Mark Kleiman on Drugs

Why have you chosen Paying the Tab? 

First of all because it involves the most important abused drug, which is alcohol. Secondarily, because it’s one of the most lucid and beautifully-written policy books I know, and because it makes a very straightforward point: which is that in the US, alcohol is far too cheap and far too loosely regulated and the resulting social costs are enormous. Cook calculates that if we double the alcohol tax, which would increase the average price of a drink by about ten per cent, that would prevent about 500 murders a year. 

But prohibitions never work. 

Prohibitions do work: that’s why there’s less cocaine abuse than there is alcohol abuse. But badly implemented prohibitions can be terribly expensive. 

But Cook isn’t talking about making alcohol unaffordable. He is just talking about raising the price a little so that people would drink a little less. The people who would use less alcohol would be two groups – people with not much money, like teenagers, and people who drink a lot. It would have very little impact on the ordinary drinker. Somebody who has a drink a day would end up paying $35 a year in tax – he’d barely notice it. But somebody who has five drinks a day would notice it. 

How many alcohol-related murders are there in the US every year? 

There are about 16,000 murders a year and in more than half of them the victim or the perpetrator or both are drunk. Murdering someone generally doesn’t seem like a very good idea unless you’re drunk. 

You’d have to be quite drunk for murdering someone to seem like a good idea. 

No. You could be a little bit drunk and insult somebody who would then kill you. But also you could be a little bit drunk and get into a fight where you didn’t intend to kill the other guy but you did. One third of all the homicides in the United States are committed either in a bar or within 50 feet of the door.

Now you’ve chosen to talk about the Boyum and Reuter analysis of the US drug policy. 

This is the best analysis of what we’re currently doing about drug abuse and what we could do about drug abuse. This is not in the Boyum and Reuter book, but I personally think that what we are doing is mostly we are putting a lot of people in prison and telling a lot of lies. Drug-prevention education is not notorious for its factual content.

Because it overstates or understates the dangers? 

It overstates the dangers and minimises the distinctions between drugs, and overemphasises the distinction between illegal and legal drugs. What we should do is to have law-enforcement that is designed to minimise the damage done by drug dealing, as opposed to trying to minimise drug supply. We should make people who are heavy drug users and active criminals stop using when they are on probation or on parole. 

In terms of minimising the dangers done by drug dealing, do you mean, a kind of human security thing of protecting the people who aren’t involved? Or do you mean arresting the dealers rather than the users? 

I mean protecting the neighbourhood from the impact of drug dealing, which means focusing on the dealers who are the most violent. Not all dealers are equally violent and the current enforcement system actually creates advantages for the more violent over the less violent. 

How? 

Witnesses are afraid to testify against people who are reputedly scary. It’s easier to make people testify against the dealers that nobody is scared of. 

Is anyone taking any notice of this document? 

Well, it was certainly very well received and a lot of the things mentioned are now going on, but it definitely wasn’t a bestseller. It deserved to be.

Tell us about Help at Any Cost. 

This is an exposé of the juvenile drug-treatment racket and the cruelties that get practised in the name of tough love. They programmes are privately run or some are contracted by various government agencies, but they are mostly exploiting the fears of middle-class parents. 

So, your son is smoking a few joints and you send him to some horrible rehab? 

Yes. They practise physical and psychological abuse against people who are not yet adults, and there is some sexual abuse, though obviously that’s not part of the programme. But deliberate degradation and humiliation is part of the programme. 

Give me an example. 

They’re hauling them up and shouting at them, or the kids are required to wear a T-shirt that says ‘I’m a junkie’. Physical restraint, stress positions, hunger, sexual humiliation. I have somewhat blocked out the full horror of it. The book is survivors’ stories and analysis. Most of the kids don’t need to be in a residential treatment programme and, in any case, nobody is helped by being abused. 

Are these kids who are using drugs in a way that lots of people might consider fairly normal in growing up? 

Some of them, yes. But some have real serious drug problems – but even for them their treatment problem is more serious than their drug problem. 

Isn’t the addiction to whatever the substance is more of a symptom than a cause though? 

I think that’s a half-truth. There are people whose primary problem is that they got into a bad habit around some drug and if they didn’t have that bad habit then they’d be all right.