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.