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INTERVIEWER
Don't the drug warriors have an argument that what they're doing is working?
KLEIMAN
The best argument for the effectiveness for drug law enforcement is marijuana
right now. The price of marijuana is up, adjusting for both inflation and
increased potency, by something like a factor of three, between the early '70s
and today. It's the only illicit drug that's more expensive now than it was 25
years ago.
And for awhile there was also encouraging news on the consumption side. The
number of users was falling and the number of young users was falling. That
unfortunately stopped in 1991 and since then the number of young users has been
increasing. And what's really frightening is initiation's happening at younger
and younger ages. What's curious about all this is that it had nothing to do
with enforcement. There's simply no evidence that marijuana enforcement has
changed. I don't know what changed. Nobody knows what changed, and therefore
strong propositions that we should do X and that will make marijuana use among
kids go down are simply not justified.
If I knew why kids pick up a particular fashion this year and drop it next
year, I wouldn't have to make a living doing drug policy. I could be inventing
Hula Hoops. But in fact juvenile fashions come and go. One of my colleagues, a
law professor, asked his class in about 1985 how many of them used marijuana
and got almost no hands. So he asked them why. And one of them said, in a
voice dripping with contempt, "Oh, that was a '70s thing,' as if the
70s were sometime during the Korean War. There's a natural pattern about
juvenile fashion; nobody wants be doing what was done last year.
And on the other hand there's also a trend factor, that people you know imitate
their older friends and siblings. There was a long- term increase in cannabis
use from the mid-'60's, maybe even the early '60s, through about 1979. That
was followed by a collapse from '79 to '91, and now a fairly sharp increase
which may have ended last year.
INTERVIEWER
What about the impact of increased prices for drugs....there's more opportunity
for corruption and all that.
KLEIMAN
Those of us who study illicit markets used to believe that demand for most
illicit drugs were inelastic. That is to say, an increase in price wouldn't
decrease consumption very much. If that's true, then an increase in
prices is actually a bad thing, because it increases the revenues, of the
illicit market.
At least for heroin and cocaine, most people don't think that anymore. Now it
looks like those prices are pretty elastic, and therefore that even the short
term effectof increasing prices is to decrease revenues. The risk of making
dealers richer, and increasing the criminal activity of the users, may not be
there. The amount of money spent on cocaine, in the US has been close to a
constant since the early '80s, despite a very substantial decrease in price.
In any case, the marijuana market is much less characterized by violence than
the markets for heroin and cocaine. So it doesn't create the same level of
problem. Most of the money in marijuana is in growing, not distributing. And
that tends to be a relatively nonviolent activity: not invariably, but
usually.
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