Morning Ed: Crime {2016.1.13.W}
Robert VerBruggen is questioning his prior support for drug decriminalization. He touches on why I take a cautious view (except for pot), but the lack of reform in our War on Drugs has me almost has me saying “Screw it.”
Well this just sounds like a delightful situation.
The NYPD does not seem to be overly concerned with people having sex in parks.
Xenocrypt wants – in addition to a moratorium on the term “the prison population”, more from the “mass incarceration” debate.
A woman’s rape claim was undermined by her Fitbit.
The mystery of the disappearing bookseller in Hong Kong. {More}
The rape allegation story is linking to a story about bad science journalism.Report
He’s metaphorically mapping the intersectionality of SJWs and ethics in science journalism.Report
Drugs: Screw it. Cars kill more people a year. Alcohol is a drug and it’s effect is quite significant on people. The history of humanity is one of altering their state of mind. That’ll never change. Make it all legal.
Fitbit: Well, we know that “false rape allegations” occur, this is just a nice example. Fortunately, she didn’t accuse some guy who was then arrested and incarcerated. Only a misdemeanor? Should be a felony, and anyone who calls out the emergency squads for a false report ought to have to pay the costs of the call.
Hong Kong: HK folks are starting to realize that “50 years of the way things were” is subject to interpretation and the only one who gets to define that is Beijing.Report
I don’t know that the logic of the drugs article makes much sense. He’s trying to extrapolate from fluctuations in opioid painkiller prescriptions under a state of non-prescription opioid prohibition, onto legalized non-prescription opioids.
People who’ve become addicted to prescription opioids of known strength and purity are switching to street heroin of unknowable and wildly unreliable strength and purity precisely because they can’t legally buy the trustworthy stuff once their prescriptions run out. My understanding is they’re taking the heroin they buy via the much riskier method of intravenous injection in order to get the most effect from the very expensive drug they’ve bought, which might become much less popular if it were priced more affordably – heroin being effective but significantly less strong when ingested or smoked.
I think his conclusion is wrong – it’s not just “loosening control of a drug made all hell break loose,” it’s “increasing the number of people initially exposed to a drug by legal channels while gatekeeping that legal channel and maintaining prohibition of both it and related drugs made all hell break loose.”Report
It seems pretty clear to me. Drugs can be dangerous and harmful. It’s easy to say legalize it all. However that does even try to address the harm that may come. Doesn’t mean legalization of at least some drugs isn’t a good idea and the WOD is bad. Just that to many people for drug legalization are avoiding thinking about potential problems. Many issues are far more difficult that easy sloganeering.Report
I agree just calling for legalization doesn’t address the harms that may come of legalization – it addresses the harms that come from prohibition. The harms from legalization would be a different set of harms, and would require (and enable) different ways of addressing them.
I maintain that the linked article is confused – the author observes some marginal changes in the harms of prohibition that arose because of changes in the medical use of drugs closely related to the prohibited ones, and is trying to draw conclusions from those observations about the likely harms of legalization. I don’t think there is much that can be concluded in that way. If you want to learn usefully about the harms and benefits of legalization, you have to look to the closest thing we have to a context of legalization – for example the situation surrounding heroin before it was criminalizedReport
(So, in the US, prior to about 1923)
(Also probably more useful to observe, the UK’s use of prescriptions of heroin to addicts, and Portugal’s decriminalization, albeit without legalization or regulation)Report
This is a pretty dumb analogy, but I guess it sums up the logic behind the post. I can imagine a city mayor being questioned about her city’s mental health policy, “You say that you take mental health and the threat of suicide seriously, but my sources tell me that you have almost no cops assigned to tackling duty on our city’s bridges. Shouldn’t we be doing more to tackle the mentally ill?”
I say this every time this issue comes up. Ending the War on Drugs is not about stopping and fixing the damage done by drug abuse; it is about stopping and fixing the damage done by the War on Drugs.Report