>by changing the laws so every Tom, Dick and Harry isn't committing a crime simply by living their lives.
I think your comment provides some necessary nuance to the discussion but it may also miss an important consideration. Most Western societies are also highly concerned with stability as well as personal freedom. Making all consensual acts legal may maximize personal freedom at the detriment of stability. It's a balancing act.
Sending people off to jail to lose their families and jobs because the drug they like is different than the one the state likes does absolutely nothing to improve social stability. Very much so the opposite.
Very few people are in prison for simple possession. The American justice system, contrary to most popular sentiment, is quite diversionary. As a percentage, Sweden probably has more people in prison for drug possession than America.
Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
as a general rule when one makes statements that go against the common wisdom one should also make some sort of effort at showing the cause for ones arguments, but at any rate here is a stat that says 1 in 5 prisoners are in prison for a drug offense https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/pie2023_drugs.html
yes I know a drug offense is not just simple possession but I mean, you didn't try to provide anything for your astounding claims, so I figure I could get the ball rolling here.
It is not close. Which is what I think most people would predict - that it was not even close.
on edit: I see Bumby went and got some stats too, to clarify I don't doubt that violent offenses outweigh other offenses, what I doubt is that America does not have a large number of people incarcerated for drug possession.
> It is not close. Which is what I think most people would predict - that it was not even close.
With the caveat that drug offenses include manufacturing, trafficking, and sales:
Your data is consistent with my claim: I meant the denominator being the prison population, not the entire population. Sweden has about 8600 people in prison so about 37% of their prison population is in there for "drug offenses", whereas in the United States it's less than 1 in 5 per your Prison Policy citation. Obviously if you treat entire population as the denominator, then any comparison of Swedish and American prisons is useless because we incarcerate a much larger percent of the population.
Edit: I realize my original comment said "people" not "proportion of people", but in my defense interpreting it to be people literally is a bit absurd. Sweden's population is about 30x smaller than the United States, so there's no way the counts are comparable!
Edit 2: Actually no I did say “As a percentage”. Whew.
Next, you can see from this sample of federal prison (table on page 2): though drug offenses were the most serious charge for half of prisoners, only 0.1% was for possession. The rest was for trafficking and sales. https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/dofp12.pdf
This data is from 2010, and the United States has undergone a decriminalization revolution since regarding possession, so new prosecutions are even less likely to be possession claims.
> You can be charged with drug trafficking even if you have not actually sold any drugs. Prosecutors will try to show that you were in possession of a controlled substance and planned to sell or distribute it, even if you were going to distribute it for free or use it with friends.
Texas is finally calming down on weed but back when I was in college I knew plenty of friends that were slapped with "trafficking" because they had some normal amount of grams on them and the cops just went for it. That lets prosecutors scare them into shitty deals because with trafficking you're looking at years of prison.
Considering the scale of the American prison industrial complex, I'm sure plenty of people didn't have good enough lawyers to get the bogus trafficking charges thrown out.
Also, some of the possession charges are about sales and distribution. Cops often put the lower charge on reports, and prosecutors also often plead down your case.
> With the caveat that drug offenses include manufacturing, trafficking, and sales
With the caveat to your caveat that "sales" in the US tends to include anything above 1 or 2 doses. I'm no bartender, but I'll still buy beer by the twelve pack.
Only because most jurors have some background knowledge of what constitutes a "normal" amount of beer to buy and consume. A gram of cocaine could be described as 6 lines, or it could be called several dozen bumps. The prosecution is going to go up there and wax poetic about how you'd only buy multiple thirtyracks if you're planning on throwing a party i.e. distributing, and your average jury will eat that up.
Assuming you even get to a jury trial. For most pseudo-distribution cases like this, the defendant is going to plead out, because they know they're dead to rights on the possession charge, and if the judge throws the book at them for that then they may well have been better off taking the distribution plea deal.
This varies a lot by jurisdiction so it’s hard to determine aggregate impacts. For every anecdote of judges throwing the book at someone, I could probably offer one of judges letting off someone easy. The important point stands regardless: Sweden has a larger percent of its prison population incarcerated for drug offenses than the United States. Most people going to prison were convicted of a violent crime.
Sorry, maybe I was unclear: the potentially high penalties for possession are used a threat, to push people into pleading guilty on the distribution charges. Possession alone can potentially land you in jail for up to 3 years. Distribution has a wider range, from 1 year up to potentially 9 years.
If you're caught in possession of a couple grams of coke, then the prosecutor is going to want to get you on distribution. They can say something like "You will be found guilty of possession, we both know that. If you plead guilty on both counts, we can recommend concurrent sentencing and you'll be out of prison in less than two years. If you don't take the deal, we're going to push for everything we can get: even if you get off on the distribution charge, you'll still be in prison for 3 years for possession."
Now, you or I, affluent tech-bros that this forum attracts, know that this is a terrible deal. We'd hire a lawyer, fight it tooth and nail, and walk away with a possession conviction and a slap on the wrist sentence. But if you're some broke kid, with a public defender who's really just there to counsel you on what plea deal you should take, it might not seem like such a bad idea.
I understand how pre-trial negotiations work, and I am not an affluent tech bro. In fact, I spent some time consulting DA offices throughout the country on how to adopt best practices in criminal justice reform. Public defenders are not universally pushovers and judges and juries are not universally looking for blood.
Like I said, getting aggregate statistics on how pleading down impacts the composition of the prison population is very hard, but the fact of the matter is most people who end up in prison don’t do so because of anything which looks like only recreational drug use.
I would like to note that the terms “possession”, “sale”, and trafficking” are a bit tricky when it comes to drug law. My home state could consider anyone with over a quarter ounce of cannabis to have “intent to distribute”. I would regularly buy whole ounces for personal use because it’s much cheaper than buying small amounts, but that also meant that if I were ever caught I would be facing charges for sale and trafficking.
These also vary state to state, and while a white kid with a 1/4 might not get possession, a black kid with the same amount might get the book thrown at him depending on who’s prosecuting the crime.
Ok, fair enough that you meant the percentage of the population incarcerated was higher, as opposed to the percentage of the population as a whole. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
As per OkayPhysicist's point about what counts as possession and trafficking, many drugs require larger dosages with habitual use and the courts do not take this into account.
on edit: I see Komali did a better job pointing out that lots of traffiking and sales are actually possession.
Komali only claimed some percent are possession, not “lots”. And I’m going to disagree: overcharging is definitely a problem but there’s lots of pleading down as well. There are jurisdictions where you can plead down a violent crime to a drug offense. Because these strategies vary so much between DAs, it’s hard to get aggregates on how much this is happening.
>yes I know a drug offense is not just simple possession but I mean, you didn't try to provide anything for your astounding claims, so I figure I could get the ball rolling here.
The same source[1] lists drug possession as 34k of 132k total in state prisons. That suggests only a quarter of the drug offenses are actually for possession, and it's only 3.2% of the overall state prison population. That said, those figures represent the upper bound of of people in prison for possession, because offenses could be pleaded down.
> Most prisoners have been convicted of a violent crime.
this challenged my conceptions a little bit, while I wasn't blown a way by it, I did expect possession to be a higher percent of the whole. Here are some sources for others who are curious:
At yearend 2019 (the most recent year for which
state prison offense data are available), 58% of all
persons imprisoned by states had been sentenced
for violent offenses (710,800 prisoners) [https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/p20st.pdf page 28]
For the same year, 46,700 people were in prison with the most serious crime being possession. This represents 3.8% of the prison population.
However; the above are statistics for STATE prisons. The federal system seems to be murkier, with 46% (67,000~) of inmates being their for drug related reasons. Unlike state breakdowns, drug crimes are differentiated here. If we assume the breakdown between possession and other charges is the same as state levels (a VERY shaky assumption) we'd expect 10% of the federal system to be related to possession.
Averaging some of these numbers, it seems that even in a 'worst case scenario' roughly 9% of inmates are in for possession, but more realistically we're looking at around 4%.
I would bet good money that rate is even lower now. Many states proceeded with decriminalization campaigns for possession in the meantime, most reasoning from false premises.
I was originally skeptical of this. Based on what I found it seems like incarceration levels are about 1.27x higher for violent crimes.
State data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 651,800
Non violent crimes (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 141,100/131,600/109,100/6,800. Total=388,600
Federal data:
Total violent crimes (2020): 10,547
Non violent crimes: (property/drug/public order/other) (2020): 5,950/66,474/58,894/433, Total = 131,751
Combined:
Violent crime (2020): 662,347
Non-violent crime (2020): 520,351
With that said, there is massive disparity in federal crimes, where there are almost 7x the sentences for drug crimes compared to violent crimes. But that includes trafficking etc. and can't be characterized as 'simple possession'
> Sweden probably has more people in prison for drug possession than America.
Don't know if you picked Sweden in particular intentionally but they are very much an outlier of their own when it comes to drug-related crime. Simple possession of small quantities for personal use can still have you end up in jail or even prison for up to 6 months.
The state does not like those drugs because society does not like those drugs, and in the case of certain drugs, like heroin and other harder drugs we have decided that it is rational to attempt to keep them off the streets rather than agree to legal use.
It's fun to declare it "things the state doesn't like", but I legitimately don't see anyone legalizing meth or heroin anytime soon.
The state has a legitimate interest in limiting the number of people taking opioids in public. It's self-defeating to do that through mass incarceration. To be determined how well decriminalization works. But it's definitely not that the government just doesn't like drugs - hard drugs really do have societal costs.
I think the article makes a point that is overlooked:
>After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.
Can't decriminalize drugs if you stop funding drug treatment programs and chuck it all onto underfunded NGOs who have their own motivations.
I think this underscores that these problems are more complicated than may want to acknowledge. I don't think you're doing this, but part of this thread started as a pushback to the simplistic sentiment that implied we just need to decriminalize.
As you point out, we can simultaneously criticize our current policies while acknowledging simplistic replacement policies aren't really solutions.
I believe they meant recreationally legal. There are lots of medications that are also used as recreational drugs (cocaine, opiates, etc.) but their use shouldn't be conflated.
Very much agreed. But to the original point, it's about finding a balance. Just like imprisoning people for long periods isn't always conducive to stability, neither is a society full of addicts who struggle to hold down a job or take care of their family. It shouldn't be characterized as an either/or but as finding a reasonable balance.
I think the "balance" argument is a diversion because when you examine the actual policies and their outcomes, at no point does it appear that stability is the actual goal. Yes, the idea that we need a balanced approach to individual vs collective rights is valid and should be a guiding star for us. My argument is that it is not - that our policies instead cause greater instability - and the balance argument is nothing more than a rhetorically nice-sounding cover story for these destructive policies.
I would argue that rather than stability a lot of the puritan instinct comes from a desire to see one's children thrive.
The relevant analytical unit at the small scale is the family: I don't want my kids to be temperant because of stability, I want them to abstain from drugs/games/$VICE because that's the path which maximizes the chance of their living a fulfilling life, or (more cynically) which maximizes their chance of bearing me successful grandkids and great grandkids. This is why puritainism is selected for evolutionarily (at least in environments where resources are limited).
To return to the large scale policy questions, I also don't want to see the continent of my children fall to a mercantilist China (using China as an example because Chinese law cracks down hard on drug sales and limits students to one hour of video games per night). Accordingly, I support policies to limit access to addictive substances and stimuli, despite the inevitable conflict between those laws and individual rights. The inequitable enforcement of those laws is another problem entirely, and one which I think would be well solved by starting with the prosecution of celebrities and thought leaders who openly partake in $ADDICTIVE_STIMULUS, and their suppliers.
This is a pretty reasonable hypothesis, but to add a counterpoint: the nuclear family is relatively recent phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective.
Not sure how that is a counterpoint, GP doesn't even specify they are talking about a nuclear family. Presumably other family structures have a similar dynamic where they want the youth to succeed.
Fair enough. From an evolutionary perspective, there is a much smaller distinction between “family” and “society as a whole”. Prior to the nation-state, most of “society” were people known on a personal level.
So I’m not sure that there is a strong distinction between “ensuring my family has a good outcome” and “ensuring a stable society” because a stable society is meant to be a means and not an end. Regardless, this feels a bit like an untestable hypothesis.
On the contrary it is very testable: look at number of grandchildren in families with different moral beliefs and cultural norms. Can look at whether the grandchildren thrive, too.
Your statement shows why social science is hard. Superficially, sure it seems testable but in reality it is much more difficult.
Good science controls for variables. Counting the number of offspring turns a blind eye to a number of variables that can influence the outcome beyond just moral beliefs or cultural norms. Can you say your results aren't influenced by factors like genetics, environment, war, etc. that are outside those moral beliefs? Even if you could control for them, a lot of that data isn't available from an evolutionary perspective. And even if it was, moral beliefs are not static; you could have one set of morals that leads to higher numbers of offspring in one stage of your life and change morals later. It makes for a messy, and probably untestable, hypothesis.
That's my main gripe that led me to the OP. People tend to take an enormously messy social situation and think they can distill it to a simple model. Real life tends to not work that way.
The initial goal of drug laws may be in the vein of stabilizing society, while poor implementation strays from that goal. Both can be true at the same time. Poor implementation begs for better implementation, not the nullification of the goal. I am not defending current drug policies, I'm guarding against the notion that the "solution" is just to make consensual crime legal.
This side-steps a relevant discussion about how you measure societal stability, but that would be a long digression to itself.
AFAIK the drug laws the US deals with today primarily stem from the “Drug War” which was politically motivated to target Nixon’s “enemies” (blacks and anti-war activists):
> Americans have been criminalizing psychoactive substances since San Francisco’s anti-opium law of 1875, but it was Ehrlichman’s boss, Richard Nixon, who declared the first “War on Drugs” in 1971 and set the country on the wildly punitive and counterproductive path it still pursues.
> [Ehrlichman, Nixon’s advisor for domestic affairs] “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
There's a difference between not being a big fan of drugs and wanting the onerous law enforcement and incarceratorial regime which was eventually implemented. Without much meaningful input from the CBC, I imagine. Your "Ehh, sort of," is quite weak. Going back to marijuana, opiate, and even alcohol prohibition policies, drug laws have always been more about controlling the conjured threat of minority populations than anything else.
I had never heard of prohibition as a tactic to oppress racial minorities. It seems like you’re trying to shoehorn a narrative.
“nearly every major Black abolitionist and civil rights leader before World War I—from Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany and Sojourner Truth to F.E.W. Harper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington—endorsed temperance and prohibition.”
Hardly the group I would associate with oppressing minorities.
Again, the Black congressional representatives (which, due to districting were mostly representing Black people) were rather openly upset with him...for not going even harder.
That is difficult to square with Nixonian plot to use the carceral apparatus to keep Black people from gaining power.
I guess it does track with revisionism to make anything we currently disagree with to be a product of original sin.
I would just add that, based on the prevalence of drug use and abuse in this country, the increasing availability and increasingly reduced cost of illicit drugs, combined with the exceptionally high rate of incarceration and probation compared to other wealthy nations (and even non-wealthy nations), we are clearly doing something spectacularly wrong. And this wrong approach is costing us billions upon billions of wasted dollars, not to mention the cost in human lives and livelihoods. No alternatives should be off the table.
agreed that the discussion about how you measure or even define social stability is probably what's really at stake in this discussion. Policing and the concept of criminality provide a kind of 'stability' in the form of social control to governments. On the other hand, those same forces can be incredibly destabilising to the social lives of everyone who is criminalised, their families and friends, especially given that criminalisation for so many people is often a death sentence.
The other thing I'd like to just bring up is that the either/or between criminalising/not criminalising drugs can sometimes miss that there are many creative, diverse and humanising responses to problematic drug use that don't depend on control via the threat of punishment
do you also think the state should criminalize religion? given the ubiquitous problems caused by religion in the public sphere, the domestic lives of countless millions families etc etc?
Au contraire! Persecution of the lower classes can do wonders for the preservation of a certain order. Aldus Huxley imagined an imposition of fetal alcohol syndrome to keep the trades in their place, but we do it more cheeply by destroying families and carting men off to work slave labor. Overzealous policing synergizes nicely with the myth of meritocry by helping the middle class (MLK's "white moderate") attribute socioeconomic divisions to heritable "merit."
> Making all consensual acts legal may maximize personal freedom at the detriment of stability.
From a practical standpoint, this depends on the notion that prohibitions actually increase stability. No place that drugs have been legalized or decriminalized have seen significant increases in addiction rates, for instance. No place that legalizes drugs will need criminal gangs to supply them anymore. Restricting consensual acts reduces a society's stability considerably.
From a moral standpoint, giving anyone the authority to prohibit victimless acts is a pandora's box human rights violations. Who chooses what is worth oppressing in the name of stability? So soon after gay marriage (or just being gay at all) was legalized and we are already forgetting this lesson.
> Most Western societies are also highly concerned with stability as well as personal freedom.
All states are at least seemingly concerned with balancing the collective and individual freedoms. Western ones just have the arrogance to claim they do it the best. If it's any consolation the chinese claim the same.
"Making all consensual acts legal" is certainly an easy strawman to argue against, but maybe there's a middle ground between that anarchist hellscape and "owning this fish that is not explicitly illegal in the US but is illegal in Honduras can land you in federal prison."[0]
Not necessarily. I'm saying a government that takes measures to mitigate increasing the extremes of common acts that lead to destructive behavior can be more stable.
E.g., I'm not sure the current trend of increasing access to gambling will lead to a more stable society, although it increases freedom. There's a balancing act there too.
What I'm not saying: the current policies are the best ways to mitigate those risks in order to increase stability.
I think your comment provides some necessary nuance to the discussion but it may also miss an important consideration. Most Western societies are also highly concerned with stability as well as personal freedom. Making all consensual acts legal may maximize personal freedom at the detriment of stability. It's a balancing act.