It has been observed that actual political events and statements are currently so weird that it’s hard to tell satire from sober fact. (It’s not clear whether that means that The Onion will have to go out of business or instead that it will replace the New York Times.)
But of course that has long been true of drug policy. Rob MacCoun and Peter Reuter, two sober-sided academics (MacCoun a social psychologist at Berkeley, Reuter an economist at Maryland) put on their best straight faces and list the effective rules of the drug-policy-research game:
(1) Evidence that a drug impairs human capacities is always believable and important.
(2) Our best estimate of a drug’s harm is not the average estimate but the most severe estimate yet obtained.
(3) Evidence that an illicit drug could have beneï¬ts may not be collected.
(4) Treatment requires evidence of both effectiveness and cost-effectiveness.
(5) Evidence regarding prevention is always welcome, but it still would not get much funding.
(6) Law enforcement and interdiction require no evidence at all; they are assumed to be effective and appropriate.
(7) Evidence against enforcement creates a presumption that the researcher is a liberal.
(8) Evidence for harm reduction creates a presumption that the researcher approves of drug use.
(9) Scientific research on drugs cannot motivate a change from tough law to lenient law, but it can motivate a change in the opposite direction.
None of that has changed, even as the balance of media discourse has moved dramatically. Tobacco, but not alcohol, operates under the same rules. Remarkable, really. But so far it looks quite stable.
I’m not sure that Rules 4, 6 and 7 apply to tobacco.
Fair enough.
Funny. They ought to make a poster out of this and spread it around.