Drugs in Britain: What’s effective?

The final post of my catch-up blogging on the past few issues of The Economist, I’ll be dealing with drugs yet again.

The report is kindest about treatment for drug-users, which gets five stars (the top mark) for effectiveness; three stars go to education programmes and the referral of arrested addicts. But on law enforcement, the most expensive plank of the anti-drugs strategy, things fall apart. Police-intelligence work scores two out of five, as does that of customs officers. At street level it gets worse: cracking down on drug-dealing and drug-related crime rates only one star, whereas action on “soft” drugs such as cannabis scores none at all…

On intercepted imports, for example, the Treasury noted that although seizures had increased, the ever-falling price of drugs in Britain suggested that “in large measure rising totals [of seized drugs] reflect rising volumes of drug imports.”

So England is facing the same problems with the drug trade as everyone else. Combating drug imports and trade is futile: it’s both profitable and pleasurable – a deadly combination for a government trying to prohibit any activity.

I’ve been trying to come up with a reasonable solution to the drug problem (and I’ll call it that, because of the negative externalities associated with addiction), and this article leads me to (what I think are) some fairly reasonable ideas.

• Don’t waste money fighting non-addictive low-impact drugs like marijuana. Why bother? It’s easy to grow, to obtain, to use, and many people say it has less negative social and personal impact than alcohol.
• Disseminate information, not fear. As terrifying as Arizona’s anti-meth ads may be, too often they appear to be unrealistic propaganda. Providing relevant and factual information about addiction will provide a far more lasting and serious impact. Educate the people on the margins, those “just thinking about it.”
• Help the addicts.  Take the money you would spend fighting the drug war, and invest that money in public infrastructure to help rehabilitate addicts. Stem the spread of diseases like AIDS, invest in methadone clinics, provide “testing kits” to help users protect themselves against foul chemicals cut into the drugs.

As far as I can tell, drug use and subsequent addictions are incurable problems of our society. They’re just too appealing to too many people. Focus on the drugs that cause problems. Hint: marijuana is not one of them. Educate people about addiction, don’t just try to scare them: the truth will do that on its own.

The war in drugs will always end in failure. Always…it’s about time we realize that and change tactics to recognize this fact.

Cadbury points out the problem with Fair-Trade

“‘But we found that productivity, not price, was the problem,” says Alec Cole of Cadbury.”

Here. This is a pretty good approximation of the problem with the fair-trade phenomenon. The fair-traders argue that by paying higher prices for commodities (coffee, produce, etc.) they allow the small farmers to earn enough to live-on and support their family, but they fail to realize that paying poor farmers above-market value for products only increases the incentive to farm that product, driving prices back down (sometimes known as oversupply).

Mr. Cole recognizes that the price of cocoa is not the problem for the farmers; it’s their thoroughly inefficient farming techniques. Many third-world farmers don’t understand fundamental basics such as crop-rotation, so without this kind of basic knowledge their productivity will remain low and they won’t ever be able to increase their profits.

I think Cadbury has it right:

“The aim of the venture is to show cocoa farmers how to increase yields using fertilizers and by working with each other. it will also help them to find additional sources of income by encouraging them to plant red peppers and mangoes, which can grow beneath cocoa trees, and coconuts, which can grow above them.”

Buy cocoa from the most efficient producers, the ones who are best at farming, because they’re the only ones who will be able to profit in the long run.

Give a man an inflated price for a commodity and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to farm and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

The Drug Problem: Disincentives

Although already briefly discussed here, I’m trying to catch-up on the blogging I missed this week while I was inundated with homework, so I feel the need to comment on the drug problems discussed in the past few issues of The Economist.

The America’s section in the February 2nd edition is preoccupied with drug fueled violence in Mexico and the Caribbean. Mexico is beginning to look increasingly like other South American countries already torn apart by the drug trade, while the Caribbean, best known for fruity drinks sporting bamboo umbrellas, could be devolving from tourist paradise to gang-controlled wasteland.

The subtext of the article should make anyone question the incentives at work in the drug trade. Any decrease in the supply of drugs caused by a decrease in the suppliers merely raises the equilibrium price for drugs increasing the incentive to become a drug dealer. In other words, the more illegal drugs are, the more incentives there are to get involved in the drug trade. Not only increased incentives to get involved, but increased incentives to protect your firm (read: gang) by means of increasingly extreme measures (read: violence).

The “legalize drugs” movement has quickly become trite because of the general populations immediate rejection of it, but, like Al Capone in prohibition-era Chicago, the only way to stop the gang-violence is to remove the incentives for it.

Besides the common-knowledge discussion of the gang controlled cross-border drug trafficking (which hasn’t been slowed despite both Mexican and American efforts), the article states that

“After years of talks, Mexico’s Congress looks set to approve, by mid-February, a reform that will convert the country’s legal arrangements from a Napoleonic-style inquisitorial system to an Anglo-American-style adversarial system. Also in the reform package are plans to give the police new powers, including the right to enter homes without a warrant when in hot pursuit.”

Blatant disregard for civil rights has become an increasingly prominent (and terrifying) facet of the war-on-drugs. Just like the argument against The Patriot Act, against sacrificing liberty in the face of fear, disregarding privacy for a perverse obsession with stopping private consumption of controlled substances.