Drugs and Crime

(I wrote this as a response to a friend's claim that leniant drug laws in the Netherlands has led to an increase in crime and drug use.)

My friend wrote:

 

The thing is, I see rampant drug use, prostitution, and abortion as bad things. When they are legalized, more people participate; the youth gain more access and become more involved. Ultimately I see these things as adding to a society’s downfall, not its prosperity. The Netherlands is the most crime-prone nation in Europe and most drug addicts live on state welfare payments and by committing crimes. Nationwide, the number of reported crimes increased after their drug legalization began. Switzerland ended its experiment with drug decriminalization after experiencing an unacceptable increase in use, violence, crime and health costs. In the late 1800's, opium was legal in China. By 1900, ninety million Chinese were addicted to the drug, and it took fifty years of repressive police measures and rehabilitation to correct the problem.

 

Then he gave these citations, when I asked for details:

 

Robert E. Peterson, "Legalization: The Myth Exposed" in Searching for Alternatives: Drug Control Policy in the United States, Hoover Institution Press

 

Netherlands Soft Policy on Drugs May Harden as Public Complains About Junkie Criminals," Wall Street Journal, March 11, 1994

 

1991Switzerland - 

 

Nel Solomon, "Findings on Needle Park: Switzerland's Social Experiment with Legalizing Drugs," Report to Governor Schaefer, Drug and Alcohol Abuse Commission 

 

China - 

 

Gabriel Nahas, "The Decline of Drugged Nations," Wall Street Journal, July 11, 1988

 

My response:

 

Unfortunately, after much searching I can't find a single one of those references online. However, I can find many articles that cite those references. At the top of (I think) every search for those references is this: 

 

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/debate/myths/myths4.htm

 

Searching for the root of this article find us here:

 

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/debate/debate.htm

 

It turns out druglibrary.org is dedicated to decriminalizing drugs; but in fairness they have found a number of articles that support your view that criminalization of drugs by the federal government is a good thing. In particular, the "myths" article above was written by the Drug Enforcement Administration of the U.S. Department of Justice.

 

So, sadly, I can only confirm that the references you cite are used a lot by pro-criminalization advocates, but I can't read the actual references.

 

The rest of druglibrary.org/schaffer is pretty weird; it's mostly about debate tactics for decriminalizing some drugs. His main point, which I agree with, although not so much with his writing style, is that we are filling our prisons with drug users, which costs far more than the damage done by drug use. I like this article by a judge who converted from pro-criminalization to anti-criminalization: 

 

http://academiajurisprudenciapr.org/rethink-the-war-of-drugs/one-judges-attempt-at-a-rational-discussion-of-the-so-called-war-on-drugs/

 

"More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than from what we call, generically, overdosing. Milton Friedman, an advocate of legalization, has estimated that as many as 10,000 homicides a year are plausibly attributed to the drug war." DrugLibrary.org has a copy of the Milton Friedman article.

http://www.druglibrary.org/special/friedman/war_we_are_losing.htm

 

Friedman shows how prohibition and the drug war massively increased prison populations:

 

"As another bit of evidence I have plotted the number of prisoners (per 10,000 population) received into all prisons-federal, state, and local-year by year. Those data, at least in the sources readily available to me, only went back to 1926. From then on, the number of prisoners received went up very sharply until 1931. It then went down, then rose again to 1940, went down sharply during the war, rose thereafter to a peak in 1961 and came down sharply to 1969. From 1970 on, the number of prisoners received rose dramatically, to a level in 1987 more than twice as high as in 1931. The increase in the number of prisoners received coincides with the beginning of Nixon's drug war, and received an additional boost when the Reagan drug war started." (There are charts in the original article if you follow the link.)

 

Now, back to the Netherlands and their crime rate.

 

Here is The Netherlands government page describing their policy:

 

http://www.government.nl/issues/alcohol-and-drugs/drugs

 

As you can see hard drugs are still quite illegal in the Netherlands.

This page: http://www.cedro-uva.org/lib/boekhout.dutch.html says, 

"For most young people, there is nothing glamorous or attractive about heroin. As pointed out by the Dutch vice-PM and minister of foreign affairs at the UN drug summit UNGASS in June 98: 'For young people in the Netherlands now, heroine is for losers. Very few of them would think of trying it." (Van Mierlo 1998).'" Sadly I can't find the source of the quote. (All of this stuff from the '90s is before the Internet got huge so it's hard to find a link to the original material.) The article also says that each city can decide if they want the "coffeeshops" (where small amounts of marijuana is legal) within their boundaries. "Municipal governments are free to decide whether they will allow coffeeshops within their boundaries. Some have chosen a zero option, which does not, however, mean that individuals can be arrested or prosecuted for possession of small amounts or public consumption. The more common viewpoint in Dutch municipal government, however, is that some people are going to use cannabis anyway, and that it is better to have this happen in a relatively open setting, rather than underground in criminal environments. They believe that this makes it easier to exercise social and political control over the problem. In this way, coffeeshops have gradually become an accepted policy option for many middle-sized and larger cities. Some municipalities have even actively assisted in, or organized themselves, the establishment of a coffeeshop in their community." So even on a local level people are choosing to allow public and legal access to marijuana, when they could easily block and force people to go the next city over.

 

The situation in the Netherlands is generally misrepresented: "In recent years Dutch drug policies have come under increasing political pressure from several other countries. The most negative epithets have been coined in the United States. It has almost become a common thing that every now and then the Dutch approach is being castigated by a senator or a drug czar. With the appointment of the latest czar, General McCaffrey, these attacks have not only intensified, but now seem even further removed from the facts than those made earlier, such as his statement that the homicide rate in the Netherlands would be twice as high as in the US (in reality it is four times as low). This new American offensive has both irked and flabbergasted many people in the Netherlands. Whereas the Dutch authorities previously believed that many stories from abroad were based on simple misunderstandings, McCaffrey left no doubt during his 1998 European "fact-finding tour" that he was less interested in facts than in political maneuvering. His predecessor once remarked that the Dutch youth in the Vondelpark were "stoned zombies," and another American drug czar had proclaimed that "you can't walk down the street in Amsterdam without tripping over junkies" (Reinarman 1998)."

 

Here is a graph of the rate of crime in various countries.

 

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_vic-crime-total-victims

 

"People victimized by crime (as a % of the total population). Data refer to people victimized by one or more of 11 crimes recorded in the survey: robbery, burglary, attempted burglary, car theft, car vandalism, bicycle theft, sexual assault, theft from car, theft of personal property, assault and threats. Crime statistics are often better indicators of prevalence of law enforcement and willingness to report crime, than actual prevalence." You can see the US at 21% vs the Netherlands at 25%. As the note says, it could be many people don't bother reporting crimes in the US because nobody does anything about it. But let's assume the numbers are correct - there is more "crime" in the Netherlands.

 

... but how many prisoners per capita? The US has 715 vs. 112 for the Netherlands. So indeed, we lock a lot of people up. 

 

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-prisoners-per-capita

 

1/8th of the prisoners in the US are in jail for pot.

 

http://norml.org/news/2006/10/12/nearly-one-in-eight-us-drug-prisoners-are-behind-bars-for-pot-taxpayers-spending-over-1-billion-annually-to-incarcerate-pot-offenders

 

Sadly, prisons generate criminals, so one would be tempted to say that prison leads to more drug use:

 

http://www.thenation.com/blog/does-prison-harden-criminals-yes#

 

Here is an article that claims to be written by the Drug Enforcement Agency (Karen P. Tandy)and posted at About.com.

 

http://alcoholism.about.com/od/pot/a/bldea050426_4.htm

 

The article is called, "Myth: Marijuana is Harmless," and makes all kinds of claims. Most notable is the following claim: "Shocking to many is that more teens are in treatment each year for marijuana dependence than for alcohol and all other illegal drugs combined. This is a trend that has been increasing for more than a decade: in 2002, 64 percent of adolescent treatment admissions reported marijuana as their primary substance of abuse, compared to 23 percent in 1992." Well, alcohol is legal, and at that time, marijuana was not, so I think she's saying that criminalization of marijuana has not worked at all; in spite of it being illegal and a big focus of the war on drugs, she says teens use it 2x as much as alcohol.

 

She also makes claims like this: "Marijuana is a gateway drug. In drug law enforcement, rarely do we meet heroin or cocaine addicts who did not start their drug use with marijuana. Scientific studies bear out our anecdotal findings." Unfortunately, that is completely backwards. Of course heroin and cocaine addicts start out with softer drugs; alcoholics start out with milder booze. That doesn't mean smoking a toke /causes/ a person to move to harder drugs. The vast majority of marijuana users do not use hard drugs; this is somewhat self-evident; the nation would be overrun with crack heads if it were true.

 

Finally, my point, which got lost, was not that drugs are good or bad or whatever; just that the government is the wrong place to regulate drugs, just as it is the wrong place to regulate most things. Government regulation is ineffective, selective, racist, expensive and tends toward corruption. If you want a drug free world, it's better to have families, employers and insurance companies enforce compliance. I'm not in favor of the government's draconian measures taken to enforce drug laws, as the cure (a massive increase in violent crime) is worse than the disease.