Policy

Cannabis criminalization helps law enforcement (perform unconstitutional searches)

 

Opponents of cannabis decriminalization often state we should keep it criminalized in order to help law enforcement catch bad guys, and indeed it serves as an important tool for justifying searches on individuals and premises. After all, these searches may turn up more harmful criminal activities or individuals with warrants. LEO’s will often admit that in many cases they are not really after the pot and may even ignore the offense if no other offenses are found.

From a public safety standpoint, allowing “I smelled marijuana” to serve as probable cause for search may on net improve safety, but we should reject this notion because these searches are basically unconstitutional. Cannabis use, after all, is not what most officers are really after; it’s a justification.

The Fourth Amendment was not created by accident; the power to search without cause can and often is abused by LEOs, and the especially militarized flavor of drug raids in the U.S. is often needlessly violent and deadly.

When cannabis is no longer criminalized, yes, searching individuals based on a hunch (without real cause) will be harder—the goal of the Bill of Rights was not to make policing easy—but consider if we had never criminalized cannabis and it had at least as many users as it currently does. Knowing what we now know about the mild harms of the drug, would we really choose to turn at least several million people into regular criminals in order to give LE the power to search them without cause and occasionally using violent SWAT raids?

No we would not and should not. If anything this “LE tool” argument is a reason to decriminalize.

Bad Analogies Lead to Bad Policies

 

I was forwarded an e-mail that made a terrible analogy (my emphasis):

Here’s another way to look at the Debt Ceiling: … You come home from work and find …  your home has sewage all the way up to your ceilings.

Sewage would make a home immediately uninhabitable and actively damage the value of the home and its contents. Your first clue that this analogy is a failure is to see that the U.S. debt doesn’t do this. During deficits we’ve had great periods of growing prosperity and people from all over want to come here.

Consider also the huge debt we incurred fighting WWII. If debt were like sewage, we would’ve done more to stay out of the war, or the resulting debt would’ve led us to ruins by the 50s. Instead, high employment (fueled by deficit spending) left us with a strong economy able to quickly pay back that debt while prospering.

U.S. debt is–not coincidentally–more like a credit card. Yes, we’d prefer not to need one, and we must keeping paying on it, but besides the payment, it incurs no other short term liabilities, and no one is demanding we pay it off tomorrow, next year, or in our lifetimes. And unlike most consumers, the U.S. is known to be the most trustworthy borrower in the world, so creditors treat us well, never hitting us with surprise fees (i.e. it doesn’t have the risk associated with a consumer credit card), and in fact they’re willing to loan to us right now at almost no interest on current purchases. (We’ll come back to that.)

We know that credit is helpful during emergencies, regardless of your debt level. If sewage were flooding your home and you had only a credit card to pay with, you’d still call the plumber and charge it.

Back in the real world, a more apt metaphor for flooding in your home is our high unemployment. It is actively damaging human capital as people lose their skills, homes, and families from financial stress. And this damage is not limited to those directly affected. Being unemployed for long is known to reduce the wages you earn for the rest of your working life, which reduces the taxes you can pay, and your productivity, and this makes the country’s long term revenue & growth problems even worse.

The good news is that the waste water is receding. The bad news is that it’s receding slowly, while destroying the value of our nation’s workforce.

Even worse, irrational fears of deficits have distracted us from the real emergency. Politicians and hard money economists have convinced us to choose to accept damagingly high unemployment to avoid using the credit card, and–making the situation even more head-slappingly absurd–is that new purchases on our credit card accrue virtually no interest. We could borrow for almost nothing to help get people back to work doing real productive, useful things growing the economy, but instead we’re a madman yelling, “can’t use the credit card!”, while sewage floods in.

It’s unsurprising that this recovery is slow because it’s the only one in recent history where we’ve simultaneously slashed government spending (mainly at the state/local levels). While politicians complain about our out of control spending–mostly safety net spending that will recede after the recession–we’re fully suffering the effects of austerity, and just like the UK is finding out, it’s painful and ineffective.

I’ve been very much won over by the arguments and real evidence presented in support of Keynes. The hard money advocates have some compelling, ideologically pure arguments, but their models don’t seem to support what we see in the real world during recessions, and getting this wrong hurts millions of people, not just economists’ reputations. Krugman can be a annoyingly partisan hack, but even many right-leaning economists know he’s right on the economics and he regularly posts real data from the economy to prove it. And I’m certain most politicians secretly agree. Watch what happens when budget cuts are proposed in their area. Their argument becomes, “If we cut this (unnecessary) military project it will destroy the town.” And he’s right; government spending can be just as important as consumer spending in supporting an economy. Consumers without jobs can’t buy much and demand drives everything.

That doesn’t mean we should keep unnecessary projects, but at this time there are many useful tasks we should be hiring the unemployed to do. For many it was the jobs they were already doing before state budget cuts–like teaching and policing. This is the absolute best time to bail out state governments and to take up needed infrastructure projects that will have to be done eventually.

Very sadly, neither party will be making the race about the urgency of high unemployment, perhaps because it’s out of sight for them and the unemployed don’t fund SuperPACs. At the very least Obama has tried to pursue legislation like 2011’s American Jobs Act (killed by Republicans).

And despite all the hand-wringing about debt, neither presidential candidate is proposing serious plans to address it. Romney’s tax and growth plans are just fantasy and Obama’s don’t raise enough money to do much.

And if this post isn’t depressing enough, maybe David Frum will work for you.

For the 4-20 folks

 

Another year it still deserves saying… It’s long been clear the risks and harms of cannabis use are mild, and with that knowledge it should sicken us that people are regularly pulled into our criminal justice system because of cannabis use, sales, production, or political speech (see the example made of Marc Emery). Shame on us for keeping these unjustifiable laws on the books due to ignorance and inertia; each year they harm individuals far more than use of the drug, further erode our Fourth Amendment protections, and place otherwise law-abiding citizens at odds with the police.

Obama’s ONDCP still can’t be trusted

 

The Office of National Drug Control Policy under Bush, led by John Walters, was notorious for flat-out lies and evidence bending, especially regarding cannabis (it was a holy culture war for Ashcroft as well), but under Obama the office has mostly put focus on prescription drug abuse and “drugged driving”.

With 2012 bringing a host of cannabis-related ballot initiatives to voters, Walters’ style of deception is making a comeback. Look at this editorial.

Data also reveal that marijuana potency has almost tripled in the past 20 years. This is especially troubling for use among teens because the earlier a person begins to use drugs, the more likely they are to develop a more serious abuse and addiction problem later in life.

No studies I’m aware of link an increase in THC potency to anything mentioned in the second sentence. Also note that cannabis regulation could actually dictate potency, and kids are getting pot earlier under the current policy. The irony here is that higher THC potency reduces the amount of smoking (a good thing) the user needs to do to achieve the desired level of intoxication.

Would marijuana legalization make Tennessee healthier or safer? One needs to look no further than Tennessee’s current painful experience with prescription drug abuse.

Prescription drugs (generally highly pure synthetic opiates) are not cannabis.

…prescription drugs are legal, regulated, and taxed — and yet rates of the abuse…

Proposed cannabis regulation is generally not by prescription, so this sentence seems purely a distraction. Prescription drugs are scary!

Nationally, someone dies from an unintentional drug overdose — driven in large part by prescription drug abuse — on average every 19 minutes.

Prescription drug abuse is deadly, and is not cannabis use. Surely he forgot to mention cannabis is practically non-toxic.

What would America look like if we had just as many people using marijuana as we currently have smoking cigarettes, abusing alcohol, and abusing prescription drugs?

Why would we have that? It’s true that legalized cannabis would broaden the base of users, but there’s just not a lot of reason to cue scary music.

The bottom line is that laws that control substances have had a real and lasting effect on keeping drug use rates relatively low.

A gem of truth! Prohibition does reduce use, which is only one of many metrics by which you should judge public policy. We could certainly reduce alcohol use, premarital sex, masturbation, swearing, blasphemy and other ills by making them all illegal and giving police endlessly increasing funding and power to stamp them out.

Moreover, other addictive substances like alcohol and tobacco, which are already legal and taxed, cost much more in social costs than the revenue they generate.

It’s true, drugs that are not cannabis are not cannabis, and alcohol excise taxes should be raised considerably. Why has the ONDCP never taken up this cause? As Mark Kleiman put it, a drug policy that ignores alcohol is like a naval policy that ignores the Pacific. Further, you’ll not find a study that shows cannabis causes more damage than alcohol/tobacco.

This isn’t to say that we believe we can arrest our way out of our nation’s drug problem.

AFAIK in no way has the ONDCP or DEA promoted any policy that would lead to fewer arrests, and the federal grant programs that built up local drug task force militarization are still in place (with a nice boost in the stimulus act).

[blah blah diversion treatment programs]

Yes, a small percentage of daily cannabis users will find it difficult to quit, experiencing problems with sleeping, mood, and discomfort (think quitting tobacco). IMO introducing the criminal justice system as executed in the U.S. does not, on net, improve any user’s situation.

(BTW, evidence suggests that involuntary treatment is a waste of money for most people, who can and do quit even highly addictive substances by themselves with a credible threat of an immediate and short jail sentence. Sending cannabis users who happen to get caught to treatment is an incredible waste of money and hard-to-find treatment space.)

Marijuana legalization would be disastrous public health policy, because it would increase availability and increase the use of a substance that we know to be harmful.

While increase in availability and use is a certainty of commercial legalization (it’s not my preferred policy), there’s only a sliver of the accounting on display here. This may come as a shock, but people can enjoy and benefit from cannabis use, and of course the removal of the damaging aspects of prohibition reduce future damage.

On whole I see commercial “legalization” as being a small net win, and a large win if its mandated that users may only use vaporizers (or e-cigarettes); that higher CBD/THC ratios are required; and that it remains illegal to “spike” foods for unsuspecting eaters, which I suspect to be the leading cause of people “freaking out” and seeking ultimately unnecessary ER visits. There’s also some encouraging evidence that suggests that, in medical marijuana states, young adults and teens are substituting cannabis for alcohol use resulting in notable drops in traffic fatalities.

Decades of experience have shown that there are no “silver bullet” approaches to addressing our national drug problem.

So true, but discovering silver bullets requires firing a few; unless I’m mistaken we haven’t actually tried any other approaches over those decades regarding cannabis on the federal level. I think we should.

Where the murder of a thousand children is a sign of success

 

Only in the drug war.

“It may seem contradictory, but the unfortunate level of violence is a sign of success in the fight against drugs,”
— DEA head Michele Leonhart

From 2009:

“There will be more violence, more blood, and, yes, things will get worse before they get better. That’s the nature of the battle,”
— U.S. Ambassador Tony Garza

Before that Bush’s drug czar made similar statements. Obama/Clinton will stay the course, as most certainly would a Republican successor.

If thousands of U.S. citizens were dying and living in a police state to keep goods out of Canada, we might start reconsidering our trade policy.

Honduras Might Try Charter Cities

 

From the Charter Cities blog:

The government in Honduras is convinced that a charter city could be the safe playing field, with new rules, where Hondurans of all backgrounds can come together and put their skills to work with the financial resources, expertise, and technology available in the rest of the world.

I first read about charter cities last June, and I still see it as an incredibly important idea. Some of the best criticism of the idea I’ve read is from Ranil Dissanayake on the Aid Thoughts blog. This quote (from here) seems to sum up his argument:

Romer’s approach is wrong not because he thinks rules are important or that countries should invite rich Governments to enforce them, but because Romer thinks he already knows the rules, and that they can be imported anywhere. That’s not how it works. In a recent post I pointed out how different rich countries are from each other. That’s partly because their rules, evolved over hundreds of years in some cases, are specific to each of their own contexts. Romer doesn’t see this. He just sees the rules of today, and imagines that they can be peeled off a society and pulled over a new one, like a one size fits all t-shirt.

Firstly, I’ve yet to read that Romer thinks he “already knows the rules”, especially down to the details. From the early mention of the Honduras experiment, it seems unlikely that Romer, the Charter Cities organization, or foreign governments will be deciding all the rules. Secondly, some rules are much more important for success. E.g., Dissanayake mentions the variance in rape law between the U.S. and France, but these differences have little influence on economic progress (Koreans once all had similar, if not identical, cultural laws and norms, but changes in those aren’t what held North Koreans back), and immigrants in both countries easily accommodate either law. There are large chunks of the “rules” that could be left up to the host country or designed around the culture of the populations most likely to migrate there.

Also I think the incentives are right for allowing cultural enclaves some variance in their social laws if it reduces ethnic tension, since this would be destructive to land value (reducing the rents the host country can collect), to productivity (making investors unhappy), and to the credit of the organizations making the rules.

In short I think Dissanayake significantly underestimates the willingness/ability of people in poverty—and willing to move to escape it—to accept culturally different rules. I think in richer countries we’ve come to see cultural rules as so important because we can afford to.

Since I didn’t post it before, here’s the TED talk (19 min) on charter cities from 2009:

Kristof on Haiti & Trade

 

I can’t agree more.

Ultimately what Haiti most needs isn’t so much aid, but trade. Aid accounts for half of Haiti’s economy, and remittances for another quarter — and that’s a path to nowhere.

The United States has approved trade preferences that have already created 6,000 jobs in the garment sector in Haiti, and several big South Korean companies are now planning to open their own factories, creating perhaps another 130,000 jobs.

“Sweatshops,” Americans may be thinking. “Jobs,” Haitians are thinking, and nothing would be more transformative for the country.

Let’s send in doctors to save people from cholera. Let’s send in aid workers to build sustainable sanitation and water systems to help people help themselves. Let’s help educate Haitian children and improve the port so that it can become an exporter. But, above all, let’s send in business investors to create jobs.

Otherwise, there will always be more needs, more crises, more tragedies, more victims. Back in the cholera treatment center here in Mirebalais, health workers were still disinfecting the bed on which Mr. Merilus had died when, in the tent next door for milder cases, a middle-aged woman suddenly collapsed.

Nurses splashed water on her face but could not revive her. So they rushed her to the main cholera hospital tent to take the newly vacant bed there.

And that is the brutal cycle of poverty in Haiti that only jobs and trade can break.

Bring Back TSA Classic

 

At this point very few would expect that you should be able to carry metal items undetected onto a plane, so I don’t have too big a problem with metal detectors at airports. However, society has a general expectation that the image of one’s naked body is private, so we should certainly consider the new scanners a “search” under the Fourth Amendment, requiring some level of probable cause. Is showing up for a flight probable cause for suspicion that you have explosives on you?

Setting aside the question of constitutionality, there seems to be mounting evidence that TSA agents cannot handle the responsibility that this much power brings:

What happens when a terrorist successfully sneaks in bomb materials embedded under the skin? I’d guess the attack would fail for the same reason the underwear bomber’s did: our system already worked. Until all international airports with flights to the U.S. are outfitted with the new scanners and procedures, we still can’t prevent another underwear bomber (he boarded in Amsterdam).

“Buy American”

 

When economies are struggling, protectionism seems well-intentioned: By “buying American” we can go back that golden fantasy age when everything was American-made and everyone had a decent-paying job and could afford the latest luxuries. I have some examples that I hope can convince you that freer trade benefits everyone. It’s not completely intuitive; we commonly think that one person is always screwed in a deal; if it’s good for [insert foreign country], it must be bad for America. Continue reading  

Reasons to Extend Unemployment Benefits

 

From the left, Ezra Klein: the Bush tax cuts certainly majorly increased the deficit [CBO], and it’s unfair for the GOP to demand that the unemployment extension be deficit-neutral.

Further, if tax cuts don’t need to be paid for because they generate so much taxable economic activity that they pay for themselves, then neither do unemployment checks. After all, the two work very similarly: A tax cut puts more money in your pocket. Unemployment insurance puts more money in an unemployed person’s pocket. The difference is that the unemployed person is likelier to spend that money, which will generate more taxable economic activity than if that money is saved. That’s why Mark Zandi, an adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign, estimated (pdf) that a dollar spent extending the Bush tax cuts would generate .32 cents of taxable economic activity, while a dollar spent on unemployment benefits would generate $1.61 of taxable economic activity.

In other words, using the theory under which tax cuts pay for themselves, unemployment benefits are a lot likelier to pay for themselves. …

More reasons to extend them:

  • Ending benefits doesn’t magically create jobs
  • Among those who can’t find work, spending will drop to nothing, depressing local economies
  • Walked away from mortgages and desperately-liquidated assets will destroy tremendous amounts of long term value for short-term needs.

From the right, Megan McArdle:

…in recessions, the length of time for which people need “temporary” assistance stretches out. That means that the government has to respond with temporary benefit extensions. These aren’t just good for the people who are unemployed; it’s also good for us. Unemployment assistance is one of the “automatic fiscal stabilizers” that all but the most hard-nosed conservative economists agree help smooth the business cycle in modern industrial countries. Indeed, it’s one of the most effective forms of stimulus we have.

… [Not extending benefits would be] terrible economic policy–suddenly cutting off the taps would have nasty knock-on effects on the economy. And while it’s a lot of money, it’s one of the few government programs that pretty much unequivocally improve the net welfare of the American people. If Bunning wants to hold up something, how about finding some useless defense appropriations to complain about?