Wide-ranging discussion with Josh Barro of Business Insider. I failed to mention the role of alcohol in suicide, but otherwise performed adequately. Barro is a first-rate interviewer.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman
What luck to find an intelligent and knowledgeable interviewer!
About 8 minutes in, Mark says : "If it's your brother, if it's your son, your father .." A slip and not a prejudice, but still a revealing Freudian one. It looks as if there is a stereotype of the typical cannabis user or abuser as male. How far is this true? In alcohol there has been (at least in the UK) a rise in binge drinking by young women. In turn, it's plausible that heavier drinking by women lowers the social barriers to heavier drinking by the men they associate with. Is a similar process going on with cannabis?
These peer group interactions can work the other way. IIRC one early group in the USA that abandoned cigarette smoking as terminally uncool was young black inner-city men, the kind of people suburban conservatives fear (nor entirely without reason). Why I don't know.