
After California decriminalized pot, teen arrest, overdose, dropout rates fell - adventured
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/15/after-california-decriminalized-weed-teen-arrest-overdose-and-dropout-rates-fell/
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whiddershins
The burden of proof should be on the people who want to restrict rights, not
on the people who want to liberalize.

This concept is more or less in line with the spirit of the Bill of Rights,
but seems to be curiously absent from common American discourse.

Enforcing ANY law, even a seatbelt law, restricts rights and causes some
amount of harm. I find it perplexing anyone thinks legalized recreational
substance use would actually cause more harm than drug enforcement does, even
aside from the metaphysical harm of having your freedom reduced.

It is as if the harm inherent in law enforcement doesn't count, as if there
are kinds of acceptable and unacceptable violence. Which doesn't seem like a
philosophically defensible ideology to me.

~~~
jimmytidey
The thing about that is you can phrase nearly anything in terms of freedom.
Illegal cannabis = freedom to live in a place where your children aren't
exposed to drugs. I don't agree, but for me the notion of freedom isn't very
helpful.

~~~
dalek_cannes
> Illegal cannabis = freedom to live in a place where your children aren't
> exposed to drugs

You're abusing the term "freedom". Freedom is the right to act, not immunity
from the effects of others' actions.

~~~
aninhumer
>Freedom is the right to act, not immunity from the effects of others'
actions.

What about the freedom to keep slaves? The slaves are "free" to run away,
they're just not "immune" from the actions of the slave keeper if they get
caught.

This is why the term freedom is almost useless. People inevitably mean "the
set of freedoms I care about", which will always come at the expense of other
freedoms.

------
jMyles
Just as Eric Sterling, Ethan Nadelmann, groups like SSDP, and many other
expert advocates predicted.

At least in terms of arrest and overdose, it seems so obvious; I can't fathom
how people predict an increase in death, disease, and / or crime being caused
by ending prohibition. What models are they using?!

~~~
tokenadult
_What models are they using?!_

When I was in law school, I heard a very interesting guest lecture by a law
professor from another law school who has studied the history of Prohibition
(of selling alchohol) in the United States. People who were opposed to
Prohibition, that is people who thought that alcohol should be legal to
produce and sell, pointed out that Prohibition greatly increased corruption of
police forces in many places. People who supported Prohibition pointed out
that alcohol causes many medical harms for many users. The historical record
shows that they were both right. When Prohibition was repealed, corruption of
local police forces to prompt police to look the other way and not enforce
Prohibition went down, but deaths from cirrhosis of the liver and other bad
health effects of alcohol went up.

I'm on record here on HN (I won't look up the links to previous comments just
now) as being persuaded by Richard Branson's argument that decriminalizing
marijuana in the country Portugal reduced use, and thus ended up reducing
individual and societal harm from marijuana. That country still has court-
supervised drug treatment programs (but without criminal penalties) for drug
users. As far as I know, Minnesota's de facto policy is much like this. There
is a federal law of the land in the United States that criminalizes sale and
even possession of marijuana, but there is minimal enforcement here of
statutes against possession of small amounts of marijuana. There is a big
industry here of drug treatment centers, and people come to Minnesota from all
over the world to get clean from drug addictions. If we can devote more law
enforcement resources to more serious crimes, and fewer to enforcement of
minor possession offenses, I'm fine with that. But I also hope that most
people never start to use marijuana at all, and everyone who does use it is
careful to get a reality check from sober people on how well they are really
functioning.

------
ojbyrne
"does not lead to any number of doomsday scenarios envisioned by legalization
opponents"... of course the real doomsday scenario - poorer employment
prospects for Law Enforcement - hopefully will happen.

~~~
Zigurd
It's not just that cops make a huge number of useless, insignificant arrests
for drugs, there's a whole industry built on top of those arrests: All the
prosecutors, judges, clerks, bailiffs, parole officers, prison guards and the
whole prison infrastructure. Then add all the retired CJ employees teaching
the current policing doctrine in community colleges. That's the edifice that
has to be razed to avoid the situation in Ferguson.

All of those pseudo-professions have been massively inflated and is a kind of
last refuge for men with strong necks and weak reasoning skills. It's
subculture, and that subculture doesn't have a beneficial effect on the
nation's culture as a whole.

All of that employment and wasted activity also shows up in the plus columns
for productivity and GDP, warping our ability to compare our economy to other
industrial nations.

~~~
jonah
"Think of the jobs" is almost as bad as "Think of the kids" as far as excuses
for things go.

We see it a lot in the realm of energy production too. LEO or Roughneck can't
be the only job these folks could possibly get if there were fewer of those
positions.

~~~
Pxtl
I'd say that "think of the jobs" is generally a damned sight worse than "think
of the kids" as rationalizations for bad policy go. Jobs defense is often
protecting an explicit waste of resources, while kids at least are worth
protecting and tend to break libertarian models of the universe.

------
piptastic
It seems like California is following the overall trends for the "Rest of the
US" (where the data is available).

Not sure how much this actually means, if anything.

~~~
tjradcliffe
The significance is more that the panic-mongers are wrong. Even if California
is just following trend, it means that prohibition makes no difference, so
from a social policy perspective you have two choices:

1) Some number of people smoke weed, there are no violent gangs involved in
its cultivation and sale, harmless college students don't have their lives
ruined by a drug arrest and the security-industrial complex gets smaller while
its former minions have to go do something that isn't a deadweight loss.

2) Exactly the same number of people smoke weed, there are violent gangs
involved in its cultivation and sale, harmless college students have their
lives ruined by a drug arrest and the security-industrial complex gets bigger
while its minions suck the life out of the productive economy.

Which would you choose?

------
ams6110
Pot decriminalized, arrest rate falls. Tautology?

~~~
JeffL
They are not counting arrests for possession prior to the change in law in the
stat, so not a tautology.

------
josu
There is not enough data to draw any conclusions.

~~~
cnvogel
What annoys me the most: They only include one year of data before.

So, assuming they would have shown US and California data for, say, 5 years
before legalization, and during that time, there would have been a strong
correlation between the two, in the numbers shown. And then a sudden split
(decrease in correlation) in the two years following, it would have been much
more convincing.

------
madaxe_again
The most shocking thing in that article is that the US-wide suicide rate for
15-19 year olds has increased by 11% in a year.

When your kids are killing themselves in increasing numbers... you have to
wonder if your society is really as healthy and wonderful as you like to think
it is.

~~~
neoeldex
This article is misleading. Im not agains mariuana, but still. These numbers
are distorted.

F.i, there isn't a 20% drop of overdose in CA, its only -0.6%. In the US its
+0.1%.

There is no 11% increase, the 11% is the % increase of the percentage of
suicides. In ca, the increase in suicides is 0.5%. And in the rest of the US
it is also 0.5%.

Really think hard when seeing numbers, you're fooled easily.

~~~
madaxe_again
When telling others they're fooled easily, do check your assertions first,
otherwise you look like an ass!

7.8/100,000 -> 8.7/100,000 is an 11% uptick in the number of deaths by
suicide. I'm not saying that that's even remotely related to weed.

There _is_ a 20% drop in overdose - that's not -0.6% no matter how you shake
it - that's -0.6 deaths per 100k - which in absolute terms means the OD rate
per cap has shifted from 0.003% to 0.0024% - so actually a 0.0006% change in
the overall rate - but a 20% delta. It's -23.3% for 2010 -> 2012.

------
delecti
Every time I see a headline like this my reaction is along the lines of "yeah,
sounds about right". I imagine there have got to be people for whom they these
headlines are surprising, and that confounds me.

------
Roboprog
Won't somebody please think of the gangsters! How are they supposed to earn a
living now? Imagine poor old Al Capone without a market for expensive booze,
how would he have gotten by?

This message brought to you by the "Partnership" for a Drug Free America.
(never quite clear on who the "partners" are)

... with apologies to Charles Stross :-)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#Merchant_Princes...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Stross#Merchant_Princes_series)

~~~
yodsanklai
> Won't somebody please think of the gangsters! How are they supposed to earn
> a living now?

It may sound funny, but to me it's one of the few reasonable arguments against
legalization (or at least something to think about). I don't know in the US,
but where I live (in France), there are a lot of people that live from selling
cannabis. They're not Al Capone or dangerous criminals, just poor people that
don't have better opportunities.

From our leaders perspective, this may be one reason not to address the
problem of legalization (that, plus the fact that it's still largely
unpopular).

~~~
sanoli
Well, here in Brazil they _are_ dangerous criminals and very, very violent,
and no, they won't turn into upstanding citizens if the money from drugs dries
up. They'll turn into other forms of cime, probably just as violent. However,
in the long term they won't be making as much money as now, so they won't have
the crazy arsenal they have today (military grade stuff, like rocket
launchers, grenades, etc). I find it ridiculous that we keep it illegal, which
drives the price way up, which fuels the gangs pockets, so they become
_heavily_ armed, and in turn so does the police, and the result is that not a
week goes by in some cities where an innocent isn't hit by a stray bullet. In
the end, I'd rather have someone die of an overdose because they chose to and
ended up (unfortunately) in that situation than to have the whole city hostage
to this unwinnable war, and to have people die just because they happen to
live in a bad neighborhood.

~~~
drhodes
Maybe they won't turn to other forms of crime. Maybe they'll get into the
newly minted legal recreational drug industry.

------
tempodox
Logically, if you stop criminalising people then you get less “criminals”.
Makes me wonder how much more senseless laws should be abolished for the
greater common good...

------
fr0ggerrr
I'm glad Marijuana overdoses decreased.

------
spacemanmatt
This is my surprised face.

------
Zikes
Apparently locking kids up for their own good didn't do much good after all.

~~~
mindslight
"doesn't" \- There's plenty of helpful/entrepreneurial kids still going to
jail, and plenty of other drugs that are still harshly criminalized.

------
zenciadam
Dropout rates fell, but presenting the data as a percentage change of a
percentage is a bad way of reporting the data since the number of students in
the system may have changed because of demographics.

~~~
adventured
14.7% to 11.4% is a pretty solid change in two years, and it was progressive
(13.1% inbetween). I wouldn't expect demographics to impact much in two years.

The improved / stabilized economy may have had a big impact however.

~~~
neoeldex
But it is really overselling the picture. This article is misleading.

Numbers, numbers, numbers and numbers... are hard.

