Thinking out of my box

I had an interesting conversation the other day on token Telegraph lefty Tom Chivers’ blog in response to his post on legalising drugs.  I put a question:

Hi. You put the case in favour of decriminalisation very well. For me the most persuasive aspect of it is to take the whole thing out of criminal hands — and, in the case of heroin users for instance, to reduce the possibilities of overdose, HIV infection, etc. These are all compelling arguments — but I still have a few quibbles before I can be entirely convinced…

Firstly, there’s a story on the BBC News website today reporting that drug use among under-15s in Scotland has halved in the last decade. You point to evidence of similar declines in Portugal since decriminalisation — but doesn’t the fact that this has happened here anyway, without legalisation, suggest that it would be wrong to say there’s a direct link between legalisation and declining use? Mightn’t Portugal’s decline have happened anyway, as it did here?

Secondly, the great George Monbiot wrote a piece a while ago which pointed out that “At present the trade in class A drugs is concentrated in the rich nations. If it were legalised, we could cope. The use of drugs is likely to rise, but governments could use the extra taxes to help people tackle addiction. But because the wholesale price would collapse with legalisation, these drugs would for the first time become widely available in poorer nations, which are easier for companies to exploit (as tobacco and alcohol firms have found) and which are less able to regulate, raise taxes or pick up the pieces. The widespread use of cocaine or heroin in the poor world could cause serious social problems.” How do you respond to the possibility (and it is just a possibility — I think Monbiot on the whole favours decriminalisation) that legalising drugs here might actually increase harm elsewhere?

Thirdly, as far as I can see, all of the evidence cited in favour of legalisation seems to come from countries with similar, broadly liberal systems of crime and punishment to ours. However, anyone who’s been to, say, Singapore or Japan will see that their drugs laws are far, far harsher than ours — and as far as I can see they also have lower levels of drug use than we do. I worry, then, that our evidence base is too narrow — that we are in danger of policybased evidencemaking, rather than the other way round. In this context it seems parochial to describe Britain’s drug laws as “fearsome”, given the possibility of far lengthier imprisonment or even execution for drug use in other countries.

As I say, I’m openminded on the matter, but I’d be grateful if you could address these points that are still troubling me. Thanks.

He responded:

Interesting points. The third seems to be dealt with by the WHO’s claim that there isn’t a statistical relationship between the harshness of drug laws and the level of drug use. The Portugal example may not show that drug use will go down, but it certainly shows that drug use hasn’t gone up, and I think we need good reasons to make things illegal, not the other way around. Also, there are the public health benefits.

Monbiot’s argument is the worrying one, and I do seriously take it on board. My suspicion, and it’s only a suspicion, is that more good will come from destroying the drug lords and failed states than harm will come from exploitation by drug companies. But I can’t back that up, and I do acknowledge that that is a serious concern.

I responded thusly:

Thanks for your reply. On the question of Portugal v Scotland, it is a major plus for your argument that drug use at least hasn’t gone up. However, you would agree with me that it would be unscientific to say that legalisation had caused drug use to fall.

I’m glad you point me in the direction of the WHO, because I really was looking for a study of the whole world, not just of likeminded Western democracies. I’ll have a proper look at it over the weekend. If their conclusion is as you say it is, that would go a long way towards answering my concerns.

I suspect you’re right about Monbiot’s point — and given the state of some parts of West Africa and Latin America, his worst case scenario could hardly be any worse than the status quo. As you say, though, we would need a further study to look into this. All of which goes to say that the evidence may well be supportive, but not conclusive — and neither could it be, given the amount of variables in such a huge and complicated question of social policy.

I should add that I can’t accept the Delingpolist libertarian argument for drug legalisation — I don’t believe Mill’s otherwise very useful ‘do what you want unless it harms other people’ applies, because the harm caused is too often not confined solely to the user, which would remain the case even under legalisation. Think of the increased capacity for aggression by cocaine users, or the misery caused to families of heroin addicts — it would be childish to argue that these users are only harming themselves, just as no-one argues that alcohol abuse only harms the drinker. In this regard illegal drugs are much more like alcohol than tobacco. You might say everyone should ‘do what they like’, presumably at least so long as they don’t harm others, but in this case the activity intrinsically raises the risk of harming others. Or do you hold that the right not to be harmed by others is outweighed by the infringement of the right to harm oneself? Anyway, while rejecting what seems a selfish and irresponsible libertarian argument, I can however, with these reservations, just about accept the utilitarian one. We should agree that taking drugs is intrinsically harmful, and not something we should view with neutrality — thus we should want to reduce that harm, and if legalisation can help with that, we should support it.

As well as correcting my sloppy, interchangeable use of decriminalisation and legalisation, I would now go further and say I find the libertarian position (on everything) ridiculous.  Anyone who pressgangs Mill, who was arguing against genuine political and religious tyranny, into service to justify acts of hedonism that are such a reliable source of harm needs to go back and read his On Liberty.  Nonetheless, I still find myself somewhere between the utilitarian and authoritarian positions, or as we might call them the realistic and romantic positions, unable to quite make up my dope-addled mind.  I’m much more convinced that cannabis, E, acid and mushrooms (which are class A, but whose only danger is from users self-defenestrating) should be legal, and that junkies should get their fix on the NHS rather than rob or whore, than I am that we should sell cocaine over the counter.  Perhaps the wisest policy would be to accept the least harmful drugs, make them less harmful still, and concentrate on trying one way or the other to reduce use of the most harmful ones: but imperfect outcomes for users are a price worth paying for reducing harm to others, which is why I’m all for methadone programmes and needle exchanges if they cut crime and disease transmission.

Note that I don’t say ‘rather than have to rob or whore’.  One aspect of the drugs debate I really can’t stand is the attempt to remove any possibility of individual autonomy from users.  We are all human—we are all capable of free will, of rational thought and reasonable behaviour—we all always have a choice not to harm ourselves or others, even if many of us fail to exercise it.  But moralising will get us nowhere: we have to accept that many, many people — the Delingpoles of this world — are selfish and will happily buy cocaine for fun of a weekend, even in the knowledge it causes death somewhere else in the world to some poor, anonymous black or brown person whose fate they couldn’t care less about.  We have to accept that and build policy around it.

I also think liberalisers should be a bit more honest about the current non-existence of the war on drugs, at least in Britain.  Go to Camden High St on a Friday night and watch the police drive up and down, ignoring crack deals in the hope of confining them to that neighbourhood.  As wars go, it’s not exactly Laurent Nkunda v the Interahamwe.  In many ways we are already nearer de facto decriminalisation than a war.

Of course, no discussion of drugs can now take place without the talk turning to alcohol, the drug to which we are almost all addicted, which brings me neatly onto the imminent Scottish election.  If you agree, as I do, with Elish Angiolini that cheap booze is at the root of many of our problems with health, crime and the economy (and, er, to a lesser extent education, though I fondly remember one or two pisshead teachers), and if you accept the simple fact that people adjust their behaviour in response to price incentives, then you will also agree that minimum pricing of alcohol is an overdue policy, and one which ought to be weighed when deciding how to vote.  The SNP tried to bring this in, and have said they will try again.  Naturally Labour are against it, probably only so that they can bring it in themselves in a bid to repeat the success of the smoking ban, which was about the only worthwhile thing they managed in office.  I’ve generally had quite a lot of time for Annabel Goldie — her support for the budget in return for policies like extra police officers was how opposition parties should behave, rather than opposing everything for the hell of it — but the Tories’ failure to support this move was very disappointing, and confirmed the charge that they will always be more on the side of big business than of the working class (also true of Labour).  Annabel may have a point about the other parties’ auctioneering of unaffordable policies, but as my mole in the SNP points out, ‘all of her supporters are rich anyway’, and she’s not immune to giveaways either.  For instance, I’m concerned about the removal of prescription charges — have a look at what’s happened to antibiotics to see why — but then, I can’t remember the last time I had to get a prescription, and would have been perfectly able to afford it anyway, so I accept that epidemiological worries are a luxury when medical and financial ones aren’t.  In a wider sense, I fail to see why the upwards transfer of wealth from overtaxed poor Scots to better-off pensioners and graduates is still classed as solidarity and social justice: but that is another abstract complaint, and there are some very quotidian matters to settle first.  Weighing the parties in the balance then, we find that they are all wanting, but that some are wanting more than others.

Which brings me not very neatly onto the AV referendum.  I’m a bit more excited about this than I am about the election, though I’m still at a loss as to why the voters should be considered too stupid to manage both on the same day: either they’re too stupid full stop, in which case we might as well pick a dictator and hope for the best, or they’re not.  Growing up in a city which at one point returned 71 Labour councillors to 79 seats, I was never much of a cheerleader for FPTP.  The oft-heard idea that it lets us ‘kick the bastards out’ is rubbish too: can you remember the last time we removed one party with a working majority at a general election and brought in the other with a working majority?  It hasn’t happened in my lifetime: in fact it happened only once in the 20th century (when Heath beat Wilson in 1970).  AV isn’t PR (my preference is for multi-member STV, which has given us a far fairer balance on the council), but it’s probably still an improvement, and a necessary first step if we are to break the stranglehold of the rotten two or three big parties.  Even with all this in mind I was swithering, until I read that Ken Clarke and John Prescott are against it and Nigel Farage, Phillip Blond and Caroline Lucas are for it.

It’s also more fun to rank candidates in order than to put a tick in a box.  It benefits not just those who support smaller parties, but those of us (most of us, now) who aren’t partisan.  Most of all, it benefits those of us who know which parties we hate more than we know which parties we like.  And if you’re still not sure, you can always hedge your bets and put a 1 next to yes and a 2 next to no.

So tell me, dear readers: do either of you have a strong opinion on drugs, the Scottish election or AV you’d like to share…?

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The wisdom of the crowdsource

As a politics student I never much liked the term ‘political science’.  It seemed to imply that those of us doing the studying could somehow put our own prejudices aside, achieve a pure state of dispassionate reason, and study other people as if they were rats in a laboratory, rather than people just like us.  In the same way, the problem with ‘evidence-based policymaking’, which is one of the buzzwords of the day, is that the certainty of the sciences can never be fully applied to the social sciences, because it’s never possible to run fully controlled experiments on people’s lives.  Correlation, in trying to analyse the effect of one influence among millions on how people act, can rarely prove causation: at best it can give us an educated guess, which falls some way short of pure science.

Economics is a good example: the mountains of data it has accumulated still refuse to point to a clear conclusion.  The more the discipline progresses, the more disagreement there is between the Keynesians and the Austrians, both of whom can torture the statistics as they see fit and produce apparently convincing arguments.  The more I read from either, the less clear I am about which side is right: in theory the Keynesian position is appealing, but in practice the amount of responsibility it places in relatively few hands is a problem too.  Neither Ed Balls nor George Osborne really has a clue what will happen if we fiscally retrench, stimulate demand, put up interest rates, print more money, or whatever.  Each can quote roughly appropriate and superficially attractive examples from history to support his case, but neither can possibly quote examples that cover all of the variables that are in play in what is today an enormous, unique and uncontrollable experiment.  Beyond the very short term, our economic outlook is simply unknowable: unfortunately, politicians and commentators are respected for making confident predictions (even if those turn out to be completely wrong) so you won’t catch many of them admitting it.  Science and social science are, as it were, overlapping magisteria: the bigger and more complicated the political question, the weaker our ability to deal with it by scientific method.

The phrase ‘evidence-based’, then, when applied to politics, where there is rarely a definitively correct answer, is one we ought to be wary of.  Indeed, since governments so often debase evidence-based policymaking into policy-based evidencemaking, we have to be even more sceptical than usual when dealing with any politician, journalist or public figure who purports to be operating on the basis of ‘the evidence’.  Politics is about how we run society, what we do with our and other people’s money, how we share our time on earth with other people, how we order the fundamentals of our lives.  Unlike crunching data from radio telescopes or splicing plant genomes, these are emotive issues, and it is impossible to be fully dispassionate and to disregard our own experiences of our lives and of society.  Anyone who claims to be able to do so should warrant our suspicion.  Anyone who can genuinely do so is a sociopath.

If we are being honest, we all — scientists and academics included — at some point or other fall into one of the following:

1. anchoring trap — giving disproportionate weight to the first item of information received
2. status quo trap — bias towards maintaining the current situation
3. sunk cost trap — making decisions which justify previous decisions, even if these are no longer sound
4. confirming-evidence trap — concentrating on finding evidence to support a favoured option
5. framing trap — posing the question for the decision in a particular way
6. overconfidence trap — overestimating the accuracy of estimates and forecasts
7. prudence trap — being over-cautious
8. recallability trap — giving more weight to recent and dramatic events

(Hammond, J S, Keeney, R L and Raiffa, H (1998), ‘The Hidden Traps in Decision Making’, Harvard Business Review, September-October)

As ever, Orwell is ahead of me:

Implied in the demand for more scientific education is the claim that if one has been scientifically trained one’s approach to all subjects will be more intelligent than if one had had no such training.  A scientist’s political opinions, it is assumed, his opinions on sociological questions, on morals, on philosophy, perhaps even on the arts, will be more valuable than those of a layman.  The world, in other words, would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it. … The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook.  The physicists of half a dozen great nations, all feverishly and secretly working away at the atomic bomb, are a demonstration of this.

Go and read his short piece in full, then come back to this one.

The problem is at its most acute when, as with the Keynes/Hayek question, an issue presents us with binary choices.  The drugs debate is a good example, and one where the liberal side (including the BBC’s Mark Easton, who no longer makes any pretence of impartial journalism) claims to have monopolised the evidence, citing Britain before prohibition, contemporary Portugal, and elsewhere as examples of successful legalisation and harm reduction.  Many of these arguments are convincing, but then so is the argument that giving visitors boarding passes that read WARNING: MANDATORY DEATH SENTENCE FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW, and carrying out the threat, has resulted in a low drugs problem there.  Though they are clearly incompatible, essentially I agree with both sides: either extreme would be an improvement on the status quo.  But there is evidence on both sides, and neither side can conclusively demonstrate that their position, when applied to all of the other circumstances that are unique to our socio-economic situation, will work as they intend it to (for example, on the one hand the relaxation of late-night licensing laws failed to turn us into a continental-style cafe culture and merely extended the existing problems later into the night in the areas that adopted it, but on the other we had the legality and availability of ‘legal highs’ like mephedrone to thank for a drop in the use of other, nastier drugs like cocaine — at least until we made them illegal highs).  Both sides are advocating a leap in the dark, to a greater or lesser extent: but both are on firm ground to say that it is impossible to call the compromise that is our present policy a success.  What we ideally need is a global referendum in which the status quo is not on the ballot.  Much the same applies to the debate on crime and penal policy, where again the government seem to be advocating a mixed policy of community-based rehabilitation rather than short-term imprisonment, but without the vast amounts of money that such a policy would clearly need to have any chance of working — this seems to be the same sort of compromise as we have in drugs policy, and seems to me to have about as much chance of working.

The best way forward for politics and political science is to try to apply the methods of the information revolution: by acknowledging the limitations of social science as a discipline and the limitations on how much any individual or small group of people can know, by admitting the role of individual and social experiences in shaping people’s opinions, and by aggregating as much information as possible when formulating policy.  Policy should operate in the free market of ideas as price does in the free market of exchange: in the modern parlance, we should crowdsource it.  This is the opposite approach to fascism and communism (both of which, Orwell tells us, were supported by plenty of scientists and academics in their time), which both ultimately failed because too many decisions were being made by too few people with too little information.  The representative democracy we currently have — whereby we are ruled by an elite making what it thinks are the best decisions on our behalf, with a degree of our consent — is half way between the two positions.  The ultimate, revolutionary, goal — in synthesis with the revolution in access to information, which inclines me towards the rational optimist camp — is for as many people as possible to have as much of a say in as many decisions that affect them as possible.  Direct democracy may be some way off yet, but it is the direction in which we should be agitating to travel.

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Don’t get high on your own monetary supply

I see the hacks at the Economist have realised that any more doommongering stories about the state of the global economy will start to cause a decline in their readership as business folk leap to their deaths from office windows, and so have this week instead run a leader calling for the legalisation of all drugs.

I’m basically convinced by the argument that decriminalisation would remove the criminal element, which is the worst aspect of our drugs problem.  I generally take the classical liberal line that grown-ups should be allowed to do what they want to themselves, as long as it doesn’t harm others.  Of course, consuming drugs does harm others, whether or not it harms you, because of the method by which it travels from a field in Colombia or Afghanistan to your nose / arm.

However, I’m not convinced that prohibition has failed, because we only halfheartedly enforce it.  It’s not exactly difficult to buy coke or crack in central London of an evening, and if the police catch you you’re unlikely to get more than a ticking-off (a clip round the ear, of course, is not allowed these days, although for some reason seven bullets to the head is).  I suspect that if we followed the line of countries that punish drugs users we would find we had less of a drugs problem.  My first memory of my first visit to Singapore was of a warning in bold red letters on the boarding card on the plane: ‘MANDATORY DEATH SENTENCE FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW’.  (I’m going there again in a couple of weeks, so had better remember not to traffic any drugs.)  As usual under New Labour, we have the worst of both worlds: drugs are illegal, leaving the market open to gangsters, but their use isn’t punished, so demand remains high.

Perhaps we could have the least bad of both worlds?  I suggest legalising everything and introducing regulation and light taxation, allowing the state a monopoly over drug supply and focusing on harm reduction, but at the same time bringing in severe punishments (mandatory life sentences?) for freelance dealers and anyone who sells to children.

About this “quantitative easing”.  Why are savers being punished so much (by printing money and raising inflation well above interest rates, so devaluing their savings) when they are the only section of society not at fault in all of this?  There is a widespread misconception that saving is bad for the economy because it is an alternative to spending: actually, if money isn’t spent it’s invested (assuming, perhaps rashly these days, it’s in a bank).  Higher interest rates would mean more incentive for saving, less incentive to lend and borrow recklessly, more investment in viable businesses, and would allow house prices to return to a sensible level – surely more sensible than trying to reinflate the boom in asset prices and consumer crap.  It’s probably not very often I agree with the Tennessee Republican Party (and I doubt they share my views on drugs), but -

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