Without having yet read the article, it seems exceedingly unlikely that our efforts abroad have had no impact on internal drug pricing. Unless we're doing literally nothing (which I don't think is the case) or the demand for drugs is exceedingly elastic (also not the case) our efforts have to be causing an increase in the price of drugs, either through reduced production or increased cost of avoiding detection/arrest/death.

I would've thought so myself, and the article makes clear that while prices have gone up in the short-term due to such efforts, in the long run drug prices have remained nearly the same. It quotes some Drug Warriors lamenting this very fact.

It seems like drug prices would drop sharply if we suddenly applied no pressure to foreign states to curb their drug production. I'll have to read the article at some point.

I guess what you have to consider is how effective our pressure is.

God, it can't be zero can it? That would be exceedingly disappointing. Whether or not I think it's a good idea, I'd like to think that somewhere in this expensive expansive operation we were able to burn down one poppy field or arrest one person driving a flatbed full of heroin. I'd like to have at least a little bit of faith in our tactical abilities.

There's been a lot of success in the sense of burning down production centers, capturing drug runners, etc., but the demand is so high that eventually production moves elsewhere and the price comes back down.

By the way, the article talks about one success the Drug War has had: quaaludes!

The common phrase I hear used in drug stuff is "whack-a-mole" (here's a few mentions: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.moz...)

If you push down on coca fields in Columbia, someone will find a way to start growing in Bolivia. If you push down on a poppy grower in Afghanistan, someone will start up in Turkey or Morocco. You push down on marijuana from Mexico, and BC starts up. You push down on marijuana from BC, and we see increases in production in the suburbs, especially the Northwest and Southeast US.

There is no (effective and humane) way to decrease demand for drugs, so simple economics would suggest that someone is gonna try to find a way to meet that demand, no matter how they've gotta do it.

By putting drugs into a tightly taxed and regulated market, and taking them out of the criminal market, we will stop making some very bad people a lot of money (sound familiar to anyone out there?). We could also use the money to pay for services like schools and drug and alcohol abuse counseling.

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A friend of mine has written a book arguing that the best way for local communities to fight the "war" is to go after users, not sellers, and to impose very high punishment costs. Economically it makes sense, but the policing/enforcement aspect is a bitch.

Let alone the ethics.

There might be some ways to respond to that concern. Prison seems wholly inappropriate, but a large fine and mandatory "incarceration" in a treatment facility mightn't be out of the question. I suppose it all depends on the drug at issue, too.

She's an economist. She has no ethics.

ha

I really strongly don't believe, ethics aside, that any threatened penalty, even something horrifically totalitarian, would work to eliminate the customer base for drug producers, distributers, dealers. Sure, maybe you'd notice a blip in the stats, but I highly suspect that there are more or less perfect consumer-side equivalents to the supply-side risks that are taken to keep the market running.

Horrifically totalitarian penalties COULD be very effective...

Hasn't the illegal drug market continued to operate even under totalitarian regimes? I mean, I might be wrong, but I think people will do drugs as long as they're available, and one way or another they're always available. But maybe I'm being too extreme: maybe under effectively enforced martial law, where the police stay completely on the side of the law and the borders are close to smuggle-proof and the government isn't in any way endorsing the production or distribution of illicit substances, and the penalty for being caught with an illicit substance is something worse than staying sober under extreme totalitarian conditions, maybe in such a nation the drug market would evaporate.

I think it's pretty hard to be systematic when trying to imagine a world in which the black market for drugs disappears. It pretty quickly flies off into the realm of utter fantasy.

I'd argue it the other way. Imagine a world in which there were no drug laws whatsoever (or perhaps mere age restrictions like we have now with tobacco). Would you think that drug use rates in this country would stay stable in the long run if we suddenly instituted such a policy? The use of lighter drugs (pot) seem especially prone to dramatic increases in casual use under such a scenario.

I can picture a lot of people, myself included, who would be more prone to using light drugs if they weren't illegal.

I probably wouldn't dispute that, but isn't it a partial straw man, if you will? The question at hand is, is an increasing militarization of drug control strategy coupled with increasing criminalization of drug users justifiable in terms of effectively eradicating the market for illegal drugs, and if not, what are the other options? I would say that in a world where even a modicum of democracy is desired, there is an upper limit on what formal punishment can do to deter drug users.

Now I will acknowledge that my stance is a bit extreme by most standards- in my mind, criminalizing drug use is like criminalizing fun and depression, in a world where fun is necessary for survival and depression is an unavoidable byproduct of reality. So I personally think that the point of departure for drug control policy should be that users are 100% non-criminals. Given that that's off the map for the time being, and given that current punishment for drug use is pretty stiff and pretty ineffective, I believe that a decrease rather than an increase in penalization, the widespread availability of real legal alternatives to what you can get on the black market, and a radical increase in the availability of treatment for addiction, is what will decrease activity on the illegal drug market.

Why do you consider it ineffective? If we're stopping all those people who would have done drugs in my world from doing drugs, then it's effective by somebody's standards. We've prevented all that theoretically unwanted drug use from occurring. If our goal is merely to reduce drug use, then mission accomplished.

By the way, I'm for full legalization of all drugs (including an end to the concept of prescription drugs), so don't think I'm not in fact with you on this point. I'm just not sure that the argument that criminalization is ineffective is entirely correct.

But that's why I say it's sort of a straw man argument. "Somebody's standards" presupposes a world view that I think is fundamentally flawed. Sure, if your reference is "somebody's standards" then that somebody can run numbers, evaluate them according to their standards and show me that their methods are effective to some degree. But in this context, my definition of efficacy, for one thing, means that when I see those numbers I really don't see any measure of efficacy. Now I'm going to get very simplistic b/c I have a test tomorrow: if a decrease in heroin users corresponds to an increase in incarceration, and a decrease in weed smoking is correlated w/ an increase among the general population of active fear of the law, then I think whatever "effectiveness" "somebody" points to is diminished by these side-effects of their "effective" measures.

As soon as my test is over, though, I will eagerly read the RS article: I am very willing to bet there are much more interesting and rational ways to explain why the definition of effectiveness you're pointing to is a flawed definition.