atara
Bluelighter
There has been a general feeling that the "next step" for the legalization movement after cannabis should be towards decriminalizing psychedelics and other relatively safe drugs. People think it is politically feasible and probably not too disruptive, which is nice.
However, to me the more important thing for the drug policy movement to address is the violence associated with illegal drug markets. The illicit psychedelic market is not associated with so much violence, because the trade in psychedelics is relatively small and they are not a priority of law enforcement. Furthermore there seems to be a culture of pacifism among psychedelic users, and the people who sell psychedelics are (we all know this from experience) usually less scary. In particular, William Leonard Pickard supplied millions of people with LSD with no known body count.
The violence associated with most drugs is generally proportional to the size of the market in those drugs, and those markets look like this:
Marijuana: ~$150 bn (if we can't even legalize marijuana, this navel-gazing is all pointless anyway)
Cocaine: ~$88 bn
Opium/heroin: ~$64 bn
Methamphetamine: ~$10 bn
Others: <<$10 bn
In particular, the trade in cocaine has destabilized northern Latin America for decades, the trade in heroin is highly concentrated in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban and Da'esh, and the trade in methamphetamine helps fund North Korea. In short, the Drug War actually costs the West much more than merely the efforts spend on drug law enforcement.
Obviously, legalization of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine is the most effective solution. Also obviously, if that were a possibility, we would have done it already. I will be the first person to vote for the reanimated corpse of Ron Paul. Need I remind you--thousands of people are dying every day for the sake of dubious improvements in Western economies. (The DEA contends that drug legalization would hurt productivity.)
So I think the key question is this:
What are the most politically feasible reforms that would reduce violence the most?
We might rephrase this as: what is the most politically efficient way to reduce drug war violence? I have a few ideas. My general inspiration is Milton Friedman's greatest line:
Note that drug users are not very price-sensitive since the monetary cost is only one of the downsides of drug use. As such any increase in drug use would likely be smaller than the increase in consumption of, say, beef tenderloin if its price dropped similarly. Also note that putting downward pressure on drug street prices makes it harder for organized criminals to respond to law enforcement pressure by increasing street prices to raise revenue.
Coca leaf legalization:
Coca leaf tea has thousands of years of history of use in South America and continues to be widely used today without major social or health impacts. As such I expect that it would be similarly unremarkable elsewhere. I expect the impact on cocaine markets to be decentralizing: instead of being produced in large batches in third-world countries and shipped across borders, it might be extracted in smaller makeshift labs closer to the point of consumption. I expect this process to be less violent because violence is more effective when you have a visible enemy, and smaller operations are better able to hide from each other and thus less able to hurt each other. Furthermore, small operators are less likely to keep to anti-legalistic codes of honor and more likely to call the cops when they're in danger.
Perhaps the most concerning question is about the effect of cocaine on cardiac nerves, particularly since consuming coca tea is not particularly disruptive to someone's life, but may bring severe long-term health risks. There are essentially no studies on the long-term health effects of consuming coca tea (i.e., consuming small doses of cocaine regularly as opposed to large parenteral doses.
This is an extremely unconventional strategy. It's essentially a giveaway to cocaine producers! But it creates thousands of eager competitors ready to drain the Sinaloa cartel's major profit stream.
Kratom legalization:
Ditto. Even oral kratom appears to be quite addictive, but overdose fatalities involving uncombined kratom are extremely rare. This appears to be due to incomplete activation of mu-OR by mitragynine. The hope obviously is that opioid would take kratom instead. The slightly modified hope is that at least they would take kratom instead sometimes, which still means that they would consume fewer opioids and generate less profit for the Taliban.
The problem with this strategy is relatively obvious: kratom is legal! But only barely. Kratom suppliers are essentially in a grey-market and all brick-and-mortar retailers are incredibly expensive. Further, it is quite clear from the many reports of combined kratom fatalities that kratom users often continue to use other opioids, which makes this an incomplete solution at best. But an incomplete solution is still something. In fact, practically all of the solutions here are incomplete.
The other problem is the unknown liver burden of kratom use. Kratom in combination with alcohol is very damaging to the liver; kratom in combination with APAP is probably also quite damaging (most things combined with APAP are bad).
Buprenorphine legalization:
Pretty similar to kratom legalization, really. Buprenorphine has less concern about liver toxicity. Possibly the drug should be supplied only in that form combined with a little naloxone which supposedly prevents abuse.
The possibility for buprenorphine to be chemically modified to produce other opioids could be good or bad. If it is easy enough, the market will be dominated by small-scale providers, which is good. If it is relatively difficult but not impossible, it will create more large-scale suppliers, which is bad.
HDMP-28 (or similar) legalization:
Cocaine has retained its market dominance over its much cheaper and more reinforcing competitor, methamphetamine. Why? Probably because cocaine is less disruptive to the lives of the people who use it. Compared to opioids and methamphetamine, "functional cocaine use" is relatively common among cocaine users. Users with jobs and families may be readily enticed to switch to an alternative, even if it is not quite as good as the real thing. However, getting close would be nice. Since cocaine's primary health risk (cardiac nerve toxicity) is pharmacologically distinct from its reinforcing MoA (monoamine reuptake inhibition), a replacement may be (much!) safer and thus more politically palatable.
HDMP-28, itself, is not a particularly good candidate due to possible liver toxicity, although arylpiperidinylacetates (phenidates) of this category are typically metabolized rapidly by deesterification and this pathway may prevent oxidation of the naphthalene ring. Furthermore, HDMP-28 has not exactly received rave reviews among cocaine users. However, due to a lack of suitable replacements I figured I would group all such similar triple reuptake inhibitors here.
Pseudoephedrine legalization:
Everybody already hates the ban on Sudafed, so why not? It's relatively well-known that methamphetamine imports from Mexico to the United States increased dramatically when pseudoephedrine availability was curtailed. Why not reverse the process? Of all of the proposals here, this is the one we know the most about. But, of course, it's a "capitulation" to drug labs; it doesn't play nice with the adversarial psyche of the Western body politic.
Hallucinogenic treatments:
The most promising drugs in this category are ibogaine and salvia, both producing such profound dissociative effects as to comfortably earn the title "hallucinogen". These treatments are understudied but seem to be remarkably effective. For asinine reasons Western governments are reluctant to permit research into these substances, but from what we do know, activation of the kappa-opioid receptor appears to disrupt the cycle of cravings. kOR activation is not so fun, which may be why iboga, with its scattershot pharmacology, is more popular than salvia; in the case of salvia, extended experiences (chewing) appear to be necessary.
Salvinorin A analogs are under active research as possible avenues towards treatments for particularly cocaine (and possibly methamphetamine?) addiction. So this particular example may be the closest to execution, although that's not saying much.
Positive reinforcement:
The reader may have understandably doubted the existence of non-treatment, non-enforcement-based demand reduction.
Veritas vos liberabit! Why not simply pay people not to take drugs? Drug users are basically rational when they do not have to predict their own behavior. As much as I abhor urinalysis, it's less disgusting when it's voluntary. Simply offering money for a negative urine screen may convince some drug users to take time off. This may even, ultimately, cause them to decide that life without regular drug use wouldn't be so bad.
I expect this to be mostly effective for cocaine, which is the least addictive, less effective for methamphetamine, and probably not very effective for opioids. However, in combination with kratom legalization, this approach may also decrease opioid use.
This is basically a sort of qualified universal basic income, since there is no way to ensure that the money can only be offered to drug users (doing so would encourage people to become drug users). However, the outlay may not have to be very large. A drug screen detects past-week-or-so drug use, but generally most people will not want to quit taking drugs repeatedly, so testing every week is madness. Rather, you set a certain frequency limit (say 2 weeks) for positive screens (no compensation), and a longer limit (say 8 weeks) for negative ones. If we offer $200 for a negative screen that comes out to $1300 per person per year or about 260 billion dollars (in the US) per year at maximum utilization. However, most people probably wouldn't think it's worth it, I'm guessing.
I guess the major downside of this strategy is that it would be disturbing to live in a country where a lot of people regularly piss in a cup for money. I mean, like, what the fuck?
Other shit:
This idea was written by you, the reader! It might be better than any of mine!
Anyway, this has been on my mind for years, so I'm glad I finally wrote it down. I don't know if I've got the fix, but I know that whenever I think about drug policy, this is where my mind goes. I can grow my own damn mushrooms if I want to.
However, to me the more important thing for the drug policy movement to address is the violence associated with illegal drug markets. The illicit psychedelic market is not associated with so much violence, because the trade in psychedelics is relatively small and they are not a priority of law enforcement. Furthermore there seems to be a culture of pacifism among psychedelic users, and the people who sell psychedelics are (we all know this from experience) usually less scary. In particular, William Leonard Pickard supplied millions of people with LSD with no known body count.
The violence associated with most drugs is generally proportional to the size of the market in those drugs, and those markets look like this:
Marijuana: ~$150 bn (if we can't even legalize marijuana, this navel-gazing is all pointless anyway)
Cocaine: ~$88 bn
Opium/heroin: ~$64 bn
Methamphetamine: ~$10 bn
Others: <<$10 bn
In particular, the trade in cocaine has destabilized northern Latin America for decades, the trade in heroin is highly concentrated in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban and Da'esh, and the trade in methamphetamine helps fund North Korea. In short, the Drug War actually costs the West much more than merely the efforts spend on drug law enforcement.
Obviously, legalization of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine is the most effective solution. Also obviously, if that were a possibility, we would have done it already. I will be the first person to vote for the reanimated corpse of Ron Paul. Need I remind you--thousands of people are dying every day for the sake of dubious improvements in Western economies. (The DEA contends that drug legalization would hurt productivity.)
So I think the key question is this:
What are the most politically feasible reforms that would reduce violence the most?
We might rephrase this as: what is the most politically efficient way to reduce drug war violence? I have a few ideas. My general inspiration is Milton Friedman's greatest line:
Our approach will be to undermine the government's ability to protect the drug cartels by creating competition. The goal is simply to lower the street price of drugs which will make violent trafficking organizations become financially unsustainable. To lower prices, we can target supply or demand. Essentially all price-lowering efforts of governments to date have been demand-side and enforcement-based and have failed. We therefore consider only non-enforcement-based demand reductions. On the supply side, there are two ways to decrease the price of a product: increase the supply or introduce a competing product. However, any supply increases or competing products must be provided through, at least, much less violent methods than the status quo.
Note that drug users are not very price-sensitive since the monetary cost is only one of the downsides of drug use. As such any increase in drug use would likely be smaller than the increase in consumption of, say, beef tenderloin if its price dropped similarly. Also note that putting downward pressure on drug street prices makes it harder for organized criminals to respond to law enforcement pressure by increasing street prices to raise revenue.
Coca leaf legalization:
Coca leaf tea has thousands of years of history of use in South America and continues to be widely used today without major social or health impacts. As such I expect that it would be similarly unremarkable elsewhere. I expect the impact on cocaine markets to be decentralizing: instead of being produced in large batches in third-world countries and shipped across borders, it might be extracted in smaller makeshift labs closer to the point of consumption. I expect this process to be less violent because violence is more effective when you have a visible enemy, and smaller operations are better able to hide from each other and thus less able to hurt each other. Furthermore, small operators are less likely to keep to anti-legalistic codes of honor and more likely to call the cops when they're in danger.
Perhaps the most concerning question is about the effect of cocaine on cardiac nerves, particularly since consuming coca tea is not particularly disruptive to someone's life, but may bring severe long-term health risks. There are essentially no studies on the long-term health effects of consuming coca tea (i.e., consuming small doses of cocaine regularly as opposed to large parenteral doses.
This is an extremely unconventional strategy. It's essentially a giveaway to cocaine producers! But it creates thousands of eager competitors ready to drain the Sinaloa cartel's major profit stream.
Kratom legalization:
Ditto. Even oral kratom appears to be quite addictive, but overdose fatalities involving uncombined kratom are extremely rare. This appears to be due to incomplete activation of mu-OR by mitragynine. The hope obviously is that opioid would take kratom instead. The slightly modified hope is that at least they would take kratom instead sometimes, which still means that they would consume fewer opioids and generate less profit for the Taliban.
The problem with this strategy is relatively obvious: kratom is legal! But only barely. Kratom suppliers are essentially in a grey-market and all brick-and-mortar retailers are incredibly expensive. Further, it is quite clear from the many reports of combined kratom fatalities that kratom users often continue to use other opioids, which makes this an incomplete solution at best. But an incomplete solution is still something. In fact, practically all of the solutions here are incomplete.
The other problem is the unknown liver burden of kratom use. Kratom in combination with alcohol is very damaging to the liver; kratom in combination with APAP is probably also quite damaging (most things combined with APAP are bad).
Buprenorphine legalization:
Pretty similar to kratom legalization, really. Buprenorphine has less concern about liver toxicity. Possibly the drug should be supplied only in that form combined with a little naloxone which supposedly prevents abuse.
The possibility for buprenorphine to be chemically modified to produce other opioids could be good or bad. If it is easy enough, the market will be dominated by small-scale providers, which is good. If it is relatively difficult but not impossible, it will create more large-scale suppliers, which is bad.
HDMP-28 (or similar) legalization:
Cocaine has retained its market dominance over its much cheaper and more reinforcing competitor, methamphetamine. Why? Probably because cocaine is less disruptive to the lives of the people who use it. Compared to opioids and methamphetamine, "functional cocaine use" is relatively common among cocaine users. Users with jobs and families may be readily enticed to switch to an alternative, even if it is not quite as good as the real thing. However, getting close would be nice. Since cocaine's primary health risk (cardiac nerve toxicity) is pharmacologically distinct from its reinforcing MoA (monoamine reuptake inhibition), a replacement may be (much!) safer and thus more politically palatable.
HDMP-28, itself, is not a particularly good candidate due to possible liver toxicity, although arylpiperidinylacetates (phenidates) of this category are typically metabolized rapidly by deesterification and this pathway may prevent oxidation of the naphthalene ring. Furthermore, HDMP-28 has not exactly received rave reviews among cocaine users. However, due to a lack of suitable replacements I figured I would group all such similar triple reuptake inhibitors here.
Pseudoephedrine legalization:
Everybody already hates the ban on Sudafed, so why not? It's relatively well-known that methamphetamine imports from Mexico to the United States increased dramatically when pseudoephedrine availability was curtailed. Why not reverse the process? Of all of the proposals here, this is the one we know the most about. But, of course, it's a "capitulation" to drug labs; it doesn't play nice with the adversarial psyche of the Western body politic.
Hallucinogenic treatments:
The most promising drugs in this category are ibogaine and salvia, both producing such profound dissociative effects as to comfortably earn the title "hallucinogen". These treatments are understudied but seem to be remarkably effective. For asinine reasons Western governments are reluctant to permit research into these substances, but from what we do know, activation of the kappa-opioid receptor appears to disrupt the cycle of cravings. kOR activation is not so fun, which may be why iboga, with its scattershot pharmacology, is more popular than salvia; in the case of salvia, extended experiences (chewing) appear to be necessary.
Salvinorin A analogs are under active research as possible avenues towards treatments for particularly cocaine (and possibly methamphetamine?) addiction. So this particular example may be the closest to execution, although that's not saying much.
Positive reinforcement:
The reader may have understandably doubted the existence of non-treatment, non-enforcement-based demand reduction.
Veritas vos liberabit! Why not simply pay people not to take drugs? Drug users are basically rational when they do not have to predict their own behavior. As much as I abhor urinalysis, it's less disgusting when it's voluntary. Simply offering money for a negative urine screen may convince some drug users to take time off. This may even, ultimately, cause them to decide that life without regular drug use wouldn't be so bad.
I expect this to be mostly effective for cocaine, which is the least addictive, less effective for methamphetamine, and probably not very effective for opioids. However, in combination with kratom legalization, this approach may also decrease opioid use.
This is basically a sort of qualified universal basic income, since there is no way to ensure that the money can only be offered to drug users (doing so would encourage people to become drug users). However, the outlay may not have to be very large. A drug screen detects past-week-or-so drug use, but generally most people will not want to quit taking drugs repeatedly, so testing every week is madness. Rather, you set a certain frequency limit (say 2 weeks) for positive screens (no compensation), and a longer limit (say 8 weeks) for negative ones. If we offer $200 for a negative screen that comes out to $1300 per person per year or about 260 billion dollars (in the US) per year at maximum utilization. However, most people probably wouldn't think it's worth it, I'm guessing.
I guess the major downside of this strategy is that it would be disturbing to live in a country where a lot of people regularly piss in a cup for money. I mean, like, what the fuck?
Other shit:
This idea was written by you, the reader! It might be better than any of mine!
Anyway, this has been on my mind for years, so I'm glad I finally wrote it down. I don't know if I've got the fix, but I know that whenever I think about drug policy, this is where my mind goes. I can grow my own damn mushrooms if I want to.
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