Police commit 8% of US homicides. The problem is clearly not the police, or the Drug War, but guns. Well, maybe the police could use some more sensitivity training.
Ditto about Excedrin––I'm like the Johnny Appleseed of Excedrin in Europe. Most migraine sufferers here seem unaware of the treatment options, and often are unaware even that their headaches are migraines. Just suffering alone in silence. Being American, I'll happily discuss my health problems with strangers. I disagree with your doctor about Excedrin rebound headaches--most sufferers (in my experience) don't have migraines very often, and would notice the rebound pattern. Many if not most are drinking coffee anyway. Me, I have an espresso a day, but supposedly espresso (generally arabica) contains less caffeine than drip coffee (often robusta). I attribute its positive effects to phytochemicals other than caffeine.
About sugar, I tend to agree. My mornings greatly improved after I cut out "part of a healthy breakfast" orange juice.
Completely missing from the article is an estimate of the coupling between drug and non-drug crime (e.g. prostitution or robbery to finance a drug habit, violent conflict vertically and horizontally along the supply chain, tax avoidance, and corruption of police and other government employees). There are also tertiary effects, like drug gangs engaging in additional illegal activities supported by the core competencies of trafficking and violence. This merits an additional study.
Not only is that not completely missing from the paper, it's addressed empirically. The author is particularly concerned with the affect of prior drug arrests on felony charging, with previous drug convictions as a predicate for three-strikes laws, and with the relationship between violent offenders and drug charges --- they turn out to be mostly disjoint cohorts.
The author agrees with you that further study is merited.
That's a nice start, but many members of a drug gang might not ever touch drugs, at least if I can believe The Wire's portrayal of drug organizations and their division of labor. I am also skeptical of the correlation between arrests for drug offenses (where there is no victim to complain) and violent crimes.
The author would be the first to agree that there are questions raised by drug prohibition that we don't have enough data to answer. You should give the paper a close read. It's hard to come away from it thinking that he's blasé about prohibition.
Three quarters of US murder victims are male, and more than half are black. The same goes for US murderers, to which we can add that more than half are under 30, and more than half use handguns (not an inexpensive tool). I suspect that the circumstances more often involve drug gangs than domestic violence. It seems unlikely to me that Drug Prohibition could be such a big factor in murder but not in other crime or incarceration.
The criminals have lots of violent disputes, not just over territory, and the users commit more than just property crime, e.g. robbery. People up and down the supply chain try to rip each other off. It seems that the author did not expend much imagination in looking for prohibition-driven crime.
Unless you think a violent drug dealer is less likely than a nonviolent offender to ever have been charged with a drug offense, the data doesn't bear this out. According to the author's data, it seems that most violent offenders have never been sentenced for a drug charge.
Violent offenders are younger on average where drug offenders come in a wider age range. So, on that basis alone you would expect violent offenders to be less likely to have a drug charge than the population as a whole.
If a violent offender that was also charged with a drug offense is classified in the "Violent" category, how can you draw any conclusions about how likely they are to have ever been charged with a drug offense? The data seem to only show that you are unlikely to end up in prison with a drug offense as your most serious crime.
This jives with David Simon's description of the prevailing attitude of enforcement in The Corner. The justice system is too overwhelmed to press charges for mere drug offenses, so you are less likely to end up with a conviction without a more serious crime attached.
This is discussed towards the end of Section 2, where he attempts to establish that the set of inmates charged with violent offenses is mostly disjoint with the set of inmates charged with drug offenses.
Thanks for the pointer. Are you referring to Sections II C&D? Tables 4A and 4B seem like they would have the same categorization issue I described above. As I read it, the "Never drugs" column refers to a given offender never having a drug offense as the most serious offense for a conviction. This doesn't mean that the offender was never charged with a drug offense.
"Always"? Pretty sweeping, categorical assertion.
Voters' politics is based on interest, identity, and values. The latter two often run counter to the first (e.g. poor whites in the Republican Party, blacks in the Democratic Party). Blacks suffer disproportionately from Drug Prohibition, but many are religious and culturally conservative, and would like to see the death penalty for drug dealers (assuming the police could be trusted). They blame the drugs, not Drug Prohibition.
Lots of your anti-prohibition activists are wealthy progressives and libertarians who, like me, like David Simon, have no personal stake in the outcome.
Sorry, that "always" should have been accompanied with an "ought". Adhering to principle in spite of material conditions and consequences is, and I know I haven't supported this thesis, "bad".
Because the point of the article is not to convince bitcoin advocates but to point out Krugman's intellectual contortions and dishonesty, when bitcoin possesses features that should appeal to him. The NSA has to walk a tightrope, because they want US government and other security-related communications to remain secure. They cannot recommend flawed encryption to their own. I have heard no mentions of SHA-256 being flawed, and the bitcoin software is open source, an unlikely honey trap. Use your own judgment.
