Flint Journal – May 10, 2009:
Two rival local agencies spent more than $2 million last year fighting drug dealers and trying to rid communities of dope.
The results: They took about $350,000 worth of drugs off the street.
A Flint Journal review of the budgets and seizures for the Genesee County Sheriff’s Posse and the state police-run Flint Area Narcotics Group show far more was spent in enforcement of drug laws than the drugs are actually worth.
Officials with the two teams say even more drug fighting tools are needed locally. But critics contend it’s a waste of money and doesn’t fix the community’s overall drug problem.
Officials point out that drug enforcement is funded by the criminals themselves, by cash seized during drug raids.
However, drug forfeiture money is only 25 percent of the Posse’s overall budget of $536,000 and only 17 percent of FANG’s annual $1.4 million budget.
Cops spend $2M to get $350K worth of drugs off the street!
The cost of alcohol is far less than the damage it causes to society. $2M to get $350K worth of life-destroying drugs off the streets might be a bargain.
I don’t get the connection between the value of the drugs and the cost spent on fighting drug dealers. If North Korea or Iran or Texas is trying to purchase weapons grade plutonium, do we have to make sure we spend less than the value of the plutonium to prevent the acquisition?
And if the seizures are reported as normal by the police and media, the actual value is a fraction of $350k. They tend to place enormous value on every drug they capture. Since it is a black market, the police can name whatever price they want and assign that value to their haul.
Buy the drugs for 350k and spend the remainder fixing potholes?
Facepalm to #1’s comments.
Danno wrote: I don’t get the connection between the value of the drugs and the cost spent on fighting drug dealers. If North Korea or Iran or Texas is trying to purchase weapons grade plutonium…”
First, drugs are a victimless crime, while destroying an entire region full of people with a nuclear weapon certainly is not. How can you even seen an analogy between those to acts?!
But here’s the real reason. Instead of spending 2 million bucks fighting a drug war, they simply could have spent only $350k buying the very same drugs, saving a whopping $1,650,000!!! If the point is getting the drugs off the street, shouldn’t we not use the most efficient means possible?
Why spend 2 million getting drugs off the street when you can do the exact same thing spending only $350k?!
that’s the stuff GDP is madoff.
“even more drug fighting tools are needed” = more civil rights of honest people are ignored and tromped on. Cops never get enough.
#7, SN, I agree that Danno’s analogy was wrong, but also simply buying drugs at market value will only increase demand and therefore supply.
That $350k or more will be added to supply in anticipation of further increased sales.
A better use of that money would be to take the dealers off the streets and give them very public effectively deterring punishments.
#10 – JimR – A better use of that money would be to take the dealers off the streets and give them very public effectively deterring punishments.
Such as this?…
#11 – It looks like a black guy whose mattress blew up.
To only investigate or prosecute those crimes where the cost of the investigation and prosecution (and incarceration)is demonstrably less than the cost of the crime itself, is a slippery slope. A drug buy-back program–like a gun buy-back program, might make the most sense in terms of dollars spent to get a quantity of drugs (or guns or whatever) off the street. It is at least as easy to increase the supply of drugs as it is to increase the supply of guns, at least locally, though.
The more interesting question is what happened to the price of the reaming drug supply, locally, regionally, or nationally following this seizure? If there were any noticeable price increase, quality decrease, or decline in availability, I wonder how long it lasted. Was there a spike in requests for treatment due to the reduced supply or increased cost?Those are the metrics that should be used to evaluate drug policies.
The point of investigation and prosecution and incarceration is to penalize past behavior and keep it from occurring in the future short term and to reduce the chance of it happening longterm–that is the only way spending more than the individual crime costs makes any sense in the long run.
If current drug policy successes do not measurably decrease supply and increase drug costs while encouraging users to seek effective treatment, in the long term all they accomplish is picking winners and losers among drug suppliers. Those who get caught loose, those who do not, win. Disruptions in the marketplace, if the happen at all are very brief.
Perhaps it would be better for all to manage the marketplace through taxation and regulation. If your company paid for the right to sell a drug (or anything else) legally in the marketplace, would you keep an eye out for illegal sellers? Would you help to drive them out of the marketplace? With that kind of cooperation, the cost of removing illicit drugs from the marketplace would likely drop to a level closer to the value of the drugs themselves.
#11… LOL… that would do nicely.
#7 Victimeless crime? Really?
Tell that to the people that have their home broken into. Tell that to the people that are mugged. Tell that to the …. well you get the idea.
Cue everyone who normally bitch about gov’t intrusion applaud the drug war.
IF EVERY 1 JUMPED OFF A BRIGE WULD U?
JimR wrote: “buying drugs at market value will only increase demand and therefore supply…. A better use of that money would be to take the dealers off the streets and give them very public effectively deterring punishments.”
The error in your logic is that you actually think, you naively think, that the drug war can be won. That if we spend enough money and punish enough people, no one will want to buy drugs anymore and the entire market will disappear. That’s completely fucking nonsense.
Re: #17, SN: “The error in your logic is that you actually think, you naively think, that the drug war can be won… That’s completely fucking nonsense.”
You are correct in that I can think, however I can also read which is more than you can claim.
… No where did I comment on, or even imply that the drug war could be won or not.
>That if we spend enough money and punish enough people, no one will want to buy drugs anymore and the entire market will disappear.
But if you punish enough people and spend enough money the price of drugs will go higher, causing an impact on the market. The current efforts cause less people to use drugs than otherwise.
#19 The Portuguese beg to differ.
http://tinyurl.com/decriminalise-now
I did a little checking.
In Ohio it costs $14,000 per rehabilitated client (it’s complicated but this # will do for the math purposes.)
That’s approximately 140 people not buying drugs.
Would that take $350,000 worth of purchases off the street? ($2,400 each).
I honestly don’t know. Anyone know?
(That’s not to factor-in reduced social costs (foster care, welfare, theft for drug money, etc) and increase tax payments from ex-drug addicts who can now keep a job.)
MikeN “But if you punish enough people and spend enough money the price of drugs will go higher, causing an impact on the market.”
Certainly, law enforcement can impact the market, but it can never eliminate the market.
We’ve been fighting this war for several decades, spent probably trillions of dollars, turned Mexico and most of South America into a war zone, and yet even a dirt poor person can still find and can afford nearly any drug he wants anywhere in this country.
And your solution… we need to spend more money and punish more people?! What the frick?! That plan has not worked in the entire history of humanity. What makes you think it’ll work now? Sending potheads to prison for life? The death penalty for using coke? Being drawn and quartered in the public arena for having a scale and plastic baggies in your car?
It’s people like you who thought prohibition was a good idea. “Gee, if we spend more money and punish more people harder, eventually they’ll stop.”
Hey, if the cops just bought the drugs it would save millions a year.
To #7 Durgs have never been a victimless crime. The dealers kill each other and anybody that gets in their way. The junkies will do anything to get the cash to get their fix which is another way of saying a lot of drug users are career criminals. Employers fire junkies or refuse to hire them. Junkies cause a lot of accidents and what happens to the families of junkies is sin/criminal.
SN,
I don’t disagree that the War on Drugs is a failure, your arguments are hollow.
It was not that prohibition was such a bad idea, it did manage to garner sufficient votes to amend the Constitution. The problem with Prohibition AND the War on Drugs are the incompetent and corrupt police that allow it to take place. While most American police are not corrupt, the same can’t be said for police in most jurisdictions where the drugs originate.
A second problem was the lumping of marijuana in with heavy narcotics such as cocaine, heroin, and morphine. While cannabis is not harmful and is not addictive, the same is not true for opiates. While cannabis should, by all reasonable standards, be decriminalized, there should not be a blanket immunity for all drugs.
Instead of heavy prison terms, maybe we should have more diversion programs for drug addicts. It costs a lot less to treat them then it does to incarcerate them.
RE# 25,
Damn, I must be suffering from Alfred1 flu or something.
That first sentence should have read,
While I don’t disagree that the War on Drugs is a failure, your arguments are hollow.
I hope that makes more sense.
While I am at it though, I confess I have much admiration for SN. His posts are always well constructed and thought through. And he is a good looking man too.
😉
deowll wrote: “To #7 Durgs have never been a victimless crime. The dealers kill each other and anybody that gets in their way.”
That’s because the government turned it into a war. You don’t see people killing each other buying potato chips.
“The junkies will do anything to get the cash to get their fix which is another way of saying a lot of drug users are career criminals.”
The exact same argument could be made against alcohol. Do you seriously want to try prohibition again?
“Junkies cause a lot of accidents and what happens to the families of junkies is sin/criminal.”
Yep, it appears you do, because we all know alcoholics cause more accidents than pot heads and have screwed up families. So let’s try prohibition again, I’m sure it will work this time, if we spend more money and give harsher punishments.
Mr. Fusion wrote: “I don’t disagree that the War on Drugs is a failure, your arguments are hollow.”
Which arguments are hollow? Has anyone refuted any of my arguments yet today? Nope.
“The problem with Prohibition AND the War on Drugs are the incompetent and corrupt police that allow it to take place.”
Oh, so that’s why, throughout the entire course of our history, that mind altering substances have never been eliminated. If we could only find perfect police, then the perfect prohibition could be implemented. Let’s get right on that.
“there should not be a blanket immunity for all drugs.”
And of course there would be no need for such immunity, because your hypothetical and completely imaginary perfectly incorruptible police force will solve all drug related crime. Yes!
“Instead of heavy prison terms, maybe we should have more diversion programs for drug addicts.”
But once your perfectly incorruptible imaginary super-police take over the planet, there will be no drugs left to become addicted to. What a paradise that will be! What a truly wonderful solution to the drug problem. Thank you so much! Why didn’t we think of imaginary hypothetical incorruptible super-police a long time ago?!
#7 – “Victimless crime?” Having seen the effects of drug addiction upon both the users and their loved ones, this statement can only be made by one of two people:
The naive.
or…
The addict himself.
Hey, I got a good idea:
legalize all drugs, and let the less than 1% of the population that ruin their lives using them do exactly that.
This argument that we’re trying to save people from themselves is bogus. The money and effort and curtailing of freedom to save these people just doesn’t make any sense.
It’s as ridiculous as outlawing porn, or gambling, or drinking, or extreme sports, or dumb business ideas, because a handful of people ruin their family’s lives over it.
This actually may be a record of efficiency!
Current drug policy is insane. Imagine you go to your doctor for a hangnail on your right hand, and he amputates your right leg.
Well.. now you STILL have a hangnail on you hand and you are missing a leg. This is drug policy as we know it. We get both the issues of drugs AND the issues of crime, we are making some very bad people very rich and they are spreading that money to corrupt our entire system of government.
And NOW, the doc (on the take) is recommending that left leg come off for the cure.
Oh yeah! Brilliance! Let’s do it for the kids!