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Did Decriminalizing Pot Cause the Heroin Crisis?
Let me say at the outset that I’m dubious. But Don Winslow makes an interesting case in El Chapo and the Secret History of the Heroin Crisis:
If you wonder why America is in the grips of a heroin epidemic that kills two hundred people a week, take a hard look at the legalization of pot, which destroyed the profits of the Mexican cartels. How did they respond to a major loss in revenue? Like any company, they created an irresistible new product and flooded the market. The scariest part: this might not have happened with El Chapo in charge.
He argues that the Sinaloa Cartel — whose flagship product had been weed — found itself suddenly unable to compete against a superior American product with dramatically lower transport and security costs. “Once-vast fields in Durango now lie fallow.” This of course was supposed to be a selling point of decriminalization: It would put the cartels out of business. Except that it didn’t. Instead of taking up gainful employment as insurance adjustors or chartered accountants, they analyzed the US market and saw an unfilled niche. A growing number of Americans were addicted to expensive prescription opioids:
They increased the production of Mexican heroin by almost 70 percent, and also raised the purity level, bringing in Colombian cooks to create “cinnamon” heroin as strong as the East Asian product. They had been selling a product that was about 46 percent pure, now they improved it to 90 percent.
Their third move was classic market economics—they dropped the price. A kilo of heroin went for as much as $200,000 in New York City a few years ago, cost $80,000 in 2013, and now has dropped to around $50,000. More of a better product for less money: You can’t beat it.
At the same time, American drug and law-enforcement officials, concerned about the dramatic surge in overdose deaths from pharmaceutical opioids (165,000 from 1999 to 2014), cracked down on both legal and illegal distribution, opening the door for Mexican heroin, which sold for five to ten bucks a dose.
With consequences we all know — 125 deaths a day, more than five an hour, a fatality level that matches the deaths from AIDS at the height of the epidemic.
Many journalists, including Winslow, believe the Mexican government wound up supporting the Sinaloa Cartel during the worst years of the Cartel Wars on the grounds that someone had to win for there to be even a modicum of stability. The Sinaloa crew was, at least, averse to killing civilians, which couldn’t be said of their rivals. When Guzmán was recaptured in 2014, Winslow predicted that like Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Mexico would now be plunged into blood feuds in a chaotic power struggle:
I reminded them that in the power vacuum that followed Saddam Hussein’s capture and subsequent execution, Iraq splintered into sectarian violence, Shiite against Sunni. ISIS came into being, overran Iraqi and Syrian cities, and launched a reign of terror.
Look, I shed no tears for either Hussein or Guzmán. Both were killers and torturers. But the fact is that the horrific violence of Guzmán’s war of conquest had largely abated by 2014, precisely because he had won the war (with at least the passive assistance of the Mexican and U. S. governments) and established what’s come to be called the Pax Sinaloa.
The cartels, he says, control somewhere between 8 and 12 percent of the Mexican economy. The Mexican economy is dependent on the drug trade. He doesn’t buy the story about El Chapo escaping his maximum security prison through a mile-long tunnel, by the way:
For the record, Guzmán did not go out that tunnel on a motorcycle. Steve McQueen escapes on motorcycles. My money says that Guzmán didn’t go into that tunnel at all; anyone who can afford to pay $50 million in bribes and finance the excavation of a mile-long tunnel can also afford not to use it.
Gentle reader, the man is worth $1 billion. He was thinking about buying the Chelsea Football Club. He went out the front door. … Guzmán didn’t escape; he was let out so that he could try to reestablish order.
At roughly the same time, Fentanyl enters the scene. For narcos, it’s got huge advantages over heroin. It’s made in a lab, so you don’t need poppy fields. You don’t need to hire people to tend and harvest the crop. It’s incredibly powerful, so you can smuggle more per courrier.
But it’s the profits that will make fentanyl the new crack cocaine, which created the enormous wealth of the Mexican cartels in the eighties and nineties. A kilo of fentanyl can be stepped on sixteen to twenty-four times to create an astounding return on investment of $1.3 million per kilo, compared with $271,000 per kilo of heroin.
No wonder the DEA estimates that the importation of fentanyl from Mexico is up by 65 percent from 2014.
Fentanyl is now mixed with heroin to increase its potency. Unwitting heroin users die from taking a same-sized dose. Doctors and cops don’t realize they need a much stronger dose of Narcan to revive someone who’s taken an overdose. And it’s even more addictive than heroin: Once you’ve tried it, you don’t go back. The combination of lab-produced fentanyl and the fracturing of the Sinaloa Cartel “is a catastrophe for law enforcement and American society as a whole but an absolute boon for the narcos seeking to supplant the old order.” The profits ensure that up-and-coming cartels can afford to pay their fighters.
The rest of the article’s a great read — starring Sean Penn, a ravishing telenovela star named Kate, and a monkey — but if you’re strapped for time, short version is Guzmán winds up back in jail. And nothing changes.
The Los Angeles Times estimates that two thirds of Mexican drug lords have been either killed or imprisoned. And what’s the result? Drugs are more plentiful, more potent, and cheaper than ever. Deaths from overdoses are at an all-time high. Violence in Mexico, once declining, is starting to rise again. Just last week, I looked at photographs of the bodies of four people stuffed into a car trunk in Tijuana. The bodies showed signs of torture. …
… Someone will replace El Chapo, just as he replaced his predecessors. My bet’s on El Mencho, but it really doesn’t matter. That’s the lesson we seem to have to learn over and over and over again, world without end, amen. Guzmán was right: “If there was no consumption, there would be no sales.” I’m always amazed that progressive young millennials will picket a grocery chain for not buying fair-trade coffee but will go home and do drugs that are brought to them by the killers, torturers, and sadists of the cartels. …
As long as the U. S. and Europe continue to buy billions of dollars’ worth of drugs a year while at the same time spending billions to intercept them, we will create an endless succession of Chapos and Menchos.
An entire economy is based on drug prohibition and punishment, something to the tune of $50 billion a year, more than double the estimated $22 billion we spend on heroin.
I’m not persuaded that this wouldn’t have happened absent the decriminalization of pot, are you? If it had remained profitable to sell weed, I reckon these guys would have sold weed and opioids. If you argue as Winslow does that this is an entirely demand-driven industry, it doesn’t make sense to think that the cartels only have the wit, resources, or manpower to sell one drug at a time.
But it’s easy to persuade me that so long as there’s a multi-billion market for drugs in the US and Europe, someone will supply it. And easy to persuade me that the war on drugs has resulted in social catastrophe for the US and Mexico — probably more of a catastrophe than total decriminalization could ever be. Almost half the federal prison population is in the pen for a drug-related offense. The US has about five percent of the world’s population, but a quarter of its prison population — a grievous shame in a country that prides itself in being the land of the free. Locking up drug offenders ensures that families are destroyed, children fatherless, and the curse of underclass life passed to a new generation.
And for Mexico, it’s been far worse. In 2014, researcher Molly Molloy estimated the human toll of the previous six years, and found that as many as 130,000 people or more had been killed, 27,000 were missing, and an untold number buried in mass graves.
“The overwhelming majority of the deaths are people shot down on the street, in their homes or workplaces, on playgrounds, etc. In my reading of the daily accounts of the killings, it is clear that most of the victims are ordinary people, exhibiting nothing to indicate they are employed in the lucrative drug business,” Molloy wrote. …
Amid all the killing, Molloy told NCR, she has seen no evidence the flow of drugs from Mexico has decreased, which prompts her to ask, “So if this is a drug war, who is winning, and what were all those dead people killed for?”
Thoughts?
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Fair point. But keep in mind that’s not an argument that they wouldn’t work in the US, or that similar policies tailored to the US wouldn’t yield beneficial outcomes.
It’s possible they wouldn’t, But if not why not? We’re bigger isn’t really a logical argument.
Kind of agree, because I do think that the geographic scope, distribution of population, population density, etc., does affect how we organize ourselves and what kind of services and support networks we can provide that may make a program highly successful in a different environment. Agree entirely that it is not determinative, but it is one of many variables regarding the success of these programs.
That’s a very good question. To an extent I agree with Bryan’s comment — America is more violent country than other developed countries, and that’s “part of our shadow.” I’d also point out that if you measure the violent crime rate not over the past year but over the past century, Europe is an absolute bloodbath compared to America. You might reply, “Yes, but war and crime aren’t the same thing” — and perhaps that’s right, but anyone who says, “Americans are just more violent” has to explain why we’re on the other hand so peaceful when it comes to going to war with other Americans.
It’s true, as Bryan says, that we’re a less inhibited and conformist country in many ways, with consequences both good and bad. But I also think that answer is too defeatist. We have an extremely criminogenic, mostly black underclass, without which I suspect our crime rates would be closer to Europe’s. And the history of that underclass is completely unlike that of any population in Europe. I suspect that if we could put black families back together again, it would go a long way toward solving the crime problem. And while the bad news is that no one knows how to do that, the good news is that it’s slowly happening on its own.
What does the treatment consist of?
Well, effective diet pills used to be commercially available :-)
Murder is prohibited. That doesn’t work. But let’s don’t legalize it.
I am not sure I trust some of those studies, as they are trying to prove a point.
Treatment is ideally tailored to the needs of the person. The basis is group therapy with other people in addiction. If there is a Mental Health issue, medications for that. Individual therapy to address past trauma (and this pushes 80% in women who are addicted – i.e. some form of abuse in their lives). Case mgt. if the person needs skills training (often they do). And, regular drug screening to make sure they are clean.
An understanding that relapse is part of the process, and we expect people to relapse, but that does not mean they start over at ground zero. An understanding that the person cannot use “just one” dose of anything.
Ongoing support for living a life where Recovery is the #1 thing in the person’s life. 12 Step programs, or similar can work. And sorry for the non-believers out there, but Faith appears to make staying in recovery more likely.
3% of the population Black males aged 16-34 are responsible for 1/2 of our violent crimes.
Blacks 24.7/100k 7x higher violent crime rate
White 3.4/100k
Blacks 13.2% of the population Commit 52.2% of murders, homicides ( and again almost all of that is done by only 3% of the population).
Blacks 6.8 times more likely to commit Murder
Take them out of the stat and suddenly the US is very close to Europe.
But we can’t rationally discus or address the problem, and the underlying cause which is the total breakdown of black families because, racist.
Oh I forgot one more point. For crime stats Hispanics = white. A large chunk of that 3.4/100k “white” violent crime rate is thanks to our illegal population.
On US incarceration and crime rates:
Maybe we’re better at enforcing laws worth enforcing. Maybe the prevalence of guns incents criminals into strategies where police arrest is preferable to being stopped by victims. Maybe race relations are so crappy in Europe that people are afraid to report on protected and especially newly protected classes. Maybe institutional racism is a far more pervasive, less blatant phenomenon there. Still waiting for the first black, um anything from any of those toy countries.
Finally, if our criminal justice system were more about the justice of deterring through frightful consequence, it would be less necessary to go through revolving-door law enforcement theater with a cast of millions.
On enforcing existing laws about illicit drug use:
As people have said — if we were serious about prohibiting things, we could get them down to background noise. Obviously, there’s a “Laffer” principle to this curve. I say we’re way on the “not trying hard enough” end of it.
There are all sorts of apples and oranges when it comes to comparing nations. Infant Mortality? Not only does the US rate them differently, (i.e. not calling a baby who was born alive but died within hours “stillborn”), race plays a factor. Regardless of income, or location, infant mortality is higher in people of recent African descent.
What would music have done without those little white pills?
Six Days on the Road, Caffeine, Benzedrine, Nicotine (And Wish Me Luck) and er, in a different vein, New Amphetamine Shriek (NSFW/CoC)
According to Nils Bejerot, Sweden succeeded for a while in rehabbing people from amphetamine (tablet) addiction. All they had to do was lock them up for two years or so under a pretty harsh concentration camp like regimen. Around half recovered, IIRC.
Another fascinating part of the book is its description of how heroin addiction spread under the UK’s then policy of prescribing heroin to addicts. Over-liberal prescribing by a few physicians had led to an increase in the number of addicts. Classic epidemiological contact tracing showed that injected opiate addiction was spread like an infectious disease from one person to the next.
If true, this would be good news. Are there data to show it?
Sorry. I didn’t read your earlier comment.
Let me answer a line you posted in that comment:
You’ll never agree with me on this, but the way I see this is the inverse of the way you do: individual rights are primary and are not trumped by anecdotes or statistics. This country was intended to be a sea of liberty with islands of control, not the other way around. What needs to be justified is not the ending of prohibition but the prohibition. And that justification has to be a very, very high bar. What should be crimes are violations of properly- and consistently-defined individual rights. How is outlawing drugs because a person might abuse them different from outlawing guns because they might be used against an innocent person?
When you “medicalize” behavior, and that’s what we’re talking about here, behavior, you are deferring responsibility. “It’s not my fault! I have a disease!” Baloney! No one put a gun to your head.
Addiction is NOT a Brain Disease, It is a Choice!
Agree. It’s an opt out.
“Choice” is a complex thing. Most of the time, our behaviors are caused by things going on that we are not even aware of.
That does not mean, someone with an addiction gets to say “It is not my fault!” any more than someone with Type II diabetes can say it, 100%.
The brain undergoes changes. We can look at PET scans and see the changes in action. Addicts are not in control and need help reestablishing control.
If everything wast just a choice, then we would not have a rising obesity epidemic.
Bryan – all our choices (or most of the more significant ones) are hemmed in and constrained by needs, urges, habit, blind spots, unmet and unrecognised hungers, you name it. But it does come down to choice – am I ruled by these or not? It’s often difficult, and I’m not judging people who decide to be so ruled, bu at the end of the day every heroin (or anything else) addict who got clean got there because of choice.
From the link I’m gathering you didn’t read:
“Learning to play the piano well will change your brain – and if you were to compare brain scans of a piano player to a non-piano player, you would find significant differences. Does this mean that piano playing is a disease called Pianoism? Learning a new language changes your brain, are bilingual people diseased?”
I do sometimes wonder how conservatives would prefer to classify diseases thought to be either caused by lifestyle, or where remission may be achieved through discipline alone without much, if any, additional therapeutic intervention.
My own experience with clearly physiological, and most likely congenital, diseases such as asthma is that “it’s a disease!” does not actually do much to absolve the sufferer from responsibility. Indeed, for more and more of these diseases, the norm is that the sufferer is expected to discipline himself until the disease is so well-controlled it’s no longer an excuse for any sort of abnormal behavior. In fact, part of the frustration with not having achieved a remission of symptoms for such a disease these days is the feeling of moral failure for having fallen short. (If “asthma shouldn’t stop you” anymore, and it’s still stopping you, doesn’t it follow that it’s your own fault, then, for not trying harder to control it?)
Just do your best, darling.
This is why I am hopeful that medical science can come up with a test to identify those whose brains have been altered by watching television news. Perhaps those people should not be allowed to vote or hold public office.
Except for the part where there may be fundamental problems with brain fMRI data analysis and the conclusions derived from it.
Being a Calvinist, this sounds very familiar. I’m not sure I’d like a Calvinism without God, though.
The programs I’m familiar with are redirects from the criminal justice system. They start with a detox -depending on the drug, the detox may involve substitutes, like Methadone or Levacetylmethadol (LAAM), to step the patient off the drug. After the detox, they have the same group counseling Bryan discussed for many weeks to several months -same basic 12 Step Program as AA or NA. Random drug testing to make sure they are clean. For those going in as an alternative to criminal prosecution, I think the tolerance for relapse is fairly low, but for voluntary rehabilitation it is higher.
Those who complete the program have extraordinarily high levels of not-relapsing, not-recidivating, and go on to live good lives.
The evaluations are regrettably vague on the percent that complete the program.
A clear, immediate negative consequence seems to be important in the jail diversion programs. IIRC, even a night or two in jail for blowing a urine test is effective in the context of a full program, while considering the blown test as a parole violation that sends you back to finish the whole sentence doesn’t work as well to get the person clean.
So, it’s down to some statistical percentage that justifies violating an individual right?
“I’d rather not have that” doesn’t sound like an argument that can stand against a right.
(And, by the way, and I mean this seriously: do you think there’s an individual right to take drugs as long as you don’t steal, defraud, injure, murder, etc.? Do we at least agree on that?)
I think it’s a fair question of when a society elects to prohibit something (drugs, alcohol, hazardous waste, behavior).
As a society, we increasingly frown on restrictions on individuals “for their own good” as imposing on their liberty. There are still debates over restrictions on suicide, for example. Most laws regarding sexual morality are basically null and void these days. [Aside: Although, for as much as these have been torn down over the decades, it’s hard to say that society is any better as a whole as a result.]
In general, I think we then look to impose restrictions based on the impact that an individual’s conduct has on third parties – imposing on their rights and liberties (e.g., assault, defamation, invasion of privacy, murder, theft, property damage, etc.)
Then on what basis (and to what degree) do we impose restrictions on an individual’s conduct that may not necessarily impact (or even involve) the rights of third parties? There are laws to protect some groups of people from exploitation (e.g., age of consent, statutory rape, etc.). But I think generally, the approach is to look at the probability of potential harm to others. I think this is the approach behind quarantines, public health restrictions, and various prohibitions.
Citizen X sitting in his basement getting stoned and eating brownies is objectively not harming anyone but himself. But under those drugs his judgment is increasingly impaired. He might want a bag of Cheetos and decide to hop in the car, now to the increased probability of harm others. The risk of harmful conduct goes up with the potency of the substance and impairment of judgment. As pointed out above, addicts have a high tendency to commit crimes either under the influence or for getting more drugs.
You can then say: “Well, then punish Citizen X for DUI, theft, child neglect, or assault but there should be no prohibition on him accessing, buying and consuming the drugs.” From my perspective, that is imposing on me the obligation to bear the costs of cleaning up the mess, without allowing me the choice to avoid a harm that I can reasonably foresee. The entire challenge of a free society is to balance the liberties of its citizens.