Transcript Fighting Addiction to Drug War: What America Can Learn

Fighting Addiction to Drug War:
What America Can Learn From Europe
An economic analysis of drug policy
By
David W. Rasmussen
Dean, College of Social Sciences
James H. Gapinski Professor of Economics
The Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA
[email protected]
Introduction
Economic Analysis is based on three basic propositions:

Individuals and people in institutions respond to incentives

Resources are limited

Substitution is possible for all actors
The Moral: Public Policy often generates unintended consequences
Origins
The Florida project was funded by the Florida Legislature.
Two Strategies:
1.
Trace the impact of policy on prices and quantities
(not reliable data)
2.
Analyze the trade-offs generated by the drug policy
Introduction
Praise was not forthcoming from FL public officials:
“The Florida State Study is fatally flawed”
Florida Governor Bob Martinez
“I must respectfully disagree with the findings of a recent Florida State
University study… The conclusions are further flawed…
Other conclusions in the study are similarly flawed.”
Robert R. Dempsey
Former Commissioner of Florida Department of Law
Enforcement
Outline of the paper
I. The Drug War: Growth in drug arrests
II. Criteria for evaluating success of the drug war.
III. Europe’s role in America’s drug policy debate
IV. Is America Addicted to Drug War?
V. Prospects for peace
Growth In drug Arrests Per Capita
1960-2003
UNITED STATES
Drug Arrest per 100,000 population
Average Annual
Percentage Change
Year
Actual
1960
26
1965
34
6.2
1970
228
114.1
1980
256
2.5
1984
312
4.4
1989
538
14.5
1990
449
-16.5
2003
575
2.2
Assumed 2.4% growth after
1970
228
486
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Crime in the United States, (various years).
Growth In drug Arrests Per Capita
1960-2003
76 percent of growth occurs in 1965-70 and 1985-89
1965-70 (35%)
1984-89 (41%)
The 1984-89 escalation is related to the rise of asset forfeiture, a
change in police incentives. The in-rem proceeding means you do
not have to make an arrest to seize an asset. The logic is to make
drug users pay for drug enforcement. The result was that more
drug arrests occurred.
Key incentives are that:
Police keep assets and, crucially,
Local legislatures do not cut funding in response to “profits;”
Growth In drug Arrests Per Capita
1960-2003
We estimate this would result in 11,825 fewer persons sent to
prison for drug offenses in 2003, resulting a a cost savings in
excess of $3.86 billion
Criteria for Evaluation



Increase in money price and reduced quantity (availability)
Reduce the demand for “drugs” (raise full price)
Reduce crime
Economic and social costs of the drug war that we will not
consider here are huge:
Quantifiable costs
 Costs of excessive incarceration
 Prosecution and court costs
 Lost worker productivity
Criteria for Evaluation
Non Quantifiable costs

Impacts of drug enforcement on community stability

Erosion of civil liberties via forfeiture laws
(not required for the war)

Disruption of families


Long-term consequences for the individual
Implicitly this evaluation asks the following question: if
the war on drugs did not cost anything, would it pass a
benefit/cost evaluation?
Criteria for Evaluation
A Hypothetical Illicit Drug Market
The Drug War is designed to lower consumption (Q)
Criteria for Evaluation
Strategy 1: Reduce Supply
Reduced supply raises price and lowers consumption
Reduced Supply
Reduced Supply
As is customary in all free market industries, domestic and
foreign suppliers adjust to changing cost conditions and therefore
will act to offset the impacts of drug policy. Multitudes of
entrepreneurs can always outwit a government bureaucracy. The
result: an increase supply due to much more powerful forces
that those posited by Caulkins et al.
This last point is crucial because it points out that
entrepreneurs act like economic agents and change their
behavior in response to relative prices and costs. When drug
policy imposes higher costs and lowers profits drug, suppliers
and sales reps do not quit the business (as drug warriors hope),
but they change their behavior in ways that increase profits
Criteria for Evaluation
Strategy 2: Reduce Demand
Reduce demand by increasing punishment
Criteria for Evaluation
The Expected Value of Punishment
Probabilities
Sentence
Arrest
Guilty
Prison
In
Days
0.001
0.33
0.19
1095*
0.87
0.06
1.44
0.001
0.33
0.19
633**
0.87
0.045
0.83
* 3 Years
**3 Years Discounted at .25
% Served
Expected Days
Expected Hours
Criteria for Evaluation
“An FDLE survey of police chiefs and sheriffs in Florida several
years ago established a consensus that at least 50 percent of the
crime rate was directly related to the drug problem. These people
are professionals on the front line of the war on crime and drugs.
Should we believe them or be deluded by a couple of economics
professors?”
Robert R. Dempsey, former Commissioner FDLE
Criteria for Evaluation
United States
Crimes per 100,000 population
Annual
Year
Violent
Rate of Change
Annual
Property
Rate of Change
1960
160.9
1726.3
1970
363.5
12.6
3621.0
10.8
1980
596.6
6.4
5353.3
4.8
1990
726.6
2.2
5073.1
-0.5
2003
475
-2.7
3588.4
-2.3
Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics, 2003.
Criteria for Evaluation
Theory of apparent success: use drug laws when officials can’t prove an Index
I crime; if they get the right people, crime might fall due to incarceration
Two state of the art time series studies:
Shoesmith (2005) and Corman and Mocan (2000).
Common factors in crime trends
Violent crime: per capita income, drug crime incarceration, and alcohol
consumption
For property crime: add arrest rates and drug arrest rates
Criteria for Evaluation
Corman and Mocan study uses New York City data from 1970 to
1996 and is therefore preferred to Shoesmith’s study using
national data.
They find “a positive relationship between drug use and
robberies and burglaries” but conclude that “increase law
enforcement is a more effective method of crime prevention in
comparison to efforts targeted at drug abuse.”
Economic Model of Crime Deterence
How Drug Arrests Benefit the Police
Agencies
More Drug Arrests (Arrests are a measure of police “productivity”)
Lowers the probability of arrest for Index I Crimes
Increase the number of reported Index I Offenses (Suggesting
the “need” for more police)
Bigger Police Department budget
Europe’s Role in America’s Drug Policy
Debates
The drug war failed to:
 Increase in “full” price and reduced quantity
 Reduce the demand for “drugs”
 Reduce crime
Europe has a critical role to play, i.e., to reveal alternatives
to the failed drug war
Provide the laboratories for policy alternatives and the
evaluation
Europe’s Role in America’s Drug Policy
Debates
Dynamics of individual drug use histories in various
environment is important for drug policy. This is true for
both causal and regular users.
If casual and regular drug users are no worse off with a
harms reduction approach, the case for the ineffective drug
war is virtually eliminated. This can only be evaluated in
Europe, but even here cultural differences will make the
results only suggestive for the U.S.
Europe’s Role in America’s Drug Policy
Debates
If the U.S. we were really pragmatic, we would pay for
research on selected alternative policies in Europe.
That way any unintended consequences from failed
experiments would be borne by Europeans and Americans
and we would share the knowledge generated by the
evaluation research.
Is America Addicted to Drug War?
One primary reason the drug war has had political support is
that Americans tend to believe that there is a solution for
every problem.
Factors reinforcing this tendency
 Our Commitment to the Idea of Progress
 A Historical Commitment to the Puritan ethic
 Difficulty of dealing with ambiguity in our politics
 A strong minority of social conservatives
Prospects for Peace: Recovery from
Addiction in Possible
U. S. Federalism in Action
46 states passed some kind of drug policy reform between 1996
and 2002
-
Alternatives to incarceration
Protecting medical marijuana patients and providers
Reforming drug sentencing
Expanding sterile syringe availability
Reducing civil asset forfeiture abuses
Source: Drug Policy Alliance, State of the States (September 2003)
Effective Drug Control: Toward a
New Legal Framework
State-Level Regulation as a Workable Alternative
to the “War on Drugs”
King County Bar Association
Drug Policy Project
1200 Fifth Avenue, Suite 600
Seattle, Washington 98101
206/267-7001
www.kcba.org