Pubdate: Fri, 08 Nov 2013
Source: Detroit News (MI)
Copyright: 2013 The Detroit News
Contact:  http://www.detroitnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/126
Author: Mark Osler
Note: is a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas in 
Minneapolis and a former federal prosecutor in Detroit.

DRUG POLICY: MORAL CRUSADE OR BUSINESS PROBLEM?

Slowly, Americans are beginning to realize what a mess our "War on 
Drugs" has been. We have spent billions of dollars and prosecuted 
millions of people, all to little real effect.

Michigan has been front and center in this sad drama.

At the root of this failure is a simple error: We have treated 
narcotics as an issue of morality rather than business.

Our efforts have been focused on punishing relatively minor actors 
through mass incarceration rather than on the very different goal of 
shutting down drug businesses. A starting point as we reconsider our 
efforts should be the simple recognition that narcotics trafficking 
is first and foremost a business.

That means that we need to put business experts in charge of the 
effort to close down narcotics businesses. This change might make all 
the difference.

A business expert, for example, would know enough to identify a 
proper measure of success or failure.

The only real way to know if narcotics interdiction is working isn't 
how much cocaine is piled up in a bust, or how many people we lock 
up. Rather, the best measure is an economic one: the price of 
narcotics on the street.

If we are successful at restricting supply, the price should go up 
(given a rough consistency of demand). Hiking the price is important.

We have learned from cigarettes that raising the price of something 
addictive reduces usage rates.

Still, governments continue to measure success by narcotics seized, 
arrests made, and sentences imposed rather than the street value of 
illegal drugs.

Similarly, no knowledgeable businessperson would use an analytical 
device like the system we have in place to rank-order the importance 
of narcotics defendants, where the weight of drugs those defendants 
possess is usually used as a proxy for culpability. If you have a lot 
of drugs on you, you get a high sentence.

In reality, important figures in narcotics organizations don't 
possess drugs at all - that is left to mules, street dealers, and 
low-level managers.

Given this false proxy, it shouldn't be surprising that our prisons 
are stuffed full of mules, street dealers and low-level managers.

Who keeps the profit is a better gauge of responsibility and 
culpability. That's how a business works.

A businessperson would also realize the futility of sweeping up 
low-wage labor in an effort to close down a business.

Or, for that matter, grabbing inventory periodically (which we do via 
drug seizures) or occasionally seizing profits (which we do when we 
forfeit drug dealer's homes or cars). In real life, the way to shut 
down a business is to curtail cash flow, because without that there 
can be no labor hired, no inventory produced, and no profit 
generated. Conversely, so long as cash flow exists (or credit, which 
drug dealers generally can't obtain), labor, inventory, and profit 
can be replaced.

Yet, the one thing we do not focus on is cash flow, which we could 
capture through forfeitures. We keep the money, the business fails, 
and drug dealers are out of work rather than in prison.

Finally, a businessperson would recognize that part of what drives 
the entrepreneurial spirit of the narcotics business is low barriers to entry.

Almost anyone has what it takes to start out, after all. Because 
drug-afflicted areas often suffer from high levels of regulation and 
low levels of available capital, the only entrepreneurial opportunity 
in a neighborhood might be selling crack or meth. Detroit is a great 
example of this problem, with its welter of regulations affecting 
small business and lack of funding for new ventures. In a place like 
this, less regulation and localized micro-lending may lead to fewer 
drug dealers.

In the mid-1980s, America faced two parallel public health crises: 
AIDS and crack cocaine.

Both affected historically oppressed groups (or at least were 
perceived that way), both were misunderstood at first, and neither 
had a name in the formative stages.

More importantly, both were initially dealt with as moral scourges - 
the product of gay sex and drug use.

The paths for these two crises diverged, though.

In time, we dealt with AIDS as what it was, a disease.

Experts on epidemiology and related sciences were tasked to solving 
the problem, and they successfully converted AIDS from a death 
sentence to a chronic but manageable disease.

We never made the same turn toward solving the problem with crack.

To do so would have required that we recognize that narcotics is a 
business, and that business knowledge was needed to break it down. 
Sound bites, moral crusades and harsh standards made lousy policy.

If we want to solve problems, we are wiser to pay more attention to 
things like medicine and markets and less attention to the moralistic 
impulses of politicians.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom