I’ve had a good time guest-posting for Ta-Nehisi Coates this week, mostly (as promised) recycling some previous RBC material: a note on high-stakes educational testing paired with a statement of Dukenfield’s Law, another on classified information (the main “state secret” turns out to be that the state makes mistakes). reflections on personal pronouns, on the mathematics of moral responsibility, and on early gangbanger fiction, Lowry Heussler’s classic analysis of the Gates arrest, and an obit for my father.
One post that got some attention was about some practical steps for changing drug policy.
Two items on my list of reforms drew the most flak in comments: the abolition of the minimum legal drinking age and the non-commercial legalization of cannabis.
Note that the drinking-age idea was paired with a tenfold increase in alcohol taxes to about a dollar a drink, roughly doubling the retail price of alcohol. That, plus a zero-tolerance policy on drinking and driving for teenagers, would get you most of the benefits of the current 21-year-old MLDA (and lots of benefits the MLDA can’t provide) without making tens of millions of teenagers into scofflaws. It’s a good general principle that a law that’s widely broken is a bad law, and 90% of American 18-year-olds have sampled alcohol, despite the laws against it.
On the cannabis front, my plea is for a “grow-your-own†policy: consumers would be allowed to cultivate pot for their own use, to give it away, or to join small consumer-owned co-ops to produce the stuff for them. No commercial sales.
“Why not?†demanded several outraged commenters. Why allow use but not sale?
Two words provide the gist of the answer: marketing and lobbying. A legal cannabis industry, like the legal beer industry, the legal tobacco industry, the legal fast-food and junk-food industries, and the legal gambling industry, would do everything in its power to expand its sales, including taking political action to weaken whatever regulations and minimize whatever taxes were imposed.
Well, again, why not? What’s wrong with persuading someone to engage in what would be a perfectly lawful behavior?
Nothing, if the behavior is harmless as well as lawful. Everything, if the behavior predictably inflicts harm on the person being persuaded.
But cannabis use (like drinking, eating, and gambling) is harmless to most of the people who engage in it. Is it wrong to suggest that someone start a potentially benign activity simply because it might turn into a bad habit?
Might. “Aye, there’s the rub.†To the consumer, developing a bad habit is bad news. To the marketing executive, it’s the whole point of the exercise. For any potentially addictive commodity or activity, the minority that gets stuck with a bad habit consumes the majority of the product. So the entire marketing effort is devoted to cultivating and maintaining the people whose use is a problem to them and a gold mine to the industry.
Take alcohol, for example. Divide the population into deciles by annual drinking volume. The top decile starts at four drinks a day, averaged year-round. That group consumes half of all the alcohol sold. The next decile does from two to four drinks a day. Those folks sop up the next thirty percent. Casual drinkers - people who have two drinks a day or less – take up only 20% of the total volume. The booze companies cannot afford to have their customers “drink in moderation.”
The relationship is obvious once you think about it. One of what the beer commercials of my youth called “real beer drinkers – people who drink a case or more of beer a week†is worth two dozen people who only consume a drink a week, which is roughly the national median.
Not everyone in those top two deciles has a diagnosable drinking problem; you could have four drinks every day and never be actively drunk. But that’s not the typical pattern. Most of those folks have an alcohol abuse disorder. And they’re the target market. “An innkeeper loves a drunkard,†says the Yiddish proverb, “except as a son-in-law.â€
Since the alcoholic beverage industries are as dependent on alcohol abuse as a chronic drunk is on his wake-up drink, they fiercely resist any effective policies for curtailing it, starting with higher taxes. (Contrary to myth, taxation takes most of its bit out of heavy drinking rather than casual drinking, because alcohol is a much bigger budget item for heavy drinkers.) Would it be technologically possible to have package clerks and bartenders check customers against a list of people who had lost their legal drinking privileges as a result of a criminal conviction for drunk driving or drunken assault? Sure it would. Would the industry hold still for it? No way.
So the prospect of a legal cannabis industry working hard to produce as many chronic stoners as possible, and fighting hard against any sort of effective regulation, fills me with fear. I don’t believe that the actual tobacco companies would enter the cannabis market, but I don’t doubt that the cannabis companies that would emerge from full commercial legalization would have all of the tobacco outfit’s morals – and a less tainted product to sell.
The rate of problem use among cannabis users is lower than the rate of problem drinking among drinkers (lifetime risk of about 10% v. lifetime risk of at least 15%) but that’s under conditions of illegality and high price. The risks of chronic heavy cannabis use aren’t as dramatic as the risks of chronic heavy drinking – the stuff doesn’t kill neurons or rot your liver, and generates less crazy behavior than beer does – but that doesn’t make those risks negligible. Ask any parent whose fifteen-year-old has decided that cannabis is more fun than geometry. Of the 10% of cannabis smokers who become heavy daily smokers for a while, the median duration of the first spell of heavy use (not counting the risks of relapse) is 44 months. That’s not a small chunk to take out a lifetime, especially a young lifetime.
Cannabis isn’t harmful enough to be worth banning. But that doesn’t mean that it’s safe to give America’s marketing geniuses a new vice to peddle.
Hear hear!
For most long-time cannabis users (me and a lot of boomers), growing some is pretty easy. Hell Martha could probably do a show on how to create your own sinsemilla and have it be the highlight of your garden. Much less technical skill needed vs. that needed to make a really good beer.
Of course, it's fairly predictable that your scheme would maintain the existence of a black market, and continue to require intrusive drug law enforcement to investigate whether a particular grower was engaged in illegal commercial sales. IOW, you'll keep the worst aspects of the drug war, just because you find people profiting off selling things you disapprove of offensive.
I understand and share your concern about lobbyists and marketers, but your preoccupation with the bad habits some people might pick up is misplaced.
I don't want you to burden me with responsibility for other people's possible development of bad habits. I prefer you to burden THEM with that responsibility. In the process, I want you to end the stupidest goddamned thing I've ever seen, the War on Some Drugs. Established drugs policy does not serve the public interest. It's all about the money, and serves only special involved in that racket, including some with whom we're at war.
It's too costly, monetarily and otherwise, to protect people from themselves. Far better to arm people with honest information instead of propaganda in the hope fewer of them develop bad habits, and then put the resources presently being wasted to more productive use, such as making the streets safe, teaching kids to read and think and so on. There's no lack of things that need more urgent attention than protecting people from themselves.
Brett: No, it wouldn't. Discreet sales don't pose much marketing risk; flagrant sales don't require intrusive enforcement. And the illegal commercial market couldn't easily compete with homegrowing or co-ops. So despite your confidence that nothing ever works, this would work fine. And it has nothing to do with any objection to profit; my objection is to the socially noxious activity of tempting people to develop bad habits that the promise of profit incentivizes. I believe too fervently in capitalism to want to turn another bunch of capitalists loose on the nation's fifteen-year-olds.
The specter of a tobacco-like cannabis industry is uninviting, but I see some issues with the non-profit trading milieu that you advocate.
Cannabis need not be smoked. Before the advent of (psycho)pharmacology, neuroscience & modern technology, humans wishing to partake of the psychoactive facility of cannabis, had few options. They could eat the identified parts of the plant, which didn't work. Or they could burn it and inhale the resultant vapors, which did. Along with a few other, less effective, ways. These were the crude methods befitting a pre-modern society. Unfortunately, cannabis was banned before the modern biosciences really got going. Which is why, in 2010, the predominant mode of administration of cannabis, is to accumulate a certain amount of plant matter, burn it, and then inhale the vapors. Vaporizers or other implements which work with whole plant matter are a step forward*, but they're a temporary accommodation. And within the greater domain, an accommodating science research programme has the potential to develop ways to tackle drug tolerance & other insidious effects. If your model scenario became entrenched as The Way to conduct drug markets, I don't see the means by which the product offerings could evolve to a safer & better version. Your policy disposition is to basically take the existing drug-use scene and carve out a small legal place in the corner. That can & may be a necessary intermediate step in the path to developing a mature relationship with drugs, but it can't be the endgame.
*GW Pharma of the UK, for example, have developed cannabinoid inhalers a decade ago, but they are a commercial enterprise with a R&D dept, working under special permission of the British Home Office. Would a co-op be able to develop such devices? Would NIDA be repurposed?
Cannabis can certainly be consumed by ingesting as is done for example with pot brownies. The effect is slower and more prolonged and I'm told without the sleepyness induced by smoking.
Ingesting marijuana straight-up & alone i.e. without THC extraction, is pretty unreliable. Bhang or brownies are concoctions; not what I was referring to.
Mark, an illegal market can compete quite easily with home-growing, what it offers is convenience. You may have noticed that it's legal to brew your own alcoholic beverages; Wine, beer, (I made mead at one time.) if you demand higher potency, while distillation is still controlled, freezing works. (See Applejack.)
And yet, most people don't. For much the same reason there was still a market for illegal alcohol during Prohibition, though laws against home brewing were mostly enforced in the breach. Most people don't WANT to be their own butcher, baker, and candlestick maker.
Heck, it's legal to masturbate, by your reasoning prostitution shouldn't exist. You've got your ideal legal setup for sex, don't you?
Furthermore, your laws against making money off of selling pot will end up being enforced by the current drug warriors, and so one can safely assume they'll be enforced in the same manner: Abusively. You know, weighing the root ball with the plant to determine if you've exceeded the quota, garbage like that. Enforcement might even be more abusive, due to the desperation to fight all drug use under further legal handicaps.
No, to get the real advantages of legalization, you need to legalize, not come up with some half-way status that preserves the worst features of both legality and illegality.
Mark,
I get the gist of your argument and I agree with most of it. However, I do have a political economy objection.
Your preferred policy option, i.e., a grow-your-own-plus-small-consumer-coops model, pretty much describes the current legal setting for "medical" marijuana in California and other states. And yet, you have seen the rise of medium-to-large for-profit companies in and around that industry that are actively lobbying the public and the politicians for a relaxation of the rules governing marijuana. Witness, for instance, the support of Richard Lee, owner of Oaksterdam University, for Proposition 19. That fact seems to me strong evidence that a grow-your-own policy would not be a stable political equilibrium and would inevitably lead to full commercial legalization.
If that is the case, if the grow-your-own-plus-small-consumer-coops model is not really available in the long run, what would you be your second-best and thus preferred option?
Best regards
@Brett: Cannabis is far easier to produce than alcohol. Also "to get the real advantages of legalization, you need to legalize". The point is that legalization also comes with disadvantages. Legalizing meth would give you all the advantages of destroying the meth markets…and create very damaging legal ones. Drug policy is finding the publicly acceptable trade-off. Libertarians would find acceptable the self-destruction of many more people under a legal meth industry. Most people wouldn't.
@Alejandro: Grow-your-own doesn't describe the MMJ system at all. The dispensaries have a legal monopoly on sale of a product that could easily be grown at home/co-ops, and from what I understand the license allowing a MMJ patient to grow at home is far more difficult to get than a doctor's "recommendation" to buy. Also the rarity of home grows add an element of danger (from theft) even if you do have a govt license. Grow-your-own (what P19 will essentially be in practice I believe) would like put all undiversified dispensaries out of business (which is why many of them are fighting P19).
"@Brett: Cannabis is far easier to produce than alcohol."
I can't speak to the ease of producing pot in a usable form, though I'll agree that gardening is not a particularly difficult task. (And yet, farmers do not lack for customers…) Neither, in my experience, is home brewing. Turning out a drinkable batch of booze is not materially more difficult than many ordinary scratch cooking procedures, perhaps on a par with making your own pickles or sauerkraut. Far less tricky than making your own caramel.
"Legalizing meth would give you all the advantages of destroying the meth markets…and create very damaging legal ones. Drug policy is finding the publicly acceptable trade-off. Libertarians would find acceptable the self-destruction of many more people under a legal meth industry. Most people wouldn’t."
Well, yes, I am a libertarian, and part of that is that I find the collateral damage of the war on drugs to non-users much more offensive than any damage drug users might do to themselves. After all, the former didn't voluntarily assume those risks. Which damage includes not just misdirected raids, but the general militarization of law enforcement, and erosion of civil liberties. Even the idiocy of having to provide ID to buy cold medicine that works.
But I would say that legalization of drugs would probably produce much less harm to the actual users than a naive projection would assume. Usage patterns are warped by the war on drugs, just as Prohibition shifted consumption from beer to hard liquor. (And it shifted back after Prohibition ended, too.) Would you have assumed that, when Prohibition ended, you'd just get more people going blind from drinking sterno? Why assume that legalization of drugs would result in more people consuming drugs which are produced not so much to meet the exact demands of consumers, but to cope with legal restrictions on the staring points of chemical synthesis?
Dukenfield's Law. I believe the incentives problem was long ago identified (waa it by János Kornai in the 1950s? ) as a weakness of Soviet-style central planning. Contrary to myth, Soviet plant managers faced very high incentives for plan fulfilment: under Stalin, being shot for failure; under his successors, merely lots of money for success. If nails were measured by weight, they made few big ones; if by number, lots of little ones. A capitalist variant is Goodhart's law of central banking from 1975: any monetary indicator used for policy becomes unreliable.
Doubt the mirror.
Mark, this is not a utilitarian argument. You're halfway to laying your cards on the table about what kind of life you think is most worth living, or to pawning the question off on current (mutable) psychiatric nosology.
Brett, if anything you underestimate the adverse effects of prohibition on non-users — it underlies the Republican Party's policy of dividing Americans against each other & against Mexico —, but we have to be honest about the intrinsic costs of use to non-users (parents, children, spouses, etc). That's where most of the misery lies (parents & children enjoy no contact high). As for users, it's not just cheap rhetoric for Kleiman to refer to parents' worries. Sellers' caveat emptor indifference rightly offends against normal human moral psychology where children are concerned, & they're a lot of the market.
@Alejandro: Grow-your-own doesn’t describe the MMJ system at all. The dispensaries have a legal monopoly on sale of a product that could easily be grown at home/co-ops, and from what I understand the license allowing a MMJ patient to grow at home is far more difficult to get than a doctor’s “recommendation” to buy. Also the rarity of home grows add an element of danger (from theft) even if you do have a govt license. Grow-your-own (what P19 will essentially be in practice I believe) would like put all undiversified dispensaries out of business (which is why many of them are fighting P19).
Steve,
Please correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding was that medical marijuana dispensaries were supposed to be something ressembling a coop, i.e., non-profit organizations providing marijuana to its members for a fee covering production and other associated costs. They were not supposed to turn a profit on marijuana, yet many (most?) do. Also making a buck from marijuana is the large array of companies serving the dispensaries, with anything from training to paraphernalia to specialized equipment. That for-profit sector is indeed spearheading the effort to establish full commercial legalization. My take is that you could probably see a similar trajectory under a grow-your-own-plus-small-coops model, i.e., nominally non-profit organizations starting to make money from marijuana, passing part of those profits to a large marijuana-related industry, and all of them working together through the political system to undermine the restrictions of the regulatory model. If that is the case, full commercial legalization could very well be the end-destination of a controlled grow-your-own-plus-small-coops system.
Best regards.
Brett writes: I find the collateral damage of the war on drugs to non-users much more offensive than any damage drug users might do to themselves.
Left out of this analysis is an undeniable reality: There are externalities of drug use that affect non-drug users, e.g., violence against women by men who are intoxicated on some substance.
> Steve,
>
> Please correct me if I’m wrong. …
No, you're probably right, but so what? If you want to get rid of prohibition you've got to do something that doesn't involve making perfection the enemy of progress.
The drug war has got to go, but it will remain if the action you take leaves the warriors (and by extension their symbionts, the illegal suppliers) empowered.
Fear of marketers and lobbyists does not justify continuation of current drugs policy, which is what you'll get if Prop 19 goes down.
Fear of marketers and lobbyists simply means that you have a different thing to go after. When was the last time you saw a cigarette ad on television?
Granted, what with corporations being persons and all, prohibiting recreational drug marketers and lobbyists from doing what marketers and lobbyists will do might be tough, but not impossible. Not impossible, in stark contrast to the likelihood of achieving greater good than bad by continuing present policies.
The ideal does not exist. If full commercial legalization is the end result, then so be it. Even full commercial legalization will be better than the current state of affairs.
The whole thing seems to boil down to how much responsibility for bad habits to place on the potential habitué. Yes, addicts can cause their loved ones great heartache in addition to the damage they might cause to themselves, but that's a different and more tractable problem than what results when you try to protect them from themselves via destructive policies that wind up unifying the worst aspects of nanny-statism and authoritarianism.
So, did you ever get an answer to your question about the second-best option?
Sorry Alejandro. Wrong Steve. Still…
Keith, yes there are externalities of drug use. The externality you cite, though, applies to our favorite legal drug. If you're not advocating a return to alcohol prohibition, then what was your point?
Brett is right, the externalities of the drug war are worse than the externalities of what it spectacularly fails to meaningfully address.
Steve, my point was the need to be clear about consequences, which the 21st Amendment doesn't render moot. The effects of both use & prohibition are an empirical matter, & relevant for policy in each case. Or do you imagine the legality of alcohol forecloses prohibiting absolutely anything, regardless of consequences? Free advice: don't rest the case for legalizing marijuana, w/ its relatively small bad effects, on a dogmatic, damn-the-torpedos demand for legalizing everything — methamphetamine, heroin, etc.
Steve
The externalities question applies to alcohol, methamphetamine, cocaine and others. But my point was that to frame the problem as being one of balancing only two considerations (1) how drugs affect users and (2) how drug policy affects users is to leave out a consideration that matters to virtually everyone (drug user or not, even current drug users who do not wish to quit often regret the effect their use has on their kids).
Thanks Keith, but I'm not trying to balance the harms of drug abuse and drugs policy on users. Harms of current drugs policy on users are almost incidental.
What I'm talking about is the harmful effects of current drugs policy on the bulk of everyone else. Whatever harmful effect current drugs policy may have on users is a distraction from the question of how much harm it causes in general, which extends far beyond the user's sphere, and beyond the range of effects that caused alcohol prohibition to be repealed. Illegal alcohol didn't finance insurgencies, for example. Illegal alcohol didn't cause effective medicines to be placed out of reach at the pharmacy, or the logging of your name if you purchase them. It didn't cause massive mistrust of the police, because it was repealed.
As for current willful drug users who regret the effect on their kids, I'd wager most of the effect they regret would be at least partially mitigated if they didn't have to fight the law to obtain the substances they are able to obtain (which are probably not the safer, cheaper ones they'd prefer to obtain absent the obstruction presented by prohibition).
Where does it say that ineffectually trying to protect people from themselves trumps the many billions of dollars wasted on policing and imprisoning people, the many billions of tax dollars foregone, the vast corruption engendered at home and abroad, the failed states, the diminution of civil liberties, the reduction in respect for the law, opportunities elsewhere squandered, to name a few harms of current drugs policy? That's like insisting that sprinkler system make sense on airplanes.
Steve
Well, I actually think the harms imposed on drug users can be pretty brutal and I doubt you'd disagree. 5 years in federal prison for 5g worth of crack is a serious harm (that's not the law any more but it was).
And to return to your alcohol example, that's the number one substance in the U.S. in terms of association with family violence…and it's legal. So, and again I doubt you'd disagree, all of these substance have some effects that are sui generis and not determined simply by their legal status.
Hello again Keith,
There is no concession in my agreement with your last, in which you sidestepped my last.
Please separate the effects of drug use and drug policy upon the user from the effects on everyone else. The wider picture is what counts.
Steve
It may be that we just don't agree. I have spent much of career trying to help people who are addicted to drugs and what happens to them matters a great deal to me — maybe my professional experience leads me to overweight the lives and well-being of that population, we are all captives of our own experience. But I don't see the need to make a choice between should we care what happens to users OR everyone else…what would be wrong about weighing both into our policy analysis?
Fair enough Keith, but it's not black and while, users OR everyone else. Placing the emphasis on "everyone else" will wind up benefiting users, too, as in removing exposure to the criminal element and their symbionts.
Anyway, fair enough. Peace.
It seems to me that you could make Kleiman's argument about anything. Sugar and fatty foods, for instance, are habit-forming. Should we require their production to be non-commercial as well? How about alcohol and tobacco? How about closing down all casinos, lotteries, and racetracks and requiring everyone to gamble at home?
Indeed, what you get at the end of this project is a repudiation of capitalism, where anything that might be bad for you can't be sold or marketed. Imagine, if you will, the hit to economic growth and tax revenue that we would take if we thought like this.
No thanks. I'm perfectly fine with state-grown marijuana as a substitute for complete prohibition, but the capitalist system is based on the idea that if something is legal, the most beneficial means of dissemination is to allow people to sell it.
Mark, you seem to assume that regulation of legal cannabis cannot address any of the problems you posit. Here in Australia, advertising of tobacco is banned. The products have to be hidden in shops. I would think a licensing regime similar to alcohol would apply to cannabis, ie customers have to show proof-of-age at licensed outlets to buy a reasonably priced (and taxed) product. Sales could also be rationed as in Amsterdam, to 5g per sale. Under these conditions I think the illicit industry would just about disappear and cannabis would be harder to get for young people who are most likely to experience problems.
Some kids will grow their own for sure, but I would rather see them gardening than ripping people off to pay illicit drug prices.
You also seem to assume that regulated supply would increase use compared to the unregulated distribution under prohibition. This is highly debatable!
This is the pot equivalent of the ban on gay marriage. Mark, sorry but a lousy idea that indulges the personal preferences of some at the complete expense of others. That and it wouldn't work. I have spent my entire adult life in the cannabis trade in CA; you
are no expert and your policy ideas for cannabis reflect that.
Even when I was in 1st grade I knew it was wrong and unfair for the teacher to punish the class for the transgressions of one or two students.
So do you really think that it's better to leave the distribution in the hands of the Mexican cartels?
Why not just say no to advertising for this product. Pharmaceutical companies have to use up to half their commercial's time to give that list of potential side effects and Cigarettes/tobacco can't advertise on TV so I think it safe to assume that 1st Amendment issues wouldn't put the kibosh on the no advertising cannabis rule.
I do hate to break this to you but degenerate addicts don't need to be see any advertising to get them on their way to debauching themselves. One of the biggest misconceptions on the side of observers is that people who are degenerate addicts could have been prevented from becoming degenerate addicts by some kind of tweaking of their reality. One of the whoppers is that if they hadn't smoked that first joint they would have remained sober as the proverbial judge. It really is totally untrue. It's a disease but it's not a communicable disease. I know lots of degenerate addicts even validate the flawed thinking that they were made into degenerate addicts by happenstance. The other popular but no less false proffer is that alcoholics aren't suffering from the same disease as degenerate addicts that express their addiction with unapproved and addictive substances. The phrase 'alcohol and drugs' is equivalent to the phrase 'pizza and food'. If you re-legalize cannabis you're likely to see an influx of degenerate addicts take up the habit, but not a one would be sober before cannabis re-legalization. Frankly I think you'll see a lot of degenerate addicts that today express their degenerate addiction through the abuse of alcohol. But for one reason or another these people aren't inclined to break the law to get high. I submit that any increase of cannabis abuse will see a 1 for 1 decline in the number of degenerate addicts that choose a different drug of abuse. The article above brought back a memory from an AA meeting a few years ago which I attended which featured a guest speaker affectionately referred to as The "Listerine Lady". That name came from the fact that the only thing she drank when she was a practicing degenerate addict and expressed her addiction with mouthwash, with a preference to minty green Listerine. She chose that because she was hiding her degenerate addiction and believed that people wouldn't guess she was a drunk if her breath were always minty fresh. I only mention her because it illustrates my point that degenerate addict will get around any roadblock to their getting high, whether real or perceived.
Interesting: I went to look to see if maybe her story was online somewhere and apparently it's not that uncommon for people to drink mouthwash to feed their degenerate addiction. As a result there's a number of Listerine Ladies hailing from different parts of the country. That TV show Intervention had an episode where they intervened a Listerine Lady. I guess I think that the existence of all these Listerine drinkers gives a little more support to my opinion above.
PS a lot of degenerate addicts in recovery self identify to the people that they meet and some also give permission to repeat the addict's story to anyone interested in hearing it.anyone who wants to hear it. It seems to me that those with a rather unusual story give that permission the most frequently. Then again a lot of people have probably asked people with more unusual stories if they could repeat it and why in the world would someone want to repeat a addict's boring story?
One needn't look further than the sales of legal cannabis substitutes It supports the notion that a lot of people prefer to be in compliance with the law. They'll even buy random herbs treated with JWH-018 for almost the price of good cannabis taking no consideration of possible negative heath consequences of this unapproved by any regulatory body synthetic cannanabinoid. One way or another the degenerate addict. is going to get high.
The bottom line is that it's hypocritical for the laws against cannabis to be in existence as long as alcohol and sniffing model airplane glue remain legal. Without making alcohol and glue sniffing against the law there is absolutely no hope in winning the war on some drugs because the long and the short of it is that a degenerate addict will debauch himself regardless of the drug laws in this country. It is the degenerate addict that should be what you're concerned with, because similar to the example of booze consumption above the degenerate addict is responsible almost all of the social negatives and costs that can be blamed on solely on drugs of abuse being used. That doesn't include the costs that are incurred resulting from society foolishly assigning the drugs distribution chain to organized crime enterprises. These costs are often conflated with each other by those opposed to the re-legalization of certain mind altering drugs. But there most certainly is a significant cost to maintaining the prohibited status of a partial list of mind altering drugs.