
The Drug-Violence Myth - minapurna
https://casetext.com/posts/the-drug-violence-myth#924
======
lukifer
There are mental gymnastics involved anytime the umbrella term "drugs" is
invoked; the behavioral differences between cannabis, LSD, PCP, heroin and
crack cocaine are so staggering, it's absurd to talk about them lumped
together. You might as well try to include roller skates, go-carts and fighter
jets into traffic laws.

Anecdotally, there are instances where there is a correlation between some
drugs and violence, which is why the myth persists, even if the statistical
likelihood of violence is identical for non-drug-related circumstance. But the
vast majority of drug violence is a product of inevitable black markets, and a
reflection of the misused violence of the state.

~~~
api
Try "socially unacceptable drugs" or "taboo drugs." The classification is
completely arbitrary, and is usually related to whether or not the drug is
used by a socially marginal or ethnic minority group like blacks or hippies.
Alcohol can be as dangerous as heroin if used heavily, but upper class white
people drink it so it's okay and is not a "drug."

~~~
Yakimoto
>Upper class white people

Your racism is showing.

Upper class people like Cocaine too, care to inject a racial undertone as to
why that is illegal?

~~~
api
That's why the penalties for cocaine are historical less than for crack
despite them being the same drug.

It's not racial per se -- in the original message I think "dominant mainstream
culture" would be better than "white" \-- though in the 50s and 60s those were
almost the same thing. Back then the dominant culture implied white, English-
speaking, and protestant Christian, and other cultures and ethnic groups were
second class. That's much less true today but not totally.

I'm speaking to the historical reasons for the war on drugs, which are mostly
related to racism as well as a desire to suppress subcultures like the
'hippie' movement. The original propaganda used to make marijuana illegal was
all about black men seducing white women. Google it.

If the war on drugs were about health and based on rational health evidence,
marijuana would be legal and alcohol would be schedule I.

~~~
happyscrappy
Crack is much more addictive, and most of the people buying crack are white.

------
beat
Long, long ago, in a college town far away, I was arrested in my own home,
without a warrant, for possession of marijuana. The case was thrown out by a
judge due to various evidence problems, stemming from not getting a warrant.

There are a limited number of circumstances under which it is legal for police
to enter and search a home without a warrant. As my lawyer casually knocked
down the others, the prosecutor finally landed on "danger to the officers".
The cop on the witness stand helpfully piped up, "In a drug case, there's
_always_ danger to the officers!" The judge glared at him, and said "You just
told me you were outside for fifteen minutes, and they didn't even know you
were there! You were not in danger!"

That was pretty much the end of the case.

~~~
misiti3780
im confused - who was outside for 15 minutes ?

~~~
beat
The cops. There were three of them outside our house. They came on a noise
complaint - we were having band practice, and didn't hear them knocking. They
looked through the window and saw pot on the coffee table (AFTER I had already
gone through once and cleaned it up and yelled at stupid careless musicians to
not do that, in case the police were called about the noise, sigh).

They had plenty of opportunity to get a warrant, but were just too lazy to do
so. When I finally answered the door, they asked if they could come in, I said
no, and the sergeant in charge said "Oh yes we can!" and forcibly shoved me
out of the way.

After gathering us all up, they separated me and asked me privately who it
belonged to - me and my roommate, or our three guests? The implication was
that they'd arrest the two of us, or arrest everyone. I lied and said it was
all ours, so the other three were released.

Judge ruled the confession was coerced. I wasn't "under arrest" officially, so
I hadn't been read my rights, but I was not free to go, and they intended to
arrest me, and it was clear that was the intent. And he ruled the evidence
from the search inadmissible due to lack of a warrant.

What's irritating is how cocky they all were. My roommate's lawyer advised a
guilty plea. Luckily, mine wanted to fight. If we had lost, I would have had
to pay for the public defender (since we won, the state paid). In today's
environment, an unreasonably high bail would have been required instead of our
own recognizance, and a guilty plea offered as a bargain at the bail hearing.
It's a shitty system.

~~~
misiti3780
thanks!

------
DanBC
We know that a drug addiction is a weak predictor of violence.

We know that previous violence is a predictor of violence.

We know that mental illness generally isn't a predictor of violence. Even when
you limit mental illness to just personality disorder and psychotic illnesses
it's weaker than an addiction or previous episode of violence.

But if you combine any two you get stronger predictors, and if you combine all
three that's the strongest predictor.

The article correctly points out that this gets misinterpreted as "drug use
predicts violence".

Frustratingly putting people in prison for their drug use exposes them to
violence, which this raises their future risk of being the perpetrators of
violence.

~~~
bobdole1234
Taking more than one ineffective predictor doesn't magically make them better.

The article states there is no demonstrated link. That doesn't mean that it's
not strong enough to detect on it's own, that means there is no link
demonstrated.

Adding up a bunch of nothing doesn't make something. It just makes it easier
to hand wave away the fact it doesn't actually mean anything.

~~~
DanBC
Drug use has clear links with violence (although we don't know if it causes
that violence, and sometimes we're talking about victims more likely to use
drugs after violence). The article does nothing to explain why drug addiction
is so strongly linked to violence in medical literature.

> Adding up a bunch of nothing doesn't make something. It just makes it easier
> to hand wave away the fact it doesn't actually mean anything.

There's a whole bunch of research showing this. Feel free to pick any one
study and explain why it's wrong. That research is pretty clear: MI alone is a
weak predictor; drug or alcohol addiction is a less weak predictor; previous
violence is a stronger predictor; but if you have combinations of any two
that's a stronger predictor than any one alone and if you have all three
that's the strongest predictor.

The submitted article even quotes this increased risk from drug offenders:

> A 1997 survey of prisoners also indicated only 12% of federal drug offenders
> were ever convicted of a violent crime.

That's an increased risk of being a perpetrator of violence! 12% of the
general population haven't been convicted of a violent crime.

According to Wikipedia the total number of adults under correctional
supervision:

> In total, 6,899,000 adults were under correctional supervision (probation,
> parole, jail, or prison) in 2013 – about 2.8% of adults (1 in 35) in the
> U.S. resident population.

That's the total, which includes all non-violent crimes as well as violent
crime.

Here's a World Health Organisation report:

[http://www.who.int/violenceprevention/interpersonal_violence...](http://www.who.int/violenceprevention/interpersonal_violence_and_illicit_drug_use.pdf)

\---begin quote---

• In Los Angeles, USA, 35% of methamphetamine users aged 18-25 years old were
found to have committed violence while under the influence of the drug (7).

• In Memphis, USA, victims and family members believed that 92% of
perpetrators of intimate partner violence had used drugs or alcohol during the
day of the assault and 67% had used a combination of cocaine and alcohol (8).
A study on intimate partner violence in China found that partners who used
illicit drugsa were significantly more likely to abuse their spouses
physically, sexually, or both (9).

• Results from the British Crime Survey 2007/08 showed that victims of violent
crime believed the offender to be under the influence of drugs in 19% of
incidents (10).

• In Australia, perpetrators of violence against nurses in emergency
departments were perceived to be under the influence of drugs in 25% of cases
(11).

• In Atlanta, USA, ecstacy users with higher levels of lifetime use exhibited
higher rates of aggressive and violent behaviour (12).

• In Rhode Island, USA, a quarter of women arrested for intimate partner
violence and referred by courts to intimate partner violence prevention
programmes reported symptoms consistent with a drug-related diagnosis (13).

• In Canada, boys reporting sexual harassment perpetration were seven times
more likely to use drugs and girls four times more likely to use drugs (14).

• In a study of violence in youth holiday resorts among young German, Spanish
and British holidaymakers, the use of cocaine during the holiday was
associated with triple the odds of involvement in fighting and use of cannabis
with double the odds (15).

• In England and Wales, 12% of arrestees held for assault tested positive for
cocaine use and 24% for opiate use (excluding methadone) (16).

\---end quote---

\---begin quote---

Psychiatric factors:

There are elevated levels of psychiatric conditions, particularly Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), in drug users experiencing and perpetrating
violence. For example, high rates of intimate partner violence have been found
among women with both drug use and PTSD (80), while the presence of both
cocaine dependence and PTSD is associated with increased perpetration of
partner violence (81). Furthermore, psychological distress and PTSD associated
with experiencing rape and physical assault are related to greater severity of
drug use

\---end quote---

------
mbrutsch
Sadly, our world-class political system is based entirely upon feelz, with no
minimum qualifications for participation.

~~~
qnaal
"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades
has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good." -Thomas Sowell

~~~
anigbrowl
Right, because things were so awesome back in the day...not. Sowell has made a
great living out of pandering to white conservative nostalgia; his rhetoric
relies almost exclusively on emotional arguments, wrapped in a thin veneer of
objectivity and disinterested logic. Note, for example, the assertion of a
vanished _status_ that 'worked,' sidestepping the question of why there was
any impetus to change it in the first place.

A reading trick that I find incredibly useful (no matter what your political
affiliation) is to mentally highlight all valuable adjectives and implicit
adjectives - valuable being 'nice car' as opposed to purely descriptive
adjectives like 'blue car', and implicit adjectives being things like 'worked'
above, which implies something that worked well rather than worked badly. Some
writers, and I think Sowell is an exemplar here, specialize in stating a bunch
of logical non-sequiters as a frame for a purely emotional, subjective
argument. This is the rhetorical equivalent of the stage magician drawing your
attention to the absence of anything being up his sleeve in order to distract
your attention from what he's doing with the top hat.

~~~
qnaal
> because things were so awesome back in the day...not

are you trying to credit technological advance to democratic government?

what are you talking about?

------
mschuster91
I worked for a not-so-short time in a run-down bar... I had drinkers,
fighters, junkies and stoners.

Guess which group I never had problems with? Yup, the stoners. They were just
sitting there, smoking outside and not being aggressive. The drunks would
always fight sooner or later.

~~~
stinos
Feels like your story is incomplete: tell us how did the junkies behave?

~~~
mschuster91
Needed emergency services two times and I nearly stung myself on a needle
while cleaning out a pissoir because it was stuck with a condom and cigarette
butts. Also, two (known, but not to me) heroin junkies smashed gambling
machines.

edit: oh, forgot the occurence of a junkie shitting into the pissoir. God,
what a smell, it was horrid to clean up that mess. And a suspected mentally
ill dude smeared feces over the wall.

The gambling addicts were mostly harmless but I had to kick out a couple of
them because they tried to sell stolen gear to other customers for cash to
gamble.

------
murbard2
This also seems to disprove the often repeated theory that most people
incarcerated for non-violent drug crimes are actually known violent criminals
who are only being charged with those offenses because they are easier to
prove, while mere users are generally left alone.

------
trhway
we know that alcohol is connected to violence. Lets outlaw alcohol and thus
decrease the violence... Or as they say here (that pearl of government-
hypocrisy-speak has just made my day, i'll probably add it to email signature
:)

[https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/brief-
history](https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/brief-history)

"Prohibition created a new federal medium for fighting crime,"

------
jayess
Just more evidence that the war on drugs does far more damage than drugs
themselves.

------
happyscrappy
It is hard to dispute that inner city gun violence is drug related, which is
probably why they don't mention it.

~~~
angdis
Indeed, all you have to do is to read up on who's murdering who. Drugs and
violence are intimately tied together at least in the USA. The laws are set-up
to punish drug offenders based on the quantity of drugs in one's possession.
Beyond a certain quantity, the offender crosses a threshold into
"distribution" rather than "use"\-- and long histories of violent, organized
crime is typical for those folks.

~~~
borkabrak
The text of the article is designed to respond to exactly this familiar
argument. If you're reading this, angdis, you may be interested in reading the
article.

~~~
monochromatic
The article conflates drug users and drug dealers.

------
thwaway3142357
Why is this on the front page? I've used multiple browsers on multiple OS's
and every one of them renders a blank page.

~~~
DiabloD3
Not having that issue here, but it seems to be dependent on javascript to do
anything.

~~~
bittercynic
Have to allow JS from filepicker.io, two amazon.aws domains, and a cloudfront
domain.

~~~
rambambam
Off-topic: Only allowing the cloudfront-domain worked for me.

------
bjourne
I've been assaulted twice by complete strangers in the night time in the city.
Both times I managed to avert major violence and get away unscathed. In one
case it was someone raging on alcohol and being angry at the world. In the
other case it was someone so high on something that he essentially wasn't
there. Glazed eyes, a blank stare, mouth foaming and taking off his clothes.
He couldn't even talk but for some reason he wanted to hurt me specifically. I
don't think he would have attacked me if he wasn't high so I think that is an
obvious case of drugs _causing_ violence. Don't think I'm the only one that
has been attacked by a drug maniac either.

~~~
arbitrage
This type of anecdata is exactly what the article is trying to convince people
not to fall prey to.

From the actual article:

> Ultimately there is no solid proof that drugs cause violence. Most drug
> offenders commit nonviolent offenses and at low rates. Though certainly drug
> addicts commit more crimes, they commit them at low rates, and the
> connection between drugs and violent crimes is complex and not conclusive.
> Empirical evidence that I discovered with Frank McIntyre actually shows that
> drug defendants commit less violent crime on pretrial release than any other
> group of defendants.

~~~
bjourne
To prove a generalization false, "drugs do not cause violence", you just need
one counter-example. I've found one example where the drugs did cause the
(attempted) violence so the generalization must be false.

~~~
mikeash
You're confusing a statistical claim for an absolute claim.

You're right that if the claim is "drugs are never, ever the cause of any
violence" then you just need one counter-example.

But the claim is actually "statistically, violence caused by drugs does not
occur at a rate detectably above the rate of violence in general" which means
something like that the number of violent acts with drugs as a cause is
extremely low, or that violent acts caused by drugs would still have happened
just with a different cause if it were not for the drugs.

~~~
devilshaircut
Actually the article (in the quote the replier posted) uses statistics to so
show, evidently, that drug users commit violence less frequently than a
control group; the quote does not discount the causal effect of drugs and
violence, much less in such a specific case.

The way to invalidate the poster's original claim is to show evidence that the
violent behavior in that specific instance (or at least a comparable instance)
was in no way related to the perpetrator's drug-influenced physiological
state. I believe that would be difficult to demonstrate.

