Cutting away the failure of drugs policy

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For markets to work efficiently, product information needs to be transmitted between the producer and consumer: competition and regulations mean few businesses could survive while keeping consumers ignorant of their product.. However, prohibition creates black markets, where reliable information is hard to come by. In the market for illicit drugs this is a highly dangerous problem: lack of information about the quality and composition of substances is potentially lethal.

It was therefore interesting to read CUT, a publication by Liverpool John Moores University that looks at the adulterants and bulking agents found within street drugs. Contrary to public perception, dealers don’t cut their wares with copious amounts of rat poison and brick dust, as they have little incentive to bump off their clients. A large number of adulterants are in fact relatively harmless substances such as sugar, caffeine and paracetamol. Nevertheless, the report also found examples of some rather more dangerous contaminants, such as lead within heroin samples and cannabis laced with glass. It also found chemicals such as pesticide and vetinary medicine added to certain drugs to intensify or prolong their effect. However, the report is far from conclusive as it is unable to suggest the percentage of drugs that are adulterated, or even the concentration of contaminants found in existing samples.

The main problem is that street drugs are rarely analyzed for anything other than to assure criminal convictions. Supplied underground, illegal drugs are free from all quality assurances and proper scrutiny, so users are kept in the dark on the risks they are facing. This is just one of the many reasons why policymakers should recognize that the war on drugs has been an utter failure. The market for recreational drugs should be legalized and regulated, bringing £6 billion of activity into a system of proper control. With detailed information easily at hand and stringent quality controls, people would be able to take educated decisions with full responsibility for the consequences.

The Spirit Level Delusion

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You might be familiar, if you are brave enough to stray over to the dark side of the UK press, with a book called The Spirit Level. It's the sort of thing that Polly and the rest have been squealing over all year: proof positive that inequality, in and of itself, makes life worse for everyone.

There's really only one slight problem with the book. None of the claims really seem to stand up. Just to show that there's no ideological bias about this, a lefty (well, he's just been selected as a Labor candidate for a safe seat) Australian economist:

In other words, countries that experienced big increases in inequality saw bigger improvements in health than those where inequality stayed stable or fell. In most cases, the effect isn’t significant, but the data certainly don’t support the hypothesis that rising inequality harms population health......After working on inequality and mortality, I have had similar experiences in looking at data on inequality and savings with Alberto Posso (we find no relationship), and in looking at inequality and growth with Dan Andrews and Christopher Jencks (we find that inequality has no impact on growth over the period 1905-2000, and conclude that inequality is good for growth over the period 1960-2000). In both cases, I had begun the project secretly hoping to find that inequality was bad, and wound up reluctantly reporting no such thing.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the idea that rising inequality harms either population health or growth there. Another economist looks at the claims here and here's a view from Sweden, showing that some claims really aren't capable of being upheld.

Now you might think that this is all just a bit of sour grapes but it is really a rather important point. The claim that inequality makes us all worse off would be important if true. If it isn't true this is also important: for then we would know that increased inequality doesn't make us all worse off. Whichever part is the truth has huge implications for the amount of redistribution (which of course has its own effects on things like long term growth) we do or don't do.

The importance of that truth is why I'm giving this blogger's new book a plug. The Spirit Level Delusion. It's a detailed factchecking of the claims and evidence: one of the sort that I would have done if I had the necessary skills.

Let's find out what the truth actually is, shall we?

The thin end of the wedge

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Earlier this week, three men were convicted for committing a £1.75m armed robbery at Heathrow in 2004. They were tried without a jury, convicted by a single judge, and sentenced to 15, 17 and 20 years of imprisonment respectively. This is a deeply worrying development.

Yes, the men were dangerous, violent thugs who deserved to be convicted and punished. And yes, there were understandable reasons why holding a jury trial was problematic: at a previous trial, it is alleged that jurors had been threatened; providing them and their families with round-the-clock protection would have been both difficult and prohibitively expensive. But despite all this, I’m disturbed that such a fundamental liberty – the right to be tried by a jury of ones’ peers – should be discarded so lightly.

Perhaps the worst thing is that the evidence on which the decision to not have a jury was taken has not, and will not, be disclosed. Apparently it is too ‘sensitive’ for the public eye. Putting so much faith in administrative discretion makes me very uncomfortable – maybe they made the right call this time, but who is to say they will in the future. This, ultimately, is what the rule of law is all about – protecting us from the arbitrary exercise of state power.

Would strict adherence to the rule of law mean that bad people would sometimes go free, and that justice would occasionally not be done? Yes, of course it does. But I’m reminded of the following exchange from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, which encapsulates this issue perfectly:

William Roper: “So now you’d give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get to the Devil?”

Roper: “I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you -- where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat. This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast -- man’s laws, not God’s -- and if you cut them down -- and you’re just the man to do it -- do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of the law, for my own safety’s sake.”

“Ban Mephedrone!” urge cocaine and ecstasy dealers

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Realising the danger that ‘legal highs’ pose to their core market of young night-clubbers, cocaine and ecstasy dealers mobilised every lawyer and lobbyist at their disposal to ensure that their rivals’ products are outlawed as quickly as possible.

Although this is clearly far-fetched, the principles are very sound. If these people actually had lawyers and lobbyists, they certainly would have done this. As Levitt and Dubner controversially wrote in ‘Superfreakonomics’, if prostitutes had had access to an organised lobbying apparatus, they certainly would have pushed for those who have sex for free to be outlawed, or at least regulated out of the market, in order to ensure that more people keep paying for it. Why would it be any different for drug dealers?

As Milton Friedman noted, the chief economic effect of American and British drug prohibition is ‘to protect the drug cartel’. Prohibition works wonders for those with the most resources to evade the law. Those who can grow coca leaves on vast swathes of Columbian jungle before processing it in underground factories and shipping the finished product to our shores by airplane or submarine. These are the same people who can afford to buy-off the police, or bomb those who can’t be bought. By criminalising drugs, smaller domestic producers are driven out of the marketplace, and only the big players can afford to survive – in economics speak, the barriers to entry are prohibitive, and new competitors can’t emerge. As Friedman said, “What more could a monopolist want?”

Banning legal highs will likely have the desired effect – people will stop using them, or at least use them less frequently. But does anyone really believe that people will not find other ways to get high, or use more dangerous drugs instead? Banning these legal highs is playing straight into the hands of those the law is aimed to attack.

Catholic Care wins in High Court

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Mr Justice Briggs, sitting in the Chancery Division of the High Court, today allowed an appeal by Catholic Care against a decision of the Charity Tribunal. The question was whether an exception in the Sexual Orientation Regulations would allow charities, like adoption agencies, to discriminate against gay couples that wish to adopt.

Catholic Care acts as a last resort option for ‘hard to place’ children, and has a much better record than those adoption agencies run purely by local authorities. They only offer this service to straight, married couples, in accordance with their religious beliefs. However, they did not, as some in the media have argued, try to justify their selection policy on the grounds of their right to religious belief, and nor should they have.

Rather they seek to justify it because they cannot continue without the financial support of the Catholic Church, and they will therefore have to close, rather than change their policy. Therefore, but for Catholic Care, those children would likely not be adopted at all. It is also important that Catholic Care’s service does not prejudice those with a different policy – plenty of other agencies did not adopt the same stance as the Catholics. This is what will have to be argued before the Charity Commission, now that the High Court has rejected the original analysis that no justification was possible in law.

In that regard, this is quite a narrow decision, being based entirely on an interpretation of the relevant regulation. It will require further litigation by Catholic Care before they are allowed to continue with their goal of housing needy children.

Despite this, it is something of a moral victory for those who feel that a government that would rather see adoption agencies close, in a crusade against any form of discrimination by anyone anywhere, really shouldn’t be so overbearing. For once, the government should try to consider the effects of the law it passes – in this case, on the children who would not be adopted if agencies like Catholic Care had to close, rather than merely the good intentions behind the legislation. Opponents of today’s decision have definitely got the wrong idea – the existence of Catholic Care does not mean that homosexuals cannot adopt. It just means that they cannot force Catholic charities to help them. It is on those ‘freedom of association’ grounds that the moral or ideological battle should be fought, even if the legal battle is waged piecemeal on technicalities.

As an atheist, I have no affinity for the Catholic Church, and don’t agree with Catholic Care’s stance on the issue, but this is the right decision for allowing them to potentially take that stance and provide good homes for needy children.

Mephedrone: Dealing with the facts

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Following the death of two teenage boys this week, the papers were awash today with knee-jerk calls for the banning of the legal high mephedrone. The Tories have promised an urgent review into all legal highs, while the National Association of Teachers has branded the drug as dangerous as heroin and cocaine, and called for an outright ban.

It is infuriating to see that, despite years of failed policies, public figures refuse to accept that the prohibitionist ‘war on drugs’ has caused much more harm than good. One particular problem is that prohibition breeds ignorance. Little is known about any new drug, and under a system of prohibition there is no incentive for suppliers to offer a 'safe' product and no mechanisms in place for consumers to demand this: in essense, there are no market mechanisms. Because of this, the ‘man on the street’ knows very little about important things such as a dangerous level of dosage, or drugs that mephedrone definitely shouldn’t be taken with.

It is ironic, therefore, that mephedrone’s popularity is a direct result of the government’s drug policy. In a study by Professor David Nutt on the danger and damage caused by various drugs, ecstasy was ranked far below substances such as tobacco, alcohol and even cannabis. Despite this, it is categorized as a Class A substance. Police crackdowns on the suppliers of the popular club drug MDMA, which is pure, powdered ecstasy resulted in its street price rocketing while its quality plummeted. Enter mephedrone; a component of plant fertilizer with effects similar to ecstasy and cocaine, but which comes with a smaller pricetag and is legal to possess. People can now purchase vast quantities of mephedrone with ease, and consume a substance they know very little about.

In a few months the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs will report its findings on the danger of mephedrone. However, to ban the drug if it is potentially dangerous would most likely lead to another obscure drug emerging to take its place, and a rise in drug-related criminal activity.

Instead, the death of these teenagers should be used as a catalyst to examine how, and why, prohibition is ineffective. In this case, the absurdly punitive classification of a relatively harmless drug has turned clubbers in to criminals, and encouraged them to take greater risks with their health. This is, however, just one of the UK drug policy’s many, many failings.

Enough is enough

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Check out this excellent new video from the Drinkers' Alliance. Punitive taxation on alcohol is often justified on the grounds that alcohol (and in particular 'binge drinking') causes enormous social problems, or negative externalities, which ought to be 'priced in' the initial cost of a drink. But the key point to remember here is the one Tom Papworth made recently in relation to dangerous dogs: "It is a sign of extremely bad law-making that, rather than target criminal activity, the legislator seeks to make the wider community compensate for the bad behaviour of a few. It smacks of collective punishment: somebody from your village breaks the law, so your whole village is burnt to the ground." Law-abiding Britons have put up with this approach for far too long as it is - now is the time to fight back, and resist the onward march of the bully state.

Playing with crime figures

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No, no, don't worry, I'm not about to wade into which set of crime figures are correct, the survey or what the police write down. Nor even about which political party is tripping over its own feet least in playing football with the figures. No, rather, I just want to address a particular point that's often made.

While the definitions of some crimes may have changed over time, or be either way crimes, murder is murder so that's the gold standard to look at. Changes in the murder rate will therefore be the best guide to whether crime is increasing or not.

This isn't, I sorry to have to say, entirely true. Yes, we can indeed measure murder rather better than we can all other crimes. But we're still missing something. That is that medical treatment of trauma victims has got a great deal better over the decades: people attacked who would have died in earlier times (ie, would have been murdered) now survive (and are thus not murdered). So by counting only the number of people successfully murdered we're confusing two entirely different things. The number of people attacked so that they might be killed and the number of those who survive or succumb to such attacks. Yes, this is just a newspaper report, but the estimates of how important this is are large:

Improvements in emergency care over the last 40 years have helped to lower the death rate among assault victims by nearly 70 percent, a new study says.

Those figures are for 1960 to the turn of the century. Over that time (page 9 here) murders have gone from 300 ish a year to 600 ish a year (one year's figures are no good for one event, a bombing, or Harold Shipman, can change the figures hugely). Population has also changed of course, from 48 million or so to what, 65 million today?

Now quite how you want to crunch all of those figures together is up to you but the number of murders has doubled while population has risen by only 35%...and we would expect, as a result of better medical care, the number of murders (assuming assaults of equal severity taking place) to have fallen substantially.

All of which leads to two points. Murder is, by definition, successfully killing someone and if the rate of success changes then we cannot use the simple number of murders as our standard by which to measure crime rates. And when we adjust by one way of looking at that success rate, the medical care which prevents such success, then it really does look at if Britain has become a much more violent place over the decades. For murder should have fallen and it's risen.

Banning the burqa

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Under David Cameron’s leadership the Conservative party has taken great pains to rebrand itself as a multicultural, more socially liberal party. However, there will always be individuals that will let this front down, and most recently this has been done through the comments of Philip Hollobone, MP for Kettering.

According to The Telegraph, Hollobone used a Commons debate on International Women’s day to state: ''I seriously think that a ban on wearing the burqa in public should be considered.'' He reveals he realized “how inappropriate and, frankly, offensive, it is for people to wear this apparel in the 21st century'', when he stumbled across a burqa’d woman in a park. For a start, the context for this ‘revelation’ seems to suggest how little exposure Mr Hollobone has to Britain’s veiled Muslim population, making one wonder how informed his judgment of the burqa can be. However, it is his suggestion that the burqa should be banned because he, and others, find it offensive that is his mistake.

Freedom of expression and freedom of worship help form the bedrock of a free, open and tolerant society. For Hollobone to say, therefore, that the burqa “goes against the British way of life” is at best absurd, and at worst rather worrying.

By choosing International Women’s Day to highlight his opposition to the more restrictive forms of Islam, Hollobone may have believed he was championing women’s rights. However, his ill-thought plan to ban the burqa would cause more harm than good, by attacking a visible symptom of an illiberal movement and not the roots. Making it illegal to wear the burqa in public would do nothing to change the opinion of those who believe it is essential for women to remain covered, and would simply see women confined to the walls of their homes.

Should we have open-carry?

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The BBC news on Thursday night featured a report on the upcoming Supreme Court decision on the Chicago gun ban; litigation launched after the successful case of DC v Heller, which overturned a similar outright prohibition on handguns in Washington DC.

The legal argument is actually very interesting, and detailed opinions on it can be accessed at the Cato Institute here. However, even for those who don’t share my academic interest in 2nd Amendment jurisprudence, the BBC’s report was worth watching. It largely focussed on the effect of laws already in force in Wisconsin, which allow the open-carry, but not concealed-carry, of handguns. It showed how responsible, law-abiding citizens carrying guns openly leads to people both feeling and being safer.

The story that ran slightly later in the news concerned the jobs due to be lost at train station ticket offices across London, chiefly because of the advent of the automated Oyster card. The RMT Union gave its predictable little spiel arguing in effect for swapping motor cars for cycle rickshaws, because they don’t understand the economic benefits of technological advancement. However, a lot of customers interviewed by the reporter did seem genuinely concerned that a lack of visible staff at stations would lead to an increase in crime.

That’s when the connexion between the stories struck me. Why don’t we stop relying on low-paid staff at stations to provide visible security, and instead have open-carry firearms laws?

Open-carry is very ‘visible’ – far more so than staff in neon jackets on station platforms, or standing behind ticket counters. It allows people to take charge of their own security. In addition, it empowers people to look out for one another as good neighbours, rather than relying on there always being someone official on hand to bail them out. It also means that criminals, who in our country seem to have no qualms about carrying and using knives to assault innocent citizens, would be placed at a disadvantage – far more of a disadvantage, in fact, than they are if, carrying knives, they are confronted by a station clerk, not carrying a knife.