The Economist steps up public debate on drug legalisation

As part of its latest promotional campaign The Economist magazine has launched a series of  'where do you stand?' debates built around a billboard poster campaign outlining opposing views on a series of contentious issues. One of the issues they have chosen is whether drugs should be legalised and regulated, perhaps unsuprising given their prominent interest in this debate, and indeed support for the reform position (see below) over the past few years.

Economist drug debate billboards: click to see full size*

The campaign is supported by  series of twitter debates - the drug legalisation debate taking place tonight at 6pm (see @TheEconomist for details or follw the #WhereDoYouStand hashtag) and a facebook page where you can even comment with more than 140 characters, if not a fan of new media concision.


Related blogs:

• Transform FOI vs Home Office suppression of research - Part V (in The Economist )
  
• The Economist revisits long standing commitment to ending prohibition

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*Thanks to Emily Crick for the photo

Why we need a cost-benefit analysis

A testimony published by RAND CORP earlier this year reflects what Transform has long been calling for – a cost-benefit analysis of all the policy options for the control of drugs.

‘What Research Tells Us About the Reasonableness of the Current Priorities of National Drug Control’

The testimony was given by Rosalie Liccardo Pacula a senior economist at RAND CORP’s Drug Policy Research Centre to the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Domestic Policy United States House of Representatives.
She goes straight to the point arguing that,

‘The current mix of enforcement, prevention and treatment strategies is not the optimal for managing the drug situation we have today. But the problem is not just one of balance in the budget, which implies that simply re-allocating monies across the three primary objectives would fix the problem. The problem is also one of waste. In several areas, the 2008 National Drug Control Strategy advocates continuing or new support for programs that have either (a) never been scientifically proven to be effective and which on analytic grounds seem unlikely to be successful or (b) have already been shown to be completely ineffective.’

This line of argument is backed up not only by Transform (see What is the true cost of drug law enforcement? Why we need an audit for one example) but also by another economist in Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us.

"It is unconscionable for this country to continue to carry out a public policy of this magnitude and cost without any way of knowing whether, and to what extent, it is having the desired result. Our committee strongly recommends that a substantial, new, and robust research effort be undertaken to examine the various aspects of drug control, so that decision-making on these issues can be better supported by more factual and realistic evidence."

Many economists, and indeed The Economist (see here for example) and the FT (here) amongst others have been calling for, at the very least, a rational evidence-based evaluation of the true costs of the war on drugs.

Even the Government’s drugs spokesman in the House of Lords, Lord Bassam of Brighton, discussed the relevance of a cost-benefit analysis in looking at the full range of policy options in October last year, although he also rules it out.

‘…we believe that our policy is not only right but evidence-based [sic] and that we are making progress.... It is for that reason that we have begun to set out our strategy and decided to consult further on the way in which that strategy should be perfected [sic].

To make our position plain—it is worth putting this on the record—we do not accept that legalisation and regulation are now, or will be, an acceptable response to the presence of drugs [how can they know if they haven't conducted a CBA]. As I said earlier, my right honourable friend the Prime Minister reinforced that view at the recent Labour Party conference when he said that,

“drugs are never going to be decriminalised”.

Legalisation is not open to us in view of our international obligations… The current policy of prohibition on drugs is international and is governed by UN conventions that make unlawful the production and supply of many harmful drugs and limit possession exclusively to medical and scientific purposes. It would be wrong for us to lose sight of that perspective. There is no effective cost-benefit analysis of such a policy, if one could be made. Any such policy would need to address the international dimension.

The impact of legalisation on levels of consumption globally is key to any meaningful cost-benefit analysis. Without accurate figures for this, it is impossible to ascribe meaningful figures to the likely public and individual health cost or properly to assess the impact on productivity and industry or on the level of industrial or traffic accidents. Such fundamental difficulties call into question whether the task is an appropriate use of research funding. The impact of drugs on health is the only legitimate reason for control…

The Government, like the international community generally, believe that the prohibition of narcotic and psychoactive drugs is a crucial element in keeping the level of drug use under control. Such drugs would become easier to access if they were to become legally available, and we would expect levels of use and the resultant harm and costs to individuals and society to expand significantly in the way in which alcohol and tobacco use has done... We acknowledge that there are apparent benefits to an alternative system to prohibition, such as taxation, quality control and a reduction on the pressures on the criminal justice system, but in our view these are outweighed by the costs to the physical and mental health of individuals and society that result from dependence on, and addiction to, what are mind-altering drugs. Legalisation would not safeguard these very real public health interests or allay the concerns; nor would it necessarily significantly undermine international organised crime. For this reason, the Government will not pursue legalisation either domestically or internationally. It is all too easy to lay the problems of the use and misuse of drugs here and abroad simply at the door of prohibition.’

Transform once asked the then drugs minister Bob Ainsworth MP whether he would commission an audit of the effectiveness of drug enforcement spending, to which he tellingly replied:

“Why would we want to do that unless we were going to legalise drugs?”

Finally, I’m going to leave it to Daniel Craig in the opening monologue of the gangster movie Layer Cake to explain who really benefits from the present system of prohibition and who will lose out when they are legally regulated again (first two minutes).

Transform in the Economist: FOI documents hit the media

I'm pleased to see that a cost effectiveness report (looking at the CSR targets for the drug strategy) released by the Home Office following a Freedom of Information request from Transform has received its first media attention in the Economist. The report in question can be read on the Transform website here. As the quote provided in the piece indicates, there is, in some respectrs, a bigger story here than the revealing analysis in the report itself. There have been more recent CSR reports that the Government have specifically refused to release on dubious grounds. The Home Office also undertook a Value for Money study on the various strands of the strategy spending last year - that they have also refused to publish or release, despite our FOI requests.

This suppression of this information is particularly galling given that last year we had the 10 year strategy review and consultation process - for which this sort of objective cost benefit analysis is absolutely vital. Instead we got the ridiculous rose tinted propaganda piece that was the strategy consultation document - about which Transform and various high level Whitehall authorities have already made their views abundantly clear.

Whatever your policy views, it is hard to see how restricting information and analysis on what has worked and what hasn't in the strategy (and how much it has all cost), is in anyones' interest apart from ministers trying to hide failure and avoid embarrassment. It is, quite simply, a total disgrace, and as time will no doubt show, deceit tends to be uncovered and the trouble caused by it far worse than that would have been caused by telling the truth in the first place.

click to read the pdf

More to follow including a Transform briefing next week and more media coverage over the weekend.

Transform in the Economist

The following article appears in this week's Economist, quoting Danny Kushlick from Transform. It is a typically level headed piece from the Economist, long time supporters of pragmatic drug policy and law reform, on the basis of some fairly obvious cost benefit analysis.

Drug-strategy review

Prescription renewal

Jul 26th 2007

No one can get rid of drugs but reducing the harm they do is cheap and simple

IT WAS the day the cabinet came out of the closet. When Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, admitted on July 19th that she had smoked cannabis in her student days, ministers rushed to get their own confessions out of the way. By the end of last week seven of her senior colleagues, including the chancellor and the drugs minister, had come into the open about their own youthful pot-smoking.

By wonderful irony the prime minister, Gordon Brown, had a day earlier ordered a review of the drug's legal status. In 2004 cannabis was downgraded from a class B drug to class C on the official three-point scale of seriousness which supposedly reflects the harm that illegal drugs cause and determines the penalties attached to possessing or dealing in them. Now, as the government prepares to renew its ten-year drug strategy, Mr Brown has hinted that he favours upgrading cannabis again.

It is only two years since the last review of cannabis classification, which left things alone despite reports that modern varieties were stronger than the sort that Miss Smith used to puff. And it is just a month since Mr Brown declared he had no wish to revisit the subject. A recent Tory report calling for cannabis to be upgraded, among other “tough” anti-drugs proposals, may explain his change of heart.

Britain's main problem drug, in fact, is alcohol. Young Britons swig far more than their peers in any other rich country, according to UNICEF. Drink-related deaths nearly doubled between 1991 and 2004, to 8,221—many more than the 1,644 who died from drugs in 2005. But Britain is also the stoned man of Europe. Among teenagers, only the Swiss smoke more cannabis; British adults beat most others on heroin, cocaine and ecstasy. The government says drug-taking is falling (see chart), but most of this is down to a dip in cannabis. Cocaine, more dangerous, has flourished.

This is despite a decade of real “toughness”. The number of jail years given for drugs offences increased by 22% between 1998 and 2005, thanks to longer sentences and more convictions. Officers seized nearly seven tonnes of cocaine in 2003, compared with less than one in 1996.

It is hard to know how strongly would-be drug users are deterred by the law, but the decline in cannabis consumption since it was downgraded suggests not very. And despite the efforts of the coastguards, cocaine is cheaper now than it was a decade ago. The government will not say how much its drug-enforcement efforts cost, but an estimate from the UK Drugs Policy Commission, an independent board of brains, puts it at about £2 billion ($4.1 billion) a year.

The £570m allocated for drug treatment last year is a fraction of this, but it is nearly a third more than three years ago (alcoholism charities now say they feel left out). The number being treated has more than doubled in the past decade; some 55% of those the Home Office identifies as “problem” users are enrolled, compared with 17% in America. Measuring results is more important than just “pushing people through the door and counting them”, says Danny Kushlick of Transform, a campaign group. But efforts to measure effectiveness are improving too. On July 25th NICE, the body that measures the cost-effectiveness of medical care, released guidelines on drug treatment, recommending innovations including vouchers for those who wean themselves off the stuff.

Those who cannot give up can still be helped. Doubling the proportion of primary schools that provide drugs education has not stopped cannabis use among 11-year-olds from increasing, but may help children who take risks to do so more safely. An official “safer clubbing” campaign warns youngsters not to mix ecstasy with other drugs if they choose to take it. Needle-exchange depots give heroin users a chance of escaping AIDS and hepatitis. Ayesha Janjua of Turning Point, a charity, would like sterile spoons, filters and other equipment to be made more widely available. This strategy seems to be paying off. Until 2001 the number of deaths from drugs had been rising steadily. Since then it has fallen back to below 1997 levels.

Economist: spoof annual report from the drug mafia

As a follow up to Monday's UN world drug report the Economist, a long time supporter of drug law reform, has published a tongue in cheek editorial yesterday tellingly demonstrating how the global illicit drug market operates as a multinational business much like any other, albeit minus any legal regulatory framework, and with violence as its modus operandi. The only laws the market responds to are those of supply and demand. The piece also subtly highlights the irrelevance of current enforcement measures.

Is the narcotics industry in trouble?

"FOR decades business has been booming. Over the years rival operators have found ways to lift production, they have devised inventive supply chains that reach across the globe and have expanded markets so that they supply loyal consumers in almost every country. Estimates are hard to confirm, not least because enterprises have been reluctant to open their accounts to public scrutiny, but the industry was thought to claim global annual sales of some $320 billion in 2005 (tax free). And although some better-known trade bodies (the Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels, for example) have been forced to close shop, largely as a result of tough state regulation, the industry as a whole remains in rude health."

read the complete article here