Beyond the Drug War, Inst/Policy Studies

Image: Getty Images via Daylife Excerpt from, A New U.S. Approach Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute for Policy Studies

….

The Obama administration could learn valuable lessons from some of its Latin American counterparts.

First, it could recognize that the international drug control policies implemented over the past several decades have failed to make any significant dent in the supply of illicit drugs.

Second, it could adopt measures that reduce the harm caused by both drug use and the “war on drugs.”

Completely eliminating the demand or production of illicit drugs is simply not achievable. The challenge, therefore, is to put into place policies that mitigate the harm caused by drug use to individuals, families, and communities, and the harm or negative consequences caused by illicit drug production and the policies intended to contain it.
…..

The issue of proportionality of sentencing is a major problem in the United States and the Latin American countries “persuaded” to follow its lead (more often than not as a result of threats of losing U.S. trade benefits and economic assistance). In addition to disproportionate sentences for crimes committed, the United States has long pushed for the criminalization of drug consumption and has continued to hold fast to that approach even as many European and other countries have increasingly treated drug abuse as a public health problem.

see http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5698

Because drugs are bad doesn’t mean prohibition is good.
Supporting prohibition and being pro-human rights is a contradiction.

The international conventions are an ‘immoral and unjust contradiction’ manufacturing quantifiable harms.

They must be changed. It is an imperative. /Blair

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Jeremy Douglas, RNZ interview.

Image via Wikipedia
re: Interview by Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand

09:20am New Zealand and the international drug trade / Jeremy Douglas, Manager of the UNODC’s Global Smart programme which is tracking the international drug trade, which he says is getting increasingly sophisticated. (listen here)

Jeremy Douglas, Manager of the UNODC’s Global Smart programme is obviously the product of a dumbed down education system.

There is nothing smart about this man. He is a puppet ideologue rabbiting ‘more of the same’ failed UN drug war creating fears, drug markets and drug related harms where there should be none.
Image via Wikipedia
Watch the sleigh of hand descriptions associating TRIADS with precursors and local gangs, horse tranquilizers and especially Ecstasy (MDMA), one of the more benign drugs now vilified by the prohibitory politics and vested interests passing off as health prevention – and he is here professing to inform OUR Police! Keep him out of the country, he and his ’emerging drug threat’ message is more dangerous than any radical Muslim cleric.

New Zealand’s problem with and popularity of methamphetamine is a PRODUCT of the very system he describes.

He and his ilk are the very reason UNGASS is re-examining the Hoover/Nixon/Reagan/Bush ‘War on Drugs‘ as is our own Law Commission.

Supporting prohibition and being anti-crime is a contradiction. Because drugs are bad doesn’t mean prohibition is good.

Douglas no doubt must be appalled to learn that on Nov 6th, New Zealand legislated recreational soft drug use, making provision for controlled markets. Now there would have been in interesting question for someone purporting to be so well informed!

Doh!

Blair Anderson
50 Wainoni Road,
Christchurch.

03 3894065

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Rethink the War on Drugs

Image by #_Gwen_# Crime is an issue that often seeps into Presidential elections in one form or another. Indeed, the Bush Administration has rolled back or undermined the two primary crime-fighting initiatives of the Clinton Administration by allowing the 1994 federal ban on assault weapons to lapse, and by eliminating Clinton’s COPS program, which put tens of thousands of new police on the streets of American cities. Gun control is largely a dead letter, since the NRA has shown that it has the power to keep any type of gun in the hands of anyone who wants them, as well as the power to punish any Democrat who seeks greater gun control legislation.

One area that could bring large dividends in terms of crime reduction would be to change tactics in the quagmire of the American war on drugs. With blind fidelity to a failed policy, we continue to fritter away scarce law enforcement resources fighting sale and possession of drugs and to put hundreds of thousands in prison at enormous cost to taxpayers and to inmates and their families.

Many substances from alcohol and nicotine to marijuana, cocaine, and heroin impose high social costs on American society, but only the illegal drugs lead to mass incarceration, corruption of police, street killings, and other acts of violence in the effort to market them to a desirous American population.

Just as the end of Prohibition generated enormous crime reductions, legalization of the above drugs would likely bring about similar crime drops, while risking increases in the high costs attending the likely increase in consumption and abuse.

The proper way to deal with all of these addictive substances is to legalize, tax heavily, ban all forms of marketing, and fund efforts to restrain consumption and provide treatment for abusers. Instead, we have pursued a policy that either puts hundreds of thousands of Americans in prison when a coordinated and aggressive regulatory posture could likely restrain demand in a far less costly manner, or gives far too much freedom to stimulate demand and sales by aggressive marketing and advertising.

One potential obstacle to a regime of legalization coupled with discouraging regulation and taxation is that the suppliers of addictive substances will use constitutional arguments to advance their objectives (one can imagine the briefs by sellers of marijuana insisting on their first amendment rights to peddle the drug should legalization occur) or enlist the support of compliant legislators to help stimulate demand (note the activities of the gambling industry for an unwholesome example).

This might suggest that constitutionally enshrined restrictions on the ability to market harmful substances might be an important antecedent to an effort to reduce crime by eliminating the staggering social costs of the war on drugs.

Rethink the “War on Drugs”
John J. Donohue III, Leighton Homer Surbeck Professor of Law

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com
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Helen Clark on Pot

Image via Wikipedia PM Helen Clark was speaking on the University of Otago campus today where she announced the implementation of a Universal Student Allowance. She speaks about marijuana in response to a question [a Dunedin Electorate Candidate for the ALCP] asked of her. [Monday 13 October 2008]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czxr30xBC34

Julian: I’m from the National Organisation for Reform of Marijuana Laws. The issue’s been quite contentious down here this year but we’re very thankful for [MP] Pete Hodgson.. he’s made efforts to bring medical marijuana to some patients in the form of Sativex. My question is ” If Labour wins the election are the cannabis laws likely to be relaxed further?”

Helen Clark: The fact that cannabis has been an illegal drug doesn’t mean that if it has advantage for medical conditions -and certainly some advocate it for treatment of glaucoma – that it can’t be considered for that.

We have had select committee reports look at this issue and there is a whole range of points of view: Should there be partial prohibition, should there be partial decriminalisation?
I think its time we had a more rational debate about these issues but its difficult to have a rational debate. In my view the greatest killers in our country are actually tobacco and alcohol and its effects on the road.

Image by Thomas Hawk via FlickrBut the rub is given the harm of those perfectly legal drugs at the moment – and tobacco is one where used as intended it does kill a significant number of people who use it – theres obviously considerable reluctance to actually legalise others.

But I think we need to have a continuing and rational debate about what the best form of the law is and look at what is happening in other western countries where theres a wider range of approaches

Of course, aside from the abuse of due process, lack of cognition that this is about ‘prohibition, not medpot, that there is a Law Commision review – the question not asked by media is “Who is going to sign up to a coalition agreement where thou shalt not speak about cannabis ‘in this term of governance’ else forego the treasury cheque book” ? /Blair

— ends —-

Consider this PRESS item from 2000

“Duck shoving” is what Health Minister Annette King calls it. They are too scared to talk about it, she says. She has smoked dope, in her younger years. “I admitted it. Some people would not be honest. There’s no point in saying no, anyway, when people knowing you years ago would say: ‘She’s a liar’.”

New Zealand is almost certainly heading into a review of laws governing cannabis, with Ms King at the helm. Temporarily, the review is on hold, blocked by the Greens. It will take the three Government parties to find common ground as to which select committee should deal with the issue before any review gets under way. Whichever way it goes, the chance is that within two years, people caught smoking weed could be given fines in the same way that speeding tickets Image by Simon Lieschke via Flickrare issued. Anti dope-smoking billboards and TV adverts would go hand in hand, along with more direct peer pressure-type programmes aimed in particular at Maoris. “I’m pretty sure there won’t be a recommendation for legalising,” Ms King says. The picture is less clear on how MPs will decide in a free vote in Parliament on part decriminalisation. “I know no-one in Labour who wants to legalise. “Some people want to look at a partial decriminalisation. There’s no party position on legalising.” (lies: it was a remit from the floor of the Labour Party in 1998/Blair) Ms King at first says she is uncertain how she will vote, but then expands on her thoughts. “You can’t have prohibition. The law is broken every minute of the day. “We have to look at harm minimisation from a health perspective, and containment from a policing perspective.” [more]

Blair Anderson
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com
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Don Dies For Nought

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“His life was taken as he was working hard and undercover to protect our families and the wider community from that nasty element we have all become so familiar with – illegal drug traffickers and drug users,” – Papakura Mayor Calum Penrose (Locals honour slain police officer, Papakura Courier, 24 September 2008)

Police undercover and Technical Specialist Don Wilkinson was an honorable man tasked with a hopeless cause and died protecting no-one, according to Judge Jerry Paradis and recent guest of Prof. Max Abbot for his Vice Chancellor AUT Winter lecture series (Judge Paradis – Board Member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition)

Police and Media are still parroting the ‘suspected P-lab’ line – as if they haven’t checked the house yet.

The kind of prejudice expressed in Calum Penrose ill-informed rant serves only to entrench the worst attributes of our drug policy… that of prejudice and hatred. Their is no evidence yet produced that demonstrates that Don died from Methamphetamine or any other drug. He died of “Prohibition“.

Has no one read about Capone, Alcohol Prohibition and the Valentines Day Massacre?

We can best support and protect our Police by ridding ourselves of the dysfunctional prohibitionist paradigm that delivers us the very tragic outcomes – ‘the unintended consequences’ that politicians and public servants commissioned with ‘a duty of care’ set out to solve.

—
Blair Anderson ‹(•¿•)›

Social Ecologist ‘at large’
http://mildgreens.blogspot.com
http://blairformayor.blogspot.com
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http://efsdp.org

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Student Association’s forum on drug and alcohol harm

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Jim Anderton / 1 May, 2008 /Dunedin, Otago University Campus

I welcome this forum and I am grateful for the opportunity to join you here. I welcome it because I think the issue of the harm caused by drugs and alcohol is important.
So important that a couple of years ago I supported the police in allocating resources to fund a drug harm index. I supported this study because I take the issue of drug harm very seriously.
The money was used for research to quantify drug harm – not just how expensive the problem is, but also where the avoidable costs lie and what could be done to minimise them. The government’s ministerial committee on drug policy – that I chair – has this week received a report on that research.
I want to share the results with you – this is the first time they have been made public.
This was a formal research project by professional researchers (BERL) and peer reviewed – one of the peer reviewers was Des O’Day, a public health expert at Otago University.

The study concluded, “the harm from drugs consumed in 2006 is substantial and that illicit drug seizures may have prevented approximately another third again of harm.” In 2006 illicit drug use caused social costs estimated at $1,310 million.
That’s nearly one per cent of GDP.
Illicit drug production cost the country $519 million. Related crime cost us $414 million. Lost output due to illicit drug use cost $106 million. Another $53 million resulted from drug-attributable health care and road smashes.
Of course, as we know, not all drug use is the same. So the research is broken down into categories of drugs.
Over two fifths of social costs – 42 percent, or $551 million – is caused by illicit stimulants. We know them as meth, or P.
The researchers said stimulants stand out as the “the second largest source of tangible costs for the user” at $2640 per user in 2006. They caused $551 million of social costs in 2006. That’s over ten million dollars of harm every week.
Over a third of the social costs of illicit drug use are caused by cannabis. That’s $444 million of social costs in 2006 from cannabis alone. As we already know, cannabis is not as damaging as other illicit drugs such as opiods or LSD. The cost per kilogram and cost per user is lower than the others. That is why cannabis is a Class C, not a class A, drug.
But that figure of $444 million of social costs is one that we can’t go past. It is a very high cost mainly because cannabis use is so widespread. The more widespread the use of cannabis gets, the higher that cost will be.
Compare it to alcohol use. Alcohol is far and away our most destructive drug. If you ask the police, or medical authorities, about the times they are called in to crises, or to accidents, to clean up human harm they will tell you that alcohol is almost invariably involved.
Alcohol was not part of the study I am releasing tonight. But according to the Ministry of Health, the social costs of alcohol misuse total between $1.5 billion and $2.4 billion a year. So why do we make alcohol legal, when it causes much more damage than any other drug?
The answer should give advocates of drug use some pause for thought: Alcohol is not the most intrinsically harmful drug. It is the most harmful because it is the most widely used. It causes physical and mental health problems. It causes catastrophe on the roads. It causes drownings and violence in families and elsewhere. It leads to absenteeism and problems at work.
Over 80 percent of New Zealanders drink alcohol – and it causes as much as two billion dollars of harm.
Around 14 percent used cannabis last year. And it caused $444 million. Harm to individuals includes suicide and mental illness, respiratory problems including lung damage and violence. On a proportionate basis, cannabis is the more harmful drug, according to the best figures we have available.
Who pays the social costs of harm caused by drug use? We all do, in paying taxes for our hospitals and police and social agencies to pick up the pieces. The victims of crime pay the social costs.
The families of users pay the social costs. And the users themselves.
In the case of cannabis they pay around $1,750 a year on average each in social and economic costs. These include production of drugs, crime, loss of output at work, healthcare and road accidents.
I’m the minister of forestry – and I go and see the forestry companies and ask them to work closely with communities to hire more young people and train them with high skills, so we export higher value products, instead of raw logs. And one of the problems they talk to me about is the difficulty of training young people when drugs have ruined their motivation to even get out of bed. They can tell you of the dangers of forestry workers using chainsaws or heavy machinery while they’re stoned.
When young people use cannabis they do long-term damage to their brains. It causes memory loss, mood disorders and depression. Cannabis dealers don’t care. Police will tell you cannabis dealers don’t refuse to sell their product to children, even kids in school uniform. That is who is paying the social cost.
I’ve been trying to increase the minimum legal age for buying alcohol. I think that it’s wrong that teenagers can buy alcohol at the corner dairy. When we reduced the age for buying alcohol – the number of car smashes and the number of hospital admissions for 18-20 year olds shot up. So did the figures for the under-18s. Because, of course, they were more likely to get alcohol when their friends and siblings over 18 were buying it for them, or lending them ID.
And if cannabis were made more widely available, more young people would use it, and more would be harmed by it.
I am against making drugs more widely available because I think we should be strong enough to care for our community. We should be strong enough and caring enough to give our young people a future in their own communities.
We should be strong enough to care for our young people. We should be strong enough to try to minimise harm when we know we can.
Jim Anderton / Health

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Massey on Meth and other stuff

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The economics of illicit drug markets
[ Click here to download a PDF of the original printed version of this story ]
In a kind of convenient shorthand, people often refer to Dr Chris Wilkins as an illicit-drug researcher. This is true, as far as it goes, but a more adequate description would be that he is a New Institutional Economist with a particular interest in stateless economic systems such as illicit drug markets.

New Institutional Economics (NIE) is an economic school which studies the role institutions play in economic behavior and performance. These include formal institutions such as the law and the state, and informal institutions such as social custom, norms of behavior and ideology. “ NIE looks at the institutional context of economic behaviour,” explains Wilkins. “It looks beyond the workings of demand, supply and pricing to examine how institutions, property rights, social convention and transaction and information costs affect the decision-making of economic actors and the performance of economic systems.”

New Institutional Economics is particularly suited to the study of ‘stateless economies’: economies where there is no state to enforce contracts or property rights, and this includes illicit drug markets. In his PhD thesis Wilkins looked at the workings of cannabis markets, where, in the absence of legal enforcement and remedies, cheating might be expected to be widespread. But Wilkins found these markets were typified by generally reliable transacting between buyers and sellers. The reason, says Wilkins, lies in the search and information costs associated with these exchanges. “ In the legal economy exchange is generally impersonal. In the supermarket you don’t know the person at the till and you may not even deal with cash. In the cannabis black market the buyer typically knows the seller, can inspect the product, and hands over cash. It is very personal, very face-to-face.”Image via Wikipedia

“In the clandestine illicit drug market it can be quite difficult for buyers and sellers to find one another. Legal commodities are advertised, and there are public retail outlets. In the cannabis market it is difficult to obtain information about the location of sellers, and the quality and prices of products. It takes some effort even for experienced buyers to assess the options available in the market. This means that in cannabis markets both the buyer and the seller make a significant time investment in the exchange relationship, and that constrains cheating to some extent. If a cannabis seller cheats a customer, then that customer won’t return, and that’s potentially a big loss.”

In a recent paper, Wilkins and Professor Sally Casswell explored the role gangs play in outdoor cannabis cultivation in New Zealand. The analysis in the paper suggests that gangs are unlikely to have complete monopoly control of cannabis cultivation – cannabis is too easy to cultivate and rival cannabis cultivators and cannabis crops too hard to deter and detect – though Wilkins is quick to say this does not mean the gangs do not have persuasive advantages elsewhere in the cannabis market, or when it comes to other drugs. In their paper Wilkins and Caswell set out the conditions under which an illicit drug market most favours the involvement of organised crime. These occur where there are cost advantages from larger-scale production, where there is a need for specialised skills, capital equipment or large amounts of start-up capital, and where there are visible targets for violence aimed at discouraging competition. While a few seeds, some potting mix and a secluded patch of ground are all that is required to cultivate cannabis, manufacturing methamphetamine is a much more technical and sophisticated process , says Wilkins. “You need to have access to the appropriate precursor chemicals and have the knowledge and equipment required for manufacture.”

Anecdotally, ‘cooks’ – the amateur chemists who manufacture methamphetamine – have became much sought after. Highly skilled, they can command premiums, and such is the demand that kidnappings are not unknown.Image via Wikipedia

Stories have circulated that gangs traditionally at odds are co-operating in the methamphetamine market. “Working together may be a rational way of gaining access to rare precursor chemicals and to exchange manufacture techniques.”One of the flow-on effects of the rise in the use of methamphetamine may be to extend the power and influence of New Zealand’s gangs, in much the same way that Prohibition once strengthened the hand of the Mafia in America. If this is happening then it will mirror trends that have been seen internationally. A report by the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime has noted a shift away from “a loose network of independent laboratory operators towards larger organisations able to produce more and better drugs at lower costs. The larger groups are more flexible, and are able to identify and exploit any lucrative business opportunity, as well as any flaws in law enforcement efforts. They assist each other to more efficiently produce, market and distribute their products.”Image via Wikipedia

Wilkins is the current recipient of a Fast Start grant from the Marsden fund to investigate which illicit drug markets nurture the development of organised crime.

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Legalise Cannabis, R16 say Canadian Senators

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A Canadian Senate committee recommended Wednesday that marijuana be legalized.

OTTAWA, Canada (CNN)

“Cannabis should be, from here on, in legal and of restricted use, so that Canadians can choose whether to consume or not in security,” said Sen. Pierre Claude Nolin, a Progressive Conservative Party member from Quebec province. He spoke at a news conference announcing the final report of the Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, which he chaired.

The government should give amnesty to anyone convicted of marijuana possession under current or past legislation and erase their records, Nolin said.

“Domestic and international experts and Canadians from every walk of life told us loud and clear that we should not be imposing criminal records on users or unduly prohibiting personal use of cannabis,” Nolin said.

The committee’s report will be considered by lawmakers.

Evidence indicates that cannabis is less harmful than alcohol, and undermines the idea that smoking pot leads to harder drugs, the committee said.

The report recommends the legal age for possession and consumption as 16, said Dave Newman, committee spokesman. It would be regulated similar to the way alcohol is.

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