 | NORML News: The Alchemy of Prohibition - a critique of the NZ Drug Harm Index |
 Current drug laws achieve what the alchemists from the Middle Ages couldn’t manage: turning low cost plant material into something much more valuable, writes Brandon Hutchison.
Early December last year, the NZ Police announced that they had saved the country an estimated $336 million in “socio-economic harm” as a result of their anti-cannabis campaign for the previous year when they had seized, among other things, 128,000 cannabis plants. Detective Sergeant McGill said that this money saved the taxpayer from “drug-related expenses” that would have been spent on drug related crime and health expenses (ref: Stuff website). These figures were calculated using the NZ Drug Harm Index (DHI).
In early May, NZ Customs announced the seizure of 40Kgs of Cold-Flu pills containing pseudoephedrine hidden in bags of soap powder. They asserted that this seizure had saved the community between $3 and $4.5 million “worth of harm”, again calculated using the DHI.
Despite criticisms at its inception that the DHI contained several fundamental flaws, it seems that police and customs are determined to refer to it as often as possible to justify their drug seizures. Unfortunately it is not a case of the DHI being better than nothing. A simple examination shows it to be worse than useless.
What is the Drug Harm Index?
The DHI report was published by the economic research organisation BERL in 2008 as a tool for Police for evaluating their drug prohibition activities. It places a dollar value per kilogram on the purported harm that various illicit drugs cause if they are not intercepted before reaching users (see below). It then multiplies these by the kilograms seized over the years as a measure of the harm supposedly prevented by law enforcement activity. This latter figure is labelled the NZ Drug Harm Index. It increases with increasing Law enforcement activity.
‘Harm’ per kilogram and per user
$ drug harm: Per kg / Per user
Cannabis: $11,790 / $ 1,694
Opioids: $1,074,130 / $22,186
Stimulants: $403,470 / $2671
LSD: $1,054,900,000 / $265
Source: Table 2 from NZ Drug Harm Index. Notes: 1. As a billion dollars of pure “harm”, a kilogram of LSD would be something to see! 2. From this table, cannabis users may like to consider negotiating with the authorities to pay a $1694 tax as their share of the harm they allegedly cause, in return for being left alone by Police?
How the harms are derived
The report adds up:
* An assumed 25% of street value for cannabis and 5% for other drugs as the production cost, totalling $518M for years 2005 and 2006. This item contributes the largest part of the total tangible harm (47%)
* Drug law enforcement (police, customs, courts, corrections) and crime costs directly drug-related and drug prohibition related. ( $413M or 38% of tangible harm).
* Losses to the labour force because drug users die or get sick (10%)
* Health costs (the report focuses on HIV, HepC, and depression in drugs users) and traffic accidents (5%)
In addition to these alleged tangible costs, the report adds in $200M of intangibles based on loss of life, or quality of life using the Land Transport value for a statistical life of $3M. In total the report declares there was $1.3billion social costs for the years 2005-6 due to drug use. The terms “social costs” and “harm” seem to be used interchangeably in the report.
Problems with the Drug Harm Index
Although there is potential for numerous challenges to the details, data and reasoning used in this report, two major deficiencies are considered here.
The report expressly states that it won’t consider any benefit from drug use or production. It “assumes that illicit drug consumption is abusive and imposes a social cost. Therefore all resources diverted by illicit drug consumption are regarded as social costs”.
So everything to do with drugs is a cost. While ardent prohibitionists may agree with that premise, it really is just a reflection of the prejudices of the report’s authors and funders.
This premise generates 47% of the tangible costs listed above, when really there is nothing inherently harmful about growing plants, even if some of those plants may be involved in some subsequent harm. In effect it is saying I don’t like what you do therefore it is harmful. This is arbitrary. Society has no intrinsic general right to judge and control what we do with our time and resources and declare our private harmless activities as costs on society, and then to morph those costs into “harms”. An aggravating factor is that this imaginary harm gives rise to circular reasoning from some quarters. “I don’t like that activity. Therefore everything to do with it is a harm, Look how harmful that activity is. I was right to not like it”. Attributing any benefit to drug use and production would cause 47% to vanish from the index. Moreover, intangible benefits of drug use could be included if there was a suitable way of valuing them, thus further reducing net harm. Using the logic of the DHI, any activity, for example playing rugby or going to church, could be considered to generate great harm to society.
The second major defect considered here is the bane of rational drug policy debate. As can be seen from the costs table above, the report includes the costs of enforcing prohibition and the harms that are generated or exacerbated by prohibition, as a cost against drugs rather than a cost of policy.
While this logical fallacy is commonly perpetrated by populist politicians and some lay people, it is astounding to see it appear as a cornerstone of such a well-resourced and supposedly scholarly document as this report ought to be. Remedying this would remove another 40% of the tangible costs and also substantially reduce the intangibles.
Again this leads to circular reasoning. Prohibit something (for whatever reason). Vigorously enforce the prohibition. Blame the enforcement costs on the original prohibited entity. Then use the costs to justify the original prohibition.
As well as enforcement costs, prohibition-generated crime and disease is also listed in the report as costs against drug use. Most crime that is labelled “drug-related” is acquisitional and generated by the massively inflated prices in the illicit market, not by any inherent property of the drug per se. The exception to this is of course, alcohol which generates an epidemic of violence in the home and on the streets and carnage on the roads, and to a much lesser extent stimulant drugs such as methamphetamine which, as the media incessantly tells us, makes a few people very violent. Alcohol however is legal so acquisitional crime associated with it very minor.
The inclusion of the costs of HIV and HepC is similarly problematic as there is good evidence that the spread of these diseases has been exacerbated by the unhealthy environment generated by prohibition (eg, sharing unclean needles).
Similarly, the death rate due to overdoses is considered to increase substantially as a result of prohibition. The UK organisation Transform use a figure of 100%, but others have suggested much higher increases.
None of this is intended to suggest that drugs and their use are without harm but this report wildly exaggerates that harm and mis-attributes the causes of it.
Instead of $1300 million, a tenth or less of that would be a more reasonable cost of drug abuse for the two years considered, noting that most drug use is not abuse, or problematic.
To be fair, the report wasn’t presented as a cost-benefit analysis and we shouldn’t begrudge the Police developing in-house tools for prioritising their limited resources. However, this report goes far beyond that as it is used in a public way to justify police actions, and now also by politicians to justify continuing and extending the policies which cause so much of the harm that the report claims to measure.
Recently the Prime Minister raised the possibility of trying to control methamphetamine by banning some flu medicines from sale in pharmacies. While the current “P” moral panic is a ready made bandwagon for any politician to jump on, before advocating any more extremism they should at least have the chance of behaving in a rational, informed way by having good expert information available. The NZ Drug Harm Index is not. It is a potpourri of confused logic, and large fanciful or almost meaningless numbers, all at the taxpayers’ expense. The Police apparently wasted $125,000 on it.
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