Drug Laws Are Broken

Everything that I've discussed so far has had one thing in common: an underlying cause, if you will, for the broken-ness that permeates our culture. Systems are designed and implemented by people. They are used by people. People don't really understand people very well.

Humans, as a rule, have a fundamental misunderstanding of themselves.

Take a quick look at drug laws. Drugs are bad (this point is highly debatable on philosophical grounds, but for this argument let us concede that drugs are often detrimental and, in the long run, certainly aren't good for you), so we make them illegal--in other words, we make them even worse by attaching a prison sentence to them. Our expected outcome is that people will stop using drugs.

Only it doesn't work. People still engage in recreational drug use.

So we amend our laws. We make the sentences even harsher. We throw more resources into catching drug users.

That doesn't work either. People still engage in recreational drug use. Not only that, but the prohibition of drugs has led to a vast black market and a system of organized crime. What's going on here?

Specifically, we have what's called Optimism Bias, the phenomenon by which people grossly overestimate the outcome of events. It doesn't matter how harsh a sentence is because people assume that they won't get caught. This same mechanism that gets people to play the lottery over and over and over, even though the odds of winning are diabolically low.

In a more broad sense, our whole approach to handling the "drug problem" is flawed because our collective understanding of people is flawed. We think that if we threaten people, they will give up "undesirable" behaviors. We think that if they aren't listening to our threats, we need to make harsher threats. When confronted with our failures in these areas, we admit nothing and change nothing.

Look at the torture debate going on right now. This is a huge point of contention over whether or not it is ethical to do the unspeakable to someone if it might save lives. The debate is passionate and interesting, but it completely disregards the data, which shows us that torture does not provide reliable intel. Ethics don't enter into it. It doesn't work, so why are we still arguing about it?

Because we think it should work, because we don't understand why it doesn't.

Ditto drug laws. Our war on drugs has been an abysmal failure. You can talk about whether or not it is ethical to legalize marijuana, but that's hardly the issue. The issue is that criminalizing it hasn't worked. Why are we bothering to talk about ethics?

A better approach to handling drug addition in the world would be to treat it as a public health problem rather than a crime problem--concentrate on eliminating the addiction factor, rather than thinking you can just eliminate drugs altogether. Maybe there are other ways as well that we just haven't thought of yet. The point is that our current approach is based on a poor understanding of the human condition and it needs to be re-evaluated. But it never will.

Find out why tomorrow.

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