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. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom