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InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
Posts: 17,504
National Drug Intelligence Center fails intelligence test
    #14524116 - 05/27/11 11:17 PM (12 years, 8 months ago)

National Drug Intelligence Center fails intelligence test
May 27, 2011 - hawaiinewsdaily.com

The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Drug Intelligence Center has released a major new report (that appears to have been prepared at significant expense) titled: The Economic Impact of Illicit Drug Use on American Society 2011.

The National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) prepares an annual National Drug Threat Assessment (NDTA) that provides federal policymakers and senior officials with a comprehensive appraisal of the danger that trafficking and use of illicit drugs pose to the security of our nation. To expand the scope of its NDTA, and to provide the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and other federal officials with a broad and deep understanding of the full burden that illicit drug use places on our country, NDIC has prepared this assessment— The Economic Impact of Illicit Drug Use on American Society. The assessment is conducted within a Cost of Illness (COI) framework that has guided work of this kind for several decades. As such, it monetizes the consequences of illicit drug use, thereby allowing its impact to be gauged relative to other social problems.

In 2007, the cost of illicit drug use totaled more than $193 billion.

$193 billion. In one year? Wow.

How is illicit drug use costing us so much? Let’s look at what they’re including…

Crime includes three components: criminal justice system costs ($56,373,254,000), crime victim costs ($1,455,555,000), and other crime costs ($3,547,885,000).
These subtotal $61,376,694,000.

Health includes five components: specialty treatment costs ($3,723,338,000), hospital and emergency department costs for nonhomicide cases ($5,684,248,000), hospital and emergency department costs for homicide cases ($12,938,000), insurance administration costs ($544,000), and other health costs ($1,995,164,000).
These subtotal $11,416,232,000.

Productivity includes seven components: labor participation costs ($49,237,777,000), specialty treatment costs for services provided at the state level ($2,828,207,000), specialty treatment costs for services provided at the federal level ($44,830,000), hospitalization costs ($287,260,000), incarceration costs ($48,121,949,000), premature mortality costs (nonhomicide: $16,005,008,000), and premature mortality costs (homicide: $3,778,973,000).
These subtotal $120,304,004,000.

Now, you have to read the actual report to understand what they mean by some of those terms above, but are you already starting to get the picture?

The vast majority of those costs are directly attributable to prohibition, not illicit drug use.

Criminal justice costs of $56 billion, for example, include the police, courts, and prisons that enforce drug laws.

And the absolute largest portion of the total costs by far is “lost productivity.” Here’s my favorite: $48 billion attributable to lost productivity due to prison. That’s right, they’re considering it a cost to society that people are not being productive because they’ve been arrested for drug offenses and are in jail. And they attribute this cost to illicit drug use. They even invented a really bizarre-sounding term: drug-induced incarceration.

Now I’ve heard of drug-induced hallucinations before, but drug-induced incarceration? I don’t think so. It takes a law and a judge to induce an incarceration.

Most of the other so-called costs of illicit drug use are equally suspect. Take a look at the lost labor productivity from drug users who aren’t incarcerated. They’ve essentially looked at the income of those who use illicit drugs and compared it to those who don’t and called the difference “lost productivity.” That ignores all sorts of social and class implications related to the status of illicit drugs and also whether drug use drives unemployment or the reverse is true.

Take a look at treatment costs and you’ll find they not only count the cost of treatment, but the cost of lost productivity for those in treatment, and yet treatment may be not a result of illicit drug addiction, but of court mandate.

Or health costs. How much of the health costs mentioned are because illicit drugs are unregulated, leading to overdoses and other health problems? And death. They also counted the lost productivity of every person in history who died because of illicit drugs and would have been alive to work in 2007 otherwise. This means they counted all the people who died from heroin laced with all sorts of adulterants – a direct result of unregulated drugs.

The more you look at the report and analyze it, the more you see it as a damning report on the cost of the drug war to society. And yet it’s actually presented as a justification for the drug war.

The base line they use for the report is a drug-free America.

It is important to note that this analysis occurs within the context of a “what if” scenario in which illicit drug use no longer exists.

So essentially, they are comparing a mythical non-illicit-drug-use state with today’s illicit-drug-use state. Except that that’s not really true. They are completely ignoring prohibition. In a non-illicit-drug-use state, there would be no prohibition. Prohibition is not something that just exists because drug use exists. It is an active and significant factor that’s been added to the equation. To ignore a factor of such magnitude renders the entire report meaningless.

Imagine that the government had bizarrely decreed that corn was only allowed to be planted in rocky desert areas. Now imagine that a government report studied the attempts to grow corn and concluded, without any reference to the decree, that corn was not a viable crop for the United States. How stupid would those analysts look? And yet, this is the same kind of stupidity used in this National Drug Intelligence Center report.

It gets worse.

After listing a bunch of costs that are truly attributable to the drug war andnotto illicit drug use, the analysts actually conclude that this reportjustifiesthe drug war and the drug policies that the federal government are pursuing.

…it is relatively easy to draw inferences from the findings presented above.

It is important that illicit drugs be made as difficult and costly to obtain as possible. This points to the value of law enforcement efforts. [...]

The findings thus validate the basic premises of the National Drug Control Strategy. Strong law enforcement efforts that reduce cultivation, production, and distribution of illicit drugs both limit consumer access and enhance
public safety…

Incredible. I’ve seen a lot of junk science in my time, but I’d be hard pressed to come up with a more blatant example of just making up a conclusion that had nothing to do with (and in fact was contradicted by) the data presented.



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OfflineAedan
Male


Registered: 05/06/11
Posts: 950
Loc: the desert
Last seen: 9 months, 3 days
Re: National Drug Intelligence Center fails intelligence test [Re: veggie]
    #14524209 - 05/27/11 11:37 PM (12 years, 8 months ago)

:facepalm:

This kind of backwards logic doesn't surprise me though.


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Invisibletaterdb
Male


Registered: 07/07/10
Posts: 157
Loc: rocky mountain high
Re: National Drug Intelligence Center fails intelligence test [Re: Aedan]
    #14524340 - 05/27/11 11:58 PM (12 years, 8 months ago)

Pretty good read, the guy makes some interesting observations, but dude, your preaching to the choir, anyone that would read the whole thing already knows most of this stuff, ya gotta be a little softer if you wanna sway people's opinion from the middle ground :wink:


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OfflineAedan
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Registered: 05/06/11
Posts: 950
Loc: the desert
Last seen: 9 months, 3 days
Re: National Drug Intelligence Center fails intelligence test [Re: veggie]
    #14524426 - 05/28/11 12:18 AM (12 years, 8 months ago)

Quote:

taterdb said:
Pretty good read, the guy makes some interesting observations, but dude, your preaching to the choir, anyone that would read the whole thing already knows most of this stuff, ya gotta be a little softer if you wanna sway people's opinion from the middle ground :wink:




Well it's an article. Especially to break it down for those who still have no sense of the real impact of the drug war.

They are trying to assess the effect of drug trafficking and use on the economy by the amount we spend arresting people for drugs.

:wtf: is that :poop:


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OfflineKonyap

Registered: 06/30/07
Posts: 33,945
Loc: Planet Piss
Last seen: 4 years, 2 months
Re: National Drug Intelligence Center fails intelligence test [Re: Aedan]
    #14524709 - 05/28/11 01:56 AM (12 years, 8 months ago)

the goverment run agency NIH had nothing good to say about cannibus except that it actually cause shizo in 1 out of 100 people, thats like saying cookies cause schizo in 1 out of 100 people :lol: i figure its cuz half the drugs it competes with only work out of a placebo basis at 33% or something or the other...
:takedrugs::nomnomnom:


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Offlinerunepanther
Im uhh gee!
Male


Registered: 05/17/11
Posts: 89
Loc: East ATL, GA
Last seen: 11 years, 1 month
Re: National Drug Intelligence Center fails intelligence test [Re: Konyap]
    #14524920 - 05/28/11 03:57 AM (12 years, 8 months ago)

Shits ridiculous. They should stop being so sure that drugs are the reason the world is a bad place and start realizing that the laws created to control people are what force people to use more... let's say inventive techniques. Laced drugs, mislabeled batches... all shit that could be avoided if the proper labs and equipment could be used to create these chemicals. But it can't because of this ridiculous war on drugs which is only causing more suffering for everyone rather then having the more positive effect the politicians saw. Fuck, our president has admitted to smoking weed and doing coke. If that's not a sign then I don't know what is.


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Offlinedynomite
Confuzzled
 User Gallery

Registered: 09/29/09
Posts: 1,111
Last seen: 7 years, 7 months
Re: National Drug Intelligence Center fails intelligence test [Re: runepanther]
    #14526283 - 05/28/11 12:42 PM (12 years, 8 months ago)

well there's about 200 billion reasons for the drug war to continue

there will never be changes when so many pockets are getting lined

the figures in the article aren't proof that we need to keep up the war, they're proof of influential people using the issue of drugs as an excuse to keep the money flowing


--------------------
"The great nations have always acted like gangsters and the small ones like prostitutes." - Stanley Kubrick


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