Following the federal 2005 Combat Methamphetamine Act and the augmentation of controls of meth precursors in individual U.S. States and in Mexico, the meth trade went into a swoon. Treatment admissions, drug purity and meth lab incidents all dropped substantially. Alas, all signs are that the respite is over.
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health invariably underestimates meth use for a range of reasons, but because this measurement error is fairly systematic, NSDUH is still helpful in judging trends. The latest survey found an eye-popping 59.8% percent increase in the number of Americans reporting past-month meth use. Meth lab incident data also pose some interpretational challenges because of the large variation in size of labs, but the more than 100% increase in the past two years is simply too large to fob off as error of measurement, as the Wall Street Journal recently reported.
What happened? The controls on the purchase of cold medicine (e.g., the Methcheck electronic database) have now been subverted by armies of “smurfers”. The only policy that has been shown to lastingly curtail meth labs is making pseudoephedrine containing medicines (e.g., Sudafed) prescription only. Many states are now introducing such legislation, but the cold medicine industry is responding with a flood of lobbying money to prevent the change.
Among the counter-arguments I have heard, the feeblest had been offered by some law enforcement officials who say that Methcheck helps police find and bust methlabs. Since when in law enforcement is it better to allow a crime to happen and bust someone than it is to prevent the crime entirely? Another is that reducing access to cold medicine is too much of an inconvenience to the citizenry. It is an inconvenience, but in a state such as Tennesee that spent countless millions of dollars last year dealing with meth lab explosions, every taxpayer is coughing up something worse than phlegm: Hundreds of extra dollars in their tax bill every year (and people — including a disturbing number of children — who get burned when the labs go up in flames clearly pay a much worse penalty than that)
p.s. If you want to hear a great, short reading by Nick Reding from “Methland”, including a vivid account of a meth lab explosion, check out the Stanford Health Policy Forum Video Archive. Select “Methamphetamine: An American Epidemic” — Nick’s reading is in the first 15 minutes.
Keith, would you mind posting some data about the underestimates and how we know they are, as well as any pointers to Tennessee’s meth lab explosion explosion.
Something about the armies of smurfers, preferable with some actual data, would also be nice.
John: Click on the AP link for smurfer info (the second link in my post), they did a careful job of pulling together the data.
The NSDUH challenges are that the survey doesn’t cover people who are incarcerated, people who live on the street, and people who live in dorms or military housing. Also, it’s self-report and many people will not reveal their drug use, particularly those who use drugs that have paranoia as a potential effect.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by fadsandfancies.com, fadsandfancies.com. fadsandfancies.com said: Blogfeed: The Resurgence of Methamphetamine: Following the federal 2005 Combat Methamphetamine Act and the augme… http://bit.ly/gXujAi [...]
Remember all those nasty alcohol labs they used to have in the 1920′s? People would die from the use of automobile radiators to distill alcohol in these toxic labs, and there were cases where explosions from these labs ended up destroying large parts of towns.
How did they get rid of those labs? Maybe they made radiators illegal or required you to register with the government to get one.
Fact is, even the “moonshine” that they sold is hardly ever found any more and there seems to be no desire to consume it. Wonder how that happened?
The AP link has no back track to the actual data. In accordance with AP policy, they will not list their sources. Thus my question. Add that to the “OMG the sky is falling” tone of the article, and you will forgive my skepticism.
I am aware of the challenges, but am trying to find out how they accounted for them. SWAG?
A google of tennessee and meth lab explosion returns about 8 unique hits in the first 5 pages. The rest are dups and re-reports.
“Since when in law enforcement is it better to allow a crime to happen and bust someone than it is to prevent the crime entirely?” I don’t know the answer but your fellow blogger Mark Kleiman sure does. Police have been evaluated based on arrests for as long as I can remember. Therefore, it in their selfish interests to allow a crime to happen and bust someone than to prevent the crime. This error has been discussed so many times on this blog, that it isn’t surprising that you are amazed that anyone doesn’t understand.
I really regret this, but most people don’t read Samefacts.com, and even fewer people have read “When Brute Force Fails” (I really really hate to admit, especially here, that I haven’t read it yet and I got it for Christmas).
John, regarding the uptick in Tennessee meth lab incidents and meth related drug endangered children in Tennessee, you might start here:
Reported meth labs up in Tennessee in 2010
Authorities find 2,095; agencies seek tighter hold of counter drugs
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2011/jan/17/reported-meth-labs-up-in-2010/
Count of children affected by methamphetamine up
http://www.jacksonsun.com/article/20110126/NEWS01/110126025/Count+of+children+affected+by+methamphetamine+up
I am no fan of meth enthusiasts (a roommate in the early ’90s dated one), but is scheduling sudafed effective in any real way? My intuition is that it shifts manufacture, leading to no net gain for society on meth (+, fewer amateur labs, -, richer and more powerful organized criminals) and a small net loss on sudafed. Intuition can be wrong, or wishful. A naturally sniffly person, I like having sudafed available without a $100 doctor’s visit for a script.
When I went to the drug store recently to buy some cold medicine over the counter it was very confusing. The remedies I remember from my last, long-ago cold were not on the shelf. Only similar sounding named boxes with different ingredients. A little research showed that the old, effective drugs had been put behind the counter and that the drug companies were now deceiving the sick by selling stuff off the shelf that doesn’t help your cold. The effective stuff was hidden behind the counter where you had to know to ask for it (and had to know what you wanted without being able to look for it on the shelf).
I feel sorry for folks looking for help in the cold medicine aisle who are being deceived on behalf of the war on drugs and get the don’t work pseudo remedies off the shelf.
And, I did notice that the behind the counter stuff cost a lot more than it used to when it was on-shelf.
Just another “tax” on behalf of the war on drugs.
Also, it’s self-report and many people will not reveal their drug use, particularly those who use drugs that have paranoia as a potential effect.
That’s a bizarre implication (viz. non-reporting as a pharmacological byproduct), considering that a person with such a disposition would hardly consent to participate in a survey on drug use in the first place. Also, to follow your reasoning, users of opiates, cannabis, psychedelics and other drugs should exhibit a lower degree of under-reporting. Haven’t seen any findings along those lines. More likely, users are queasy about admitting to acts in a govt-commissioned survey which are illegal and carry stiff penalties as well as social opprobrium.
I would appreciate more information substantiating the assertion that making pseudoephedrine prescription-only will lead to a sustainable decrease in meth production. What might be unforeseen consequences of that policy? Will it not just be a version of “whack-a-mole”?
It won’t help, and essentially banning pseudoendephrine (poor people: suffer through it, sorry) just shifts production. We know this, because it already happened. Pushing harder on the waterbed doesn’t do you any good. But thats the only tool prohibitionists have, so they use it.
I really wish prohibitionists would ask themselves honestly, what are the implications of the fact that “we” can’t keep drugs out of prisons?
Matthew, pseudoephedrine was returned to a prescription drug in Oregon effective July 1, 2006. Oregon’s meth lab reduction has been sustained ever since. With over four and a half years of actual experience, there has not been a single case of diverted prescription pseudoephedrine used to make meth in Oregon.
Jamie, returning pseudoephedrine to a prescription drug has helped reduce domestic meth labs in both Oregon and Mississippi. Here is a recent news release from Mississippi:
http://www.oregondec.org/2011-01-04-MBN-NewsRelease.pdf
This is about correcting an enormous mistake made by the FDA in 1976. We are talking about 15 behind-the-counter products and their generics:
http://www.oregondec.org/15.pdf
Returning pseudoephedrine to its proper prescription status is about prevention. In contrast, the industry proposed alternative, e-tracking, is more “arrest more folks” traditional reactionary war on drugs.
For those that are a glutton for further reading:
* A responsive piece I wrote for the Georgetown Public Policy Review earlier this month:
http://www.gppreview.org/blog/2011/01/restrictions-on-pseudoephedrine-supply-can-help-solve-the-meth-lab-problem/
* A law review article I wrote a few years ago discussing the history of pseudoephedrine control:
http://www.oregondec.org/IN/Tab15.pdf
* A FRONTLINE episode from a few years ago, for those that haven’t already seen it:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/
I’d be very interested in further thoughtful conversation on this topic.
Sudafed is the most effective cold medication for me. Forcing a doctor visit if I need it would cost me (and the medical system) $100-$150. Why not just make the packages very small (10 pills should be enough for a normal cold) and make them $20?
I also have used regular ephedrine for congestion when I lived in a cold climate and it worked even better. Is that completely illegal now?
Also, a black market rate of $40-50 for a box of pills seems absurdly high? Is that really the going rate or just a single anecdote?
If you make cold medicine only available by prescription, just wait to see what happens next…
Some poor doctor is going to get scammed by a patient or patients and write prescriptions for cold medicines that end up (without her knowledge) being used to make meth. The DEA will bust the doctor, seize her possessions and send her to prison. At that point, doctors will start being afraid to prescribe cold medicine and your $100 doctor visit will result in nothing but advice to take some ibuprofen and drink lots of liquids.
Rob, thanks for the note. I fear it’s not responsive. Your critics, I among them, asked whether shifting manufacture away from amateurs atually leads to any net gain for society. Sure, there will be fewer amateur labs. Please quantify: how many people does the existence of amateur labs damage, and in what way? How much of the demand is shifted to DTOs? What is the marginal effect on the societal damage wrought by the DTOs if any or all of the demand is shifted? And, as an honest broker (nothing personal, but ‘enormous mistake made by the FDA in 1976′ is not a phrase written by an honest broker), what is the cost of making sudafed essentially unavailable? Effective, inexpensive and easily available treatment for common symptoms of unpleasant diseases is worth something.
By the way, since I fully expect that Professor Humphreys will delete this comment, probably because he has no answer for it, I still feel it is worth saying one more time, this time in VERY technical, dry language that in no way contains any color, certainly not anything that could be misconstrued as anything other than a substantive argument.
I encourage anyone reading this comment before Professor Humprheys deletes it to come back here, and if it is deleted, to repost the exact same point in substance until he provides an adequate answer.
The problem with the drug war calculus is it assumes you can just weigh costs and benefits and, if one group of law abiding citizens with allergies is inconvenienced, and perhaps has to face horrible allergies, lack of breath, missed work, and maybe even hospitalization because of the inability to get medication, this is something to just be weighed against the costs of drug use and abuse.
The problem is that this use of cost-benefit analysis violates fundamental concepts of moral philosophy. Human beings, and their rights, are not instruments to be traded away for someone else’s well-being. The way this concept applies to the drug war is as follows- it is profoundly immoral and offensive for someone to say that because SOMEONE ELSE might be abusing drugs, I can’t get the medication that I need. That because SOMEONE ELSE might have an addiction problem, I might face a sleepless night because no pharmacies sell sudafed after hours. That because SOMEONE ELSE is offended by the notion of people taking recreational drugs, I might face a hospitalization or missed work because I am limited in the amount of needed medication I can buy. My health- and the health of millions of others- is not some abstract economic concept that may permissibly “traded off” by economists and public policy types who think they have found the magic bullet to stop drug abuse.
Nor is it proper to use the prescription system for this purpose. The purpose of the prescription system is not to stop people from engaging in allegedly immoral activity or to stop people from using medical drugs as raw materials in the manufacture of addictive substances. It is to ensure that drugs that can only be safely used under a doctor’s care are safely used under a doctor’s care. You do not need a doctor to use sudafed correctly. Therefore, there is an extremely powerful argument that you should be able to use it, on your own and without restriction, however some criminal or meth addict might benefit from its availabity.
Several of these comments, as well as the original post, imagine a world where the government decides what drugs it gives us permission to take and under what conditions we may take them, with the underlying principle that stopping people from using drugs for the purpose of pleasure is so important and compelling that people’s health should suffer if necessary to ensure that this doesn’t happen. This calculus is wrong in its assumptions and wrong in its conclusion. And the people who advance it need to think more seriously about what it means to live in a free society rather than a paternalistic dictatorship.
Dilan: Your prior comments were deleted because they contained name calling, which RBC forbids. You are welcome to dissent anytime as long as you do not insult the author or commenters. As you have made an argument above without insulting anyone it will stay, as is always the case here.
The basic flaw in your reasoning is that meth use imposes huge externalities whether we try to control it or not. To assume that no one will be affected by meth use other than users unless we set government policies isn’t accurate — obvious examples being a child whose parent is meth addicted, a neighbor who gets assaulted by an intoxicated meth user etc. One of the links above concerns a meth lab explosion that burned down a hotel. Any non-meth users who burned to death in such an explosion have had their freedom taken away, and it would be strange for the government to say to their families “We could have stopped that, but we didn’t want to limit your dead relatives’ freedom”. The world you are calling for, in which no one’s freedom is constrained by anyone else’s behavior cannot exist logically. It would not even exist if there were no government at all.
Keith, people dying in a meth lab explosion isn’t among the externalities of meth use. It’s one of the externalities of prohibiting meth use. People dying of impurities in illegal drugs, or wrongly labeled doses, shootings during turf wars, the militarization of police, and, yes, my stuffed up head the next time I get a cold. To a huge degree, the evils drug warriors attribute to illegal drugs are actually due to the drug warriors’ own efforts. They’re not an effect of the actual drug.
My own take on this is that people who take these drugs are stupid and self-destructive, but at least they’re self destructive. Instead of harming vast numbers of people who aren’t stupid and self-destructive, in a futile, (Yes, FUTILE!) quest to save the idiots among us, we should deploy a fraction of those resources to see to it that they can destroy themselves conveniently without taking anybody else with them.
I’m not offended so much by the guy who drills a hole in the top of his head, and tries to pour in battery acid, as I am by the woman who’s scarred for life because you swatted the bottle out of his hand, and she got splashed. And by your efforts to blame her scars on him, instead of stepping up and taking the blame for what YOU do.
Brett — I think people will have meth labs even if it is legal because that will be a cheaper way to make meth than what the market can offer. But let’s say you are right — do you think meth us itself has no impact, say, on parenting? If you visit child protective services in meth country, you will meet lots of kids who have been sexually abused by meth using parents. That’s not law, it’s pharmacology: meth increases sexual desire and lowers inhibitions to an disturbing degree. I am sure that you would agree that we can’t just say to those kids “You should have decided to have different parents — this is your fault.” So how does a libertarian handle that…do you just say those assaults are an unfortunate cost of freedom of adults?
Another question: If someone has an accident while intoxicated (on a legal or illegal substance) and goes to the ER, that has an effect on everyone, both in waiting times for care and in public and private insurance costs. Should such people be denied care, because giving it to them imposes the costs of their substance use on other people?
If you visit child protective services in meth country, you will meet lots of kids who have been sexually abused by meth using parents. That’s not law, it’s pharmacology: meth increases sexual desire and lowers inhibitions to an disturbing degree.
Is there research showing a significantly higher prevalence of child abuse by meth-using parents than those who aren’t?
It seems to me that
a)use of hard drugs, such as meth, is a pretty marginal activity, and the population of users, who elect to use it, given its reputation and social/legal status, isn’t a representative slice of the spectrum of society. IOW, their premorbid personality profile differs from the general population viz. in terms of traits such as impulsivity or stimulus-seeking.
b)meth users, due to both the pharmacologically induced impairment/behavior as well as lifestyle choices necessitated by their illicit drug activity, may be more likely to come in contact with law enforcement or other civic organs, thus increasing the likelihood of uncovering child abuse in the process. Unless there’s a study or survey assessing the prevalence of child abuse among non users (matched with meth users’ premorbid profiles), there’s nothing besides voodoo pharmacology in causally linking meth use with child sexual abuse.
@Daksya: You say “meth users, due to both the pharmacologically induced impairment/behavior as well as lifestyle choices necessitated by their illicit drug activity, may be more likely to come in contact with law enforcement or other civic organs, thus increasing the likelihood of uncovering child abuse in the process.”
I agree. The pharmacology induces destructive behavior and then the subsequent social response to that behavior may lead to uncovering to more destructive behavior - not competing explanations.
You’re positing the incidence of child sexual abuse by a parent as a direct pharmacological byproduct of meth use (“That’s not law, it’s pharmacology”)
Whereas I’m saying that there is child sexual abuse both by meth-using parents and those who don’t use meth or similar drugs. But due to 1)the nature of meth use, 2)the legal/social circumstances of meth use, cases of child sexual abuse are more likely to be uncovered during LEO or other civic attention. Child sexual abuse by non-using parents is more likely to remain hidden and hence the meth cases get morphed into a distinct “phenomenon” of meth. In the absence of research showing a significantly higher prevalence of child sexual abuse by meth-using parents, your assertion is an example of voodoo pharmacology and unsupported.
Rob, thanks for your response.
There are a few issues I’d like to raise with the data you used in your Georgetown piece.
You are crediting a 2006 law with making major changes in Oregon’s meth production. However, Oregon’s own report on violent crime notes that “…seizures of meth labs have declined dramatically since 2004″-two years before the law you trumpet as having been responsible for the drop. How do you explain the fact that seizures had already been dropping when this law was passed? What does that say about your causal claim for the law?
Then, you quote the ADAM II report: “In Sacramento the proportion of arrestees involved in acquiring methamphetamine in the prior 30 days remains high (26%), unchanged from 2007. In Portland, Oregon, however, reported acquisition is significantly lower (13%) than 2007 levels (23%).” When we move from self-reported acquisitions to urine tests, however (that’s Table 3.3 on p. 52), Portland’s drop, significant to .05, is smaller than the drop experienced in Sacramento between 2003 and 2007 (a 10 point drop, 45 to 35%, significant to .01). If California did this without even making pseudoephedrine a Rx drug, how can you credit Oregon’s policy when larger changes elsewhere happen in the absence of similar policy shifts?
(And it is a shame that ADAM II lacks numbers for the years just before the Oregon law change, since we can’t follow the trends around its enactment, making conclusions about it even more difficult to defend.)
As for violent crime rates, they also seemed to be falling in Oregon before the law was enacted, belying the notion that a 2006 law change stemmed a scourge of meth-crime. According to a 2009 article, “Craig Prins, a spokesman for the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, said the state’s crime rate began dropping in 2005. Meth-related arrests in the state are down 40 percent in the state since then.” If crime was already dropping, how can you claim the 2006 law was the cause?
You say clearly that “The purpose of the policy is to reduce domestic meth labs,” and perhaps you have actually done that in Oregon. But I note that you failed to answer your Georgetown critic’s contention that you don’t mention overall usage rates. Are fewer Oregonians using meth now?
Frankly I find the focus on the labs questionable. As others have pointed out, legalizing methamphetamine would also make large changes in the conditions of crank production, for the better-explosions, exposure of children to toxic chemicals.
I think you have tenaciously defended the policy here, but I am not convinced. I suggest that you aim for measures that seek an overall reduction of the harms associated with this substance: with its production, use, and legal repression.
Professor Humphreys:
Let’s start with externalities. If an activity has externalities, that can be an argument for taxing or prohibiting the activity. What you don’t get, though, is that is very differnt than imposing the burden of the externality on some innocent person with an allergy. All you are doing is screwing over some other innocent person and thereby imposing a different externality in order to deal with the one you care about. But people’s right to treat their health conditions should exist outside your cost-benefit calculus. In a democracy where rights are respected, sometimes you can’t solve a social problen in the way you want to. We could have a lot less crime if we repealed the Fourth Amendment. Somehow if your house were being searched every week, I doubt you would think that this was fair. Well, it is fundamentally unfair to screw over innocent people with colds and allergies to solve the meth problem. They didn’t cause it.
Your approach to public policy is the equivalent to the guy on the boat of starving people who solemnly decideds, with much regret, that SOMEONE ELSE must die so the others can eat his flesh. It doesn’t matter if that is true from a cost-benefit sense, because you have no moral right to screw uo someone else’s health to achieve a public policy end.
So to say others are effected is irrelevant. If others are effected, there are legitimate means, such as taxes and drug prohibition, to deal with that. But in a feee society, your policy toolkit does not include regretfully imposing the costs of your favored policy on one small group of innocents. You only get to impose costs on an equal basis.
Dilan: You are confusing not getting something with not agreeing. If people get less cold relief but fewer children end up in the burn unit, I will vote for that trade. Others may vote otherwise - fine. But it is not that I don’t understand the choice but that, like all people, I have particular values that lead me to care more about some things than others.
Design a policy paradigm in which drug use has no effect on anyone but the user, which is the implied contrast you make. You seem to be arguing that prohibition only imposes costs on the user, but that isn’t so — we all pay for prisons whether we use drugs or not.
Dilan: You are confusing not getting something with not agreeing. If people get less cold relief but fewer children end up in the burn unit, I will vote for that trade.
You are presupposing that people’s health is something that should be up to being traded off with a vote.
How far would you take this principle? If it would reduce global warming to sacrifice one out of every 15 infants born (as it almost certainly would), would you do it? Would you do it if the sacrifice were imposed on infants whose father’s name happened to start with “H”? It would still pass the cost-benefit test, after all.
I don’t claim that drug use has no effect on the user. I claim that cost-benefit analysis doesn’t end the argument- and is frankly immoral and dictatorial- when it involves trading off the health of innocent people. That’s the point of my Fourth Amendment hypothetical. You really could solve and prevent more crimes by having general warrants and searches. You really could. From a cost-benefit analysis, I’m pretty certain that with modern technology, you could save all sorts of lives by doing so. Imagine all those people who would not suffer the death of loved ones. Imagine all those women who would not be raped. Imagine all those people whose life savings would not have been stolen by Bernard Madoff.
The reason we don’t do this is because we don’t consider it appropriate to impose the costs of preventing those crimes on innocent people, EVEN THOUGH THE RESULT OF THAT IS THAT THE CRIMES DON’T GET PREVENTED AND THE PEOPLE GET KILLED, RAPED, AND DEFRAUDED. The cost is massive. Still, we don’t prevent it. And in fact, the fact that we don’t prevent it is the mark of a free society. It’s why the US is a nicer place to live than Singapore.
You can’t repeat over and over again how there are externalities of drug use. We get it. There are externalities of drug use. Nonetheless, the meaning of freedom is that well-meaning technocrats don’t get to trade the interests of groups of innocent people to get what they want. Living in a free society means living in a society where there is some level of drug use, and some level of externalities, that do not get prevented. This may frustrate you. But the health of OTHER people- NOT YOU- does not belong to you to trade off. It is not yours. You don’t own it. And it doesn’t become part of your cost-benefit analysis, because a moral, free world is not run on the basis of utilitarian cost-benefit analyses. And you, of course, will accept this when it’s YOUR butt on the line rather than someone else’s. If you were on that boat and were “volunteered” regretfully by someone else to be the person who has to die so the rest can live, you aren’t going to say “well, that’s OK, because the costs outweigh the benefits”. You’d scream, and you’d be right to.
Dilan: You are presupposing that people’s health is something that should be up to being traded off with a vote.
It *is* up for vote, every day in a free society whether you and I agree or not. You still seem to be contrasting my policy proposal with a world where there are no costs and no choices. If it is “dictatorial and immoral” (and BTW: why do you have to talk this way, can’t you just lay out an argument without all the invective?) to set a policy that trades off the health of innocents, then it is dictatorial and immoral to have any policy. Leaving things as they are means that innocent neighbors get burned to death in meth explosions, cracking down means we all pay for more prisons including the innocent, letting everything roll means some people will victimized by meth users, including innocents.
Your position is rhetorically easy, indeed too easy, namely that you are defending a policy in which “no suffers at all other than the guilty”. But you have not specified what that is because you can’t. No one can, it doesn’t exist.
Professor Humphreys:
I don’t take the position that “nobody suffers other than the guilty”. I think sacrifice should be shared.
For instance, consider two responses to an Islamic terrorist’s threat to use Arab terrorists to bomb airliners.
Response 1: Strong TSA security checks to ensure no explosives get on airplanes.
Response 2: Racial profiling at the airport.
From a cost-benefit point of view, 2 is obviously superior. It costs less, and the searches are going to be more narrowly tailored and thus be more likely to catch actual terrorists. However, 2 is illegal and 1 isn’t. And that is as it should be. You can’t do 2 even if you put it to a vote. The rights of Arabs and Muslims to not be singled out for special scrutiny is not subject to a cost-benefit analysis, no matter how many people vote for it. That right belongs to them, not the voters or the politicians or the economists or the wonks.
Note that under 1, everyone suffers. Not nobody except the guilty. Everyone. Similarly, when you raise taxes to pay for the war on drugs, everyone suffers. I might have arguments against that on efficacy grounds, but it is fair. It’s a social problem, it requires a social solution. Note that I am not a libertarian like some of the commenters here.
Where my objection lies is in taking ONE SUBSET of the innocent and punishing them for the acts of the guilty. Unlike raising taxes to pay for the war on drugs, thus sharing the sacrifice, denying allergy and cold sufferers the amount of medication they need whenever they need it is punishing one unfortunate group of people whose interests happen to conflict with the dreams of economists and policy wonks to foul up meth production.
The point is, I have given you many examples of things you can’t do EVEN THOUGH THEY WILL RESULT IN A REDUCTION OF DEATHS, just like I am assuming your meth proposals will. You can’t do suspicionless searches and seizures, even though it will reduce murders. You can’t do racial profiling at the airport, even if it stops a plane from getting bombed. You can’t force a guy to be cannibalized on a boat, even if his refusal dooms everyone on board.
Your only reply is “well, we’ll all pay for the meth problem if we don’t do this”. Yep. Welcome to democracy. Welcome to freedom. Isn’t it grand? We can’t solve problems as efficiently as Singapore can, because we respect rights and don’t imposed unshared sacrifice.
As far as I am concerned, you are on much stronger ground when you argue for anything to fight the meth epidemic that forces us all to share the pain. Because if the voters get sick of that, they can vote to repeal that. But when you hit a smaller group of people, like allergy sufferers, they have no recourse at all, because they don’t have enough political power to fight the technocrats and the people who would vote THEIR rights (but NOT the rights of the majority) away.
Life is not a gigantic cost-benefit analysis. You can’t seek some rough version of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency without any consideration as to whether your actions are equally or proportionately borne by the entire population.
With all due respect - you are ascribing negatives such as burned children from drug lab explosions without demonstrating that there is any statistically significant level of that, and conflating that with well established issues such as drug lab cleanups where society needs to pay for it.
Ultimately, what this fails on is that Pseudephedrine is only the most convenient of several possible chemical synthesis methods. And ultimately, pseudephedrine or any of the alternate precursors can be manufactured illicitly as well, in large quantity. Total bans fail where any step back in the production process can be replicated outside of regulated companies, and for nearly all the abused synthesized drugs that is clearly true.
Ultimately one gets back to having to ban dihydrogen monoxide, yeast, dextrose, and benzaldehyde (for Pseudephedrine), and more if one considers all the other synthesis chains for methamphetamine. Except that benzaldehyde is present in bitter almond oil and other natural sources, or can be synthesized from toluene, etc.
When you get to the point you’re seriously considering banning carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen, give me a call.
Meth is what you get when you outlaw “safer” recreational drugs.
Wow. A lot of great conversation here. I am limited in time right now, so I thought I would quickly pick out a few things as food for further discussion.
wcw, your comment about my not being an honest broker in expressing my opinion that the 1976 FDA action moving PSE to OTC was an “enormous mistake” is spot on. I fess up. It was hyperbole and pure opinion - albeit a strongly held opinion.
Matthew (and wcw), it is true that meth lab incidents, and some other trends, were going down in Oregon before the Oregon RxO PSE law went into effect on July 1, 2006. Indeed, data from Oklahoma and Oregon, the first two states to impose the BTC/logging requirements on PSE in 2003/2004, bore out the efficacy of such policies in reducing meth lab incidents. The federal CMEA, which nationalized the Oklahoma/Oregon PSE rule, effective September of 2006, provided similar results nationwide. However, that was all short lived. Some of us predicted the group PSE smurfing that was to occur.
Oregon immunized itself from PSE smurfing and a resurgence of domestic meth labs, while other states, most notably Kentucky, have pursued a different course charted by the pharmaceutical industry, who make money from PSE sales, including PSE sales later diverted to make meth. Here is a chart comparing the results of these two approaches:
http://www.oregondec.org/OR-KY-MLIs-2000-2010.pdf
Finally, here is a factoid for which I would be interested in thoughts and comments (I will, for the moment, refrain from any of my own): In 2005, before the federal CMEA took effect and made PSE more difficult to get, the US imported an estimated 382,000 kilos of PSE. NOTE: PSE is not manufactured in the US, so we must import PSE from the three countries where it is currently made (India, China, and Germany). In 2010, the US imported an estimated 650,000 kilos of PSE.
Well, I haven’t used any recently, so there must be an awful lot of those little blue guys out there…
Rob, thanks again. That chart does look impressive. But I’m still not sure about your metric of “meth lab incidents.” Why not usage rates, treatment admissions, or other measures, at least in conjunction with this one? Because I can imagine zero meth labs and a huge meth problem.
Matthew, my focus on meth lab incidents is because reducing PSE smurfing and meth labs (not meth usage) was the purpose of the Oregon legislation returning PSE to RxO. That being said, here is a chart showing Oregon treatment admission trends:
http://www.oregondec.org/OrTxAdmits-2004-2009.pdf
Thanks once more, Rob. Again, the numbers started declining before the Rx law. You’ve said this results from the logging requirements that were already in place. Gosh, if they were working so well, perhaps they should have been given more time before enacting further measures (Rx imposes a substantial burden on people compared to showing ID to purchase, which is bad enough from a consumer perspective).
Still, the focus on “meth lab incidents” as a legislative goal is perplexing. Certainly reducing unsafe labs in which minors are exposed to toxic chemicals and perhaps violence is a worthwhile goal. But making that the key metric means that many problems may remain with methamphetamine, even while the metric shows progress. If you are going to differ with the arguments from liberties that have been put forth here, you should, I think, at least make sure that the ideals of protection and public safety that you find outweighing libertarian concerns are well embodied in the measures you are working with. “Lab incidents” doesn’t seem to cover enough of the spectrum to be a good indicator of anything in particular having to do with the harms of methamphetamine production, distribution, and use, except for the very thing it measures.
Matthew, “reducing unsafe labs in which minors are exposed to toxic chemicals and perhaps violence is a worthwhile goal.” Yes indeed. While that may be a key purpose and metric regarding the issue of returning PSE to RxO, it is but one of many metrics in the overall Oregon approach to addressing the abuse of meth. I would agree with your criticism of using this metric if our entire Oregon meth strategy was focused on that one single policy. But that is not the case:
http://www.oregondec.org/OMTF-ClosingMemo.pdf
You are also correct that the BTC logging systems were working well. But the key word in that sentence is “were.” Those systems were soon circumvented by group smurfing of PSE, which is a key factor that is driving the resurgence that is the focus of this very article.
Dilan Esper:
You seem to have undone your own argument. One could argue that TSA security checks are not imposed equally on everyone but rather on ONE SUBSET of innocents: those who travel by air. OTOH, everyone who so travels is subjected to these and so you could also argue that it’s equally applied. Likewise, making sudafed Rx-only would be an equally shared sacrifice since everyone who wants it would require a prescription.