Matt Yglesias

Afghanistan’s Heroin Problem

It seems to me that the link between the poppy trade and the Taliban in Afghanistan is often discussed in the US in a somewhat confused way. Just because the opium trade is a major source of funding for the Taliban doesn’t mean that cracking down on “the opium trade” hurts the Taliban. If I deal heroin here in DC than a crackdown on “heroin dealers” would be bad for me if and only if I actually get shut down. If, instead, the police shut down other heroin dealers then that’s good for me, the cops have shut down the competition. Now if what they’re primarily concerned with is reducing the overall quantity of heroin dealing in the city maybe they don’t care about that. But if the issue is that some heroin dealers are using drug money to buy televisions and other heroin dealers are using drug money to buy bombs that are used to kill Marines then it would make sense for the cops to be a good deal more discriminating.

And this is basically the situation in Afghanistan. The Taliban gets money from the poppy trade, but it’s not my understanding that they have a monopoly on it. Under the circumstances, crackdowns on non-Taliban poppy farmers or traffickers is a way of enhancing the Taliban’s revenue by choking supply and raising prices. The logic of fighting the Taliban is that we should offer assistance to anyone involved in the poppy trade who’s not involved in funding the insurgency. Think of the US and the Taliban as like rival mafia operations. We want people involved in poppy to pay protection money (i.e., taxes) to Hamid Karzai and to avoid paying protection money to the Taliban. We want to prove that we can protect our poppy farmers/smugglers from the Taliban while cracking down on people who collaborate with the Taliban.

The problem is that formally sponsoring a group of favored poppy entrepreneurs would go against our the policy commitment that we (and other relevant players) have made to keeping heroin illegal.

I Have Smoked Pot and Don’t Really Care for It

Will Wilkinson has a good essay on marijuana in The Week:

Marijuana is neither evil nor dangerous. Scientists have proven its medical uses. It has spared millions from anguish. But the casual pleasure marijuana has delivered is orders of magnitude greater than the pain it has assuaged, and pleasure matters too. That’s probably why Barack Obama smoked up the second and third times: because he liked it. That’s why tens of millions of Americans regularly take a puff, despite the misconceived laws meant to save us from our own wickedness.

The Atlantic Monthly’s Andrew Sullivan has been documenting on his blog the stories of typical, productive Americans—kids’ football coaches, secretaries of the PTA—who smoke marijuana because they like to smoke marijuana, but who understandably fear emerging fully from the “cannabis closet.” This is a profoundly necessary idea. If we’re to begin to roll back our stupid and deadly drug war, the stigma of responsible drug use has got to end, and marijuana is the best place to start. The super-savvy Barack Obama managed to turn a buck by coming out of the cannabis (and cocaine) closet in a bestselling memoir. That’s progress. But his admission came with the politicians’ caveat of regret. We’ll make real progress when solid, upstanding folk come out of the cannabis closet, heads held high.

So here we go. My name is Will Wilkinson. I smoke marijuana, and I like it.

For my part, I’ll say that my name is Matthew Yglesias. I have smoked marijuana in the past, and enjoyed it on occasion, but mostly I haven’t really liked it so I don’t expect I’ll smoke any more in the future. That said, there’s still no really compelling reason that people who do enjoy it should be legally prohibited from doing so.

Is it really true that marijuana isn’t dangerous? Well, yes and no. I’m not a libertarian. I believe in paternalist measures for the sake of public health. And smoking marijuana is not a healthy undertaking. But it ought to be put on a spectrum that includes other unhealthy things that many people enjoy—neither beer nor cigarettes nor M&Ms are good for you. My understanding is that pot is more dangerous than candy, but less so than tobacco (which is more addictive and involves similarly bad-for-you inhaling of smoke) or alcohol. I’m inclined to think that all such substances should be legal, and subject to taxation and restrictions on permitted forms of marketing, with the level of taxation roughly scaled to the actual scope of the public health issue.

Obama and the Marijuana Question

Andrew Sullivan deems Barack Obama’s dismissive answer to a question about marijuana legalization “pathetic”.

I think it’s worth putting this into context. The administration has set up a number of mechanisms by which the public can get questions asked by the White House. This is a good idea, and will help break the hold that Beltway trivia has on the public conversation. This question—about whether legalizing and taxing pot wouldn’t be a good way to deal with the economic crisis—arose through one such process, as a result of an organized campaign by marijuana-legalizers to push it to the top of the agenda. The easy thing to do under the circumstances would have been to just ignore the question. Nobody made the administration do it. But they’re committed to the process, so given the organizers’ success in getting a lot of people to push this, they made it part of the town hall. That’s all a very good thing in my view.

But I do think the question deserved a more serious answer. Even something as simple as “I think the public health costs of legalizing marijuana would exceed any economic benefits” would be a real answer. Marijuana prohibition is popular, and pro-pot interests are not influential. So I don’t expect the president to come out in favor of reform. But it would be nice to see him discuss the issue seriously.

Good News at the ONDCP

Harold Pollack gives us the good news about the new team at the Office of National Drug Control Policy (”drug czar”):

Things are looking up, though. The new Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowski combines the credibility of a big-city police chief with a solid reputation for pragmatic and decent law enforcement practices. More important are those being brought in to back him up, particularly on clinical and scientific matters beyond the Chief’s personal experience.

Sources report that Tom McClellan will be Kerlikowski’s deputy director, and second-in-command. McLellan’s appointment is part of a weird pattern of hires made by the Obama administration: Appoint people who actually know what they are talking about rather than ideologues or the President’s smiling and funny roommate from boarding school.

The more you think not just about the administration’s big policy objectives on health care and energy, but also the large number of good people already in the place throughout the administration poised to do excellent work on dozens of second- and third-tier issues, the more frustrating it becomes to realize how it could all easily be brought down by poor handling of the banking crisis.

The Virtue of Quasi-Legal Status for Marijuana

Speaking of marijuana legalization polls, the question of course arises as to whether we should legalize pot. On this, I’ve come to stand with Mark Kleiman who conveniently repeated his gospel yesterday:

Substantively, I’m not a big fan of legalization on the alcohol model; a legal pot industry, like the legal booze and gambling industries, would depend for the bulk of its sales on excessive use, which would provide a strong incentive for the marketing effort to aim at creating and maintaining addiction. (Cannabis abuse is somewhat less common, and tends to be somewhat less long-lasting, than alcohol abuse, and the physiological and behavioral effects tend to be less dramatic, but about 11% of those who smoke a fifth lifetime joint go on to a period of heavy daily use measured in months.) So I’d expect outright legalization to lead to a substantial increase in the prevalence of cannabis-related drug abuse disorder: I’d regard an increase of only 50% as a pleasant surprise, and if I had to guess I’d guess at something like a doubling.

So I continue to favor a “grow your own” policy, under which it would be legal to grow, possess, and use cannabis and to give it away, but illegal to sell it. Of course there would be sales, and law enforcement agencies would properly mostly ignore those sales. But there wouldn’t be billboards.

That beautifully-crafted policy has only two major defects that I’m aware of: it wouldn’t create tax revenue, and no one but me supports it. On the drug-warrior side of the argument, even those who can read the handwriting on the wall won’t dare to deviate from the orthodoxy. As we did with alcohol, the country will lurch from one bad policy (prohibition) to another (commercial legalization). I just hope the sellers are required to measure the cannabinoid profiles of their products and put those measurements on the label.

I support it too! But if it is true that we need to choose between the current regime and an alcohol-style regime, I would certainly prefer commercial legalization. The public health harms would be real, but they’d be more than offset by the benefits—gains to non-abusive users, increased tax revenues that could fund worthwhile endeavors, resources currently devoted to a senseless criminalization scheme could be repurposed. This would also be an area in which America’s tradition of federalism and localism could be put to good use. In many parts of the country, people probably wouldn’t want to see any pot stores or “coffee shops” and they could, presumably, decline to license any even if federal law permitted such licenses in general.

By Request: Your Crime Control Policy On Drugs

A couple of questions asking me about the so-called “war on drugs.” It’s a multifaceted issue, of course, and part of the problem with our current approach is that different substances are treated in fairly arbitrary ways rather than with any kind of serious look at the harms in play. In general, I favor paternalism and policies that discourage people from doing stuff that’s harmful so I don’t regret that you can’t buy heroin at the local pharmacist anymore. A few things I think:

• Most jurisdictions should have higher cigarette taxes, though in some places it’s already so high that you’re starting to see substantial black market issues and those places need to be careful.
• Booze taxes should be higher most places and more clearly based on alcohol content.
• Conversely, restrictions on marijuana use should be eased. I think it’s good that we don’t have a “marijuana industry” with slick marketing campaigns and lobbyists on the Hill, but letting people “grow your own” in the basement and smoke it in your house would help undercut serious criminal enterprises and let people have some relatively harmless fun.
• Treatment that works should be more widely available, but unfortunately my understanding is that there isn’t much in the way of effective treatment beyond things like methadone replacement for opium addicts.
• We need to put much less emphasis on trying to fight drug abuse at the point of cultivation, which is taking a big toll on our foreign policy and not achieving much of anything.
• When we arrest people who have hard drug problems, we need to rely much more on things like coerced abstinence from drugs and much less on willy-nilly throwing people into jail.
• Law enforcement needs to get some reasonable goals in mind for its drug enforcement rather than “let’s seize a lot of drugs” or hazy and utopian efforts to eliminate the existence of illegal drugs. Maybe you’re targeting gangs that are killing people. Or maybe you’re targeting gangs that you hear are employing kids who belong in school. Or who are hassling people on the street. Conversely, you’re deliberately going easy on enterprises that are selling drugs out of a house somewhere but making trouble.

Those are some ideas, not by any means the last word. I think it’s really unfortunate that since the nineties crime drop, the public conversation about crime reduction has just vanished. It’d be one thing if the drop had been continuing, but in reality since the 2000-2001 recession we’ve generally been treading water. That doesn’t mean we need to “get tough” on crime, since we’re really past the limit where the “throw more people in jail” strategy is useful. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing more we can or should be doing.

Just The Facts on Drugs

Mark Kleiman offers a list of things the president-elect needs to know about drugs and drug policy. These aren’t recommendations, they’re just facts in a world where policies are often driven by hysteria or sentimentality rather than any serious effort to understand what’s happening.