Einstein and drugs

Einstein is supposed to have once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I thought of this last night as I was reading something about the “drug war” in America. We have been interdicting drug smugglers and prosecuting drug vendors and users for decades now, filling our prisons with drug-related offenders. Consider:

• “Overall, the United States incarcerated 2,320,359 persons at year end 2005….At year end 2005, one in every 136 U.S. residents was incarcerated in a State or Federal prison or a local jail.” Source: Harrison, Paige M. & Beck, Allen J., Ph.D., US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2005 (Washington DC: US Department of Justice, Nov. 2006), pp. 1-2.

• "More than 9.25 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, mostly as pre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or as sentenced prisoners. Almost half of these are in the United States (2.19m), China (1.55m plus pretrial detainees and prisoners in 'administrative detention') or Russia (0.87m)." Source: Walmsley, Roy, "World Prison Population List (Seventh Edition)" (London, England: International Centre for Prison Studies, 2007), p. 1

• "In 1995, 23% of state prisoners were incarcerated for drug offenses in contrast to 9% of drug offenders in state prisons in 1986. In fact, the proportion of drug offenders in the state prison population nearly tripled by 1990, when it reached 21%, and has remained at close to that level since then. The proportion of federal prisoners held for drug violations doubled during the past 10 years. In 1985, 34% of federal prisoners were incarcerated for drug violations. By 1995, the proportion had risen to 60%." Source: Craig Haney, Ph.D., and Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., "The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy: Twenty-five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment," American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 715.

• States spent $42.89 billion on Corrections in 2005 alone. To compare, states only spent $24.69 billion on public assistance. Source: National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), 2005 State Expenditure Report (Washington, DC: NASBO, Fall 2006), p. 35, Table 18, and p. 58, Table 32.

• Since the enactment of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug users, the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget has increased by 1,954%. Its budget jumped from $220 million in 1986 to more than $4.3 billion in 2001. Sources: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1996 (Washington DC: US Department of Justice, 1997), p. 20; Executive Office of the President, Budget of the United States Government, FY 2002 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 2001), p. 134.

• According to ONDCP, federal spending to incarcerate drug offenders totals nearly $3 Billion a year -- $2.525 Billion by the Bureau of Prisons, and $429.4 Million by Federal Prisoner Detention. Source: Office of National Drug Control Policy, "National Drug Control Strategy: FY 2003 Budget Summary" (Washington, DC: Office of the President, February 2002), Table 3, pp. 7-9.

You would think we might have learned something from prohibition, which didn’t significantly impede the supply of alcohol, but did spawn a highly profitable smuggling trade run by organized crime, since it effectively produced a monopoly and drove the price of alcohol higher, even though the production costs stayed very low.

Our largely ineffectual attempts at constraining the supply of drugs to the US has had essentially the same effect – it has produced a highly profitable monopoly. Plants (cannabis and poppies) which grow like roadside weeds produce a product that can be sold for astronomical prices on American streets. This has produced an international narcotics business estimated to earn drug traffickers $300-400 billion per year, enough that they essentially own states like Afghanistan and Columbia.

I don’t know what the answer is – drugs are addictive and it is hard to wean people from addictions. But Einstein had a point – whatever we are doing now certainly isn’t working, and to continue just to do more of the same and expect anything to improve is the definition of insanity. It’s too bad that it seems to be political suicide to suggest we try a different approach, because that effectively constrains us to keep doing the same ineffectual things and wasting billions of dollars a year of approaches that don’t work.

I suspect if we spent even a fraction of those billions on treatments and education – trying to reduce the demand instead of focusing on the supply – we would have much better results.