminalisation causes the increased drug use - I would find it very hard to believe that making opium illegal actually caused the massive increases in drug use and problems Chinese society suffered through opium. However, there might be some causal connection whereby by criminalising a drug does lead to an increase, rather than a decrease, in drug use as is popularly assumed.
Perhaps it might help to look at another example: What happened when alcohol was made illegal in the US because many people rightly saw that alcohol, one of the most harmful drugs of addiction that people regularly use, was causing great harm to individuals and society, as indeed it does in Thailand and many other countries with all that red wine at dinner, beer consumption with mates and champagne on Valentine's Day, and the whisky.
From 1919 until 1933, an amendment to its Constitution made alcohol illegal in every US state. What happened to alcohol consumption during those 14 years when the sale and use of this drug was illegal?
Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron has investigated this using cirrhosis and other markers to assess alcohol use, and concludes "that Prohibition had virtually no effect on alcohol consumption" (1999, p. 1), and "possibly even a modest positive effect" (abstract). That is, making alcohol illegal did not reduce the use of this drug, and might have correlated with a rise in alcohol use which Miron argues may in fact have been causal.
Again, the popular assumption is not supported by real world tests, which show either that making a drug illegal does not reduce use, or that it actually contributes to an increase in drug use: the exact opposite of the common assumption.
Reference
Miron, J. A. (1999, May). The Effect of Alcohol Prohibition on Alcohol Consumption. NBER Working Paper No. 7130. The National Bureau of Economic Research. Retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w7130.pdf?new_window=1
Of course, making this drug illegal did greatly benefit some groups in society. If you've seen the film The Godfather, it's depiction of the result of making alcohol and other personal matters in the US illegal is accurate: such laws are very powerful incentives to corruption.
DeleteMaking drugs illegal does benefit corrupt police and other officials, does benefit corrupt politicians, and of course it greatly benefits mafia groups.
But I'm not sure that benefiting these groups and providing powerful motivation for corruption are really good reasons to pursue a policy.