Hard News: Spectacular but useless
109 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 2 3 4 5 Newer→ Last
-
PROHIBITION DOESN'T WORK
The White House had the National Research Council [www.nationalacademies.org/nrc/] examine the data being gathered about drug use and the effects of U.S. drug policies. NRC concluded, "__the nation possesses little information about the effectiveness of current drug policy, especially of drug law enforcement.__" And what data exist show "little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for drug use and prevalence or frequency of use." In other words, there is no proof that prohibition "the cornerstone of U.S. drug policy for a century" reduces drug use. = National Research Council. Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us. National Academy Press, 2001. p. 193.
"There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana." = Milton Friedman (an economist of note that BERL might recall)
In the "The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition," a report recently done by Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron, on the causes of drug crime, Miron said his research "very much suggests that it is prohibition. It's not drug-consumption-related, it's fighting-over-disputes-in-the-illegal-drug-trade-related. And that's a result of prohibition, not a result of the drug."
Hubert Williams, President, Police Foundation; former Chief of Police, Newark, New Jersey said "Miron persuasively demonstrates, the net effects of prohibition, both past and present, are to increase violence, enrich criminals, threaten civil liberties, and make drug users more ill. The right question for policy makers, he concludes, is not whether drugs are misused but whether the benefits of prohibition outweigh its exorbitant costs. All in all, this is a solidly researched and dispassionate discussion of a topic that is too often couched in moral and emotional terms.”
Aside from the NZ Police's questionable use of the DRUG HARM INDEX to self interestedly perpetuate an unaccounted policy, demanding as it were 'more resources' without any accounting for 'deliverable outcomes' is entirely contestable in managerial let alone economic terms. The Drug Squad is in effect 'deficit funded' without as much a skerit of evidence that the resources AND priorities are allocated with ANY efficiency.
This is POOR management.
This was roundly critiqued by visiting top cop and former head of Scotland Yard Narcotics/London Metro, Chief Super Det. Eddie Ellison to the Ministry of Justice in 2004. (Eddie was also a founding member of TRANSFORM, now with UN consultative standing )"It wouldn't pass muster at Police College in let alone the Home Office. There is no room in modern policing for unaccountable deployment blindly following political directives" -(private conversation with the writer)
Eddie presented to 17 MoJ Officials alongside Snr Detective Jack Cole, both of whom were executive directors of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition [www.leap.cc] also recently accredited by the UN.
Eddie also conveyed this to Gregg O'Conner of the Police Association.
Some months later the MoJ couldnt find a single person who attended the board meetingroom presentation, declaring again in a recorded telephone conversation to the writer "we have a very high staff turnover'
The BERL DRUG HARMS report and the subsequent Police Intelligence claims that cananbis is the problem, bring the POLICE once again into disrepute.
There is no accounting the POLICE and JUSTICE stupidity of continuing to bang ones head against the wall and hoping it will soon stop hurting....
-
prohibition doesn't work.
i wonder how difficult it is for mr anderton to understand this simple statement of fact, which can be backed up with much more convincing data and arguments than the bogus "harm index".
despite prohibition and the exorbidant financial and social costs caused by prohibition (not the drug use, which cause significantly less costs), prohibition is all we get. decade in, decade out. dumpty-doo. it's not working mr anderton. it's still not working...
people still use drugs that have been arbitrarity made illegal.
organized crime continues to profit from prohibition.
if all the resources spent on the police and courts was directed into education and health, the country would be much better off, imho. -
No, the Herald story today is based on selected parts (ie: the parts the police wanted to give them) of a report that isn't published.
Yes, very sorry about that time-wasting comment.
Would the Herald play that sort of game with any other government agency?
Could the answer be . . . other government agencies don't have quite the same impact on the sale of newspapers?
-
BERLs report and it's misuse are all just so silly,silly silly. the report content should be lauded by legalisers.... for mj anyhow. Police are to be applauded with mirth for taking something which denies harm (other than costs imposed by prohibition) and holding it up as a damning indictment. Now that is pure audacity.
Perhaps most amusing is how drug legalisers are missing their opportunity to put this report to their own use... for its contents serve their purposes well, and perhaps were intended to given the looming review of the Misuse of drugs Act. As regards pot at least... not so well would it suit legalisers of P.
Still they would use the report contents to intended advantage (eg contrasting alleged pot harm with alcohol harm taken from other sources) at their peril - given the methodology is so incompetent in the round.
1. It does not weight pros against cons as frequently noted here
2. It is based on very poor research regarding cons; as most of the budget for research in NZ has gone in to tobacco and alcohol leaving drug harms pretty unexplored locally. Except party pills tee hee, and dihydrogen monoxide.I would say that is why the name of the index was not changed as agreed to "illicit drug harm index" as then the question may have beeen askedof how many workdays are missed due to party pill hangovers.
Or of how many P users are weaning off on party pills - I know a couple which broke their P addiction (quite serious) by using party pills to address their lackadaisical state of mind while their brains recovered from P. Great - it worrked. But now pweerhaps they and their toddlers are condemned to relapse.
It is a fact that a prominent pot legaliser of high academic standing helped to create the parent model of the NZ drug harm index. This ensured cannabis got favorable treatment - a handicap so to speak. This is also why the major harms from pot were not included. Why the report says no primary health costs are attributed to cannabis eg self harm like transient psychosis induced self injury
eg car crash injuries (existence denied based on a debunked 1996 study (by Robinson & Sullivan I believe) from which assumptions of the parent model were taken.This BERL report is based on a report methodology used by Oz Police =- one criticised by renowned economists as outdated even before NZ Police decided to copy and recycle the model. It is flawed on many fronts so I wish the Drug Foundy all luck in getting a review done. The only problem is that the report is so full of bull it could take years and drive their appointed reviewers insane - or make them puke at the smell of politically tainted BS.
Many agendas have conspired to form the final report. Most ironically the agendas of prominent drug liberalisers (report framework modellers)working for Oz Police have combined with pro drug policing agendas of Police, and with agendas of politicians trying to present a contradictory, flawed and essentially corrupted report (on many fronts) as "damning".
The only thing that is damned is the report unless you have only a primary school science education. This is not a report that will sit week with anyone, from rampant prohibitionists to the most liberal of legalisers. It is just pure bad social science - the kind of thing laying soft sciences openm to ridicule since any quest for some semblence of "truth" has obviously been hijacked.
I have never supported bookburning but for this I would make an exception. It is not salvageable, and needs to be redone from the start by people confirmed as having no strong leanings one way or another re preferred drug policies.
Oz Police should never have employed Dr Alison Ritter who created this monster. Where were their investigative skills that day? Now they have just landed NZ Police in the same poo they'd be sitting in - if only they were dumb enough to also publicly release their cousin index. But they aren't. The Victorian one is officially secret. For Cops eyes only. Thank God for that.
-
Beulah, you're wrong.
Alison Ritter did not create the AFP Drug Harm Index. That was McFadden and Mwesigye.
She is associated with the Drug Policy Modelling Program at the University of New South Wales -- which is the Index we should have had.
But thanks for leading me to this fascinating paper comparing drug index theories, presented by Ritter in April. It is most enlightening.
-
If this story and brian eastons estimate on the true harm of alcohol are anywhere near accurate then we can really begin appreciate what a snow job the nz police and jim anderton are pulling .............
"The current focus on problems caused by alcohol in New Zealand occurs in a context which most New Zealanders are unaware of. Over 1,000 people in New Zealand die directly from alcohol related causes each year – because of car accidents, drownings, liver cirrhosis and approximately 60 other health problems caused by drinking. This statistic does not even begin to reflect the reduced quality of life which thousands of others experience because of excessive drinking.
Economist, Brian Easton says the cost of damage caused by alcohol in New Zealand is $16 billion a year rather than the $4 billion cited by ALAC and frequently misquoted by other sources. He even says New Zealand’s population would be 30,000 higher than it is if it weren’t for premature deaths caused by drinking.
International mortality figures are equally disturbing. In the United States, government estimates say alcohol is responsible for 100,000 deaths a year. In the European Union, alcohol is estimated to kill 200,000 people a year - that’s 540 people a day.
Alcohol related death occurs in virtually every country in the world, a situation which in many respects resembles a pandemic. Pandemics are classified by the World Health Organisation on a scale of severity from 1 to 5 – where a category 1 kills less than 0.1 of those who contract the condition and a category 5 kills at least 2%.
Using the 785,000 New Zealanders who binge drink regularly as ‘those with the condition’, the annual death rate from alcohol consumption in New Zealand makes it a category 1 pandemic.
The worst pandemic in New Zealand history was the influenza epidemic of 1918 which killed an estimated 8,200 Kiwis. That was nearly 100 years ago. Excessive alcohol consumption is akin to a category 1 pandemic that hits us every year - not once every hundred years.
ENDS
Roger Brooking is the Clinical Manager at ADAC Ltd that specialises in Alcohol & Drug Assessments & Counselling." -
Ali provided the recommended research list for the AFP framework or so she told me! The framework is a skeleton that Economists without specialty knowledge re each report section eg "drug related hospitalisations" can use as an issue map, directing them to more or less fruitful avenues eg harm here or not here - so they can then flesh the skeleton out with local findings.
So to simplify she was responsible for a sort of recommended reference guide for each section. The references had a bias introduced - if you are willing to spend a few hours on this the bias of what was included or excluded as authorfitative references clearly aligns with the philosophy of the "mastermind". The word cherrypicking springs to mind.
Adrian Slack admits to no specialty knowledge and to using the "recommended research" as a guide to where to dig and where to look away.
I have spoken to world leading economists who say from their point of view the crux problem with the report is iots broad range of inquiry and the high dependence of writers therefore on secondary specialist knowledge - in multiple fields they have no personal expertise that would enable critical thinking or discernment.
Ritter abnegates responsibility for what use others may put her work to, but says that if others have differing views they ought martial their evidence in response. NDARC is but one of many playgrounds for that one.
Resorting to data from Health Information Service is also problematic as it is often low grade eg overdoses are poorly reported and recorded. Adverse drug effects are not legally required to be reported in NZ etc etc on and on.
Police say the tool must be viewed in awareness it is a very blunt tool painting a broad canvas - it can not be taken as an accurate detailed picture at all. Ritter and others say the woirk is only foundatioinal and should not be seen as a final statement at all. These indexes are made to be improved, added to, beefed out +++.
The fear in the scientific community is they will be attacked so hard they never get to mature into more accurate useful things such as drink harm indexes have become (in a way) by slow development and refinement over years as knowledge grew.
This argument in defence I accept - but still query the sanity of releasing on the unsuspecting public something so half baked.
-
Perhaps most amusing is how drug legalisers are missing their opportunity to put this report to their own use... for its contents serve their purposes well, and perhaps were intended to given the looming review of the Misuse of drugs Act. As regards pot at least... not so well would it suit legalisers of P.
Still they would use the report contents to intended advantage (eg contrasting alleged pot harm with alcohol harm taken from other sources) at their peril - given the methodology is so incompetent in the round.Amusing ? I think most so-called 'drug legalisers' are tying themselves up in knots merely trying to promote a rational factual evidence-based debate (never mind what comes next). The scientific community don't seem to be of any assistance, and its clearly no use waiting for mainstream media or the politicians and police.
Alison Ritter said "The method applied for the Australian Index has been to decide on the purpose, identify all the outcomes, and quantify them through the application of a social cost" and I wonder who decided on what purpose here.
The purse-strings can be poisonous for the scientific community too, its no different here
Survey: People With Higher Incomes More Likely to Use Legal and Illegal Drugs; Marijuana Use Widely Reported in U.S. June 30, 2008 UN/WHO -
The purpose is Polices, the outcomes selected for inclusion (and their method of analyses) by Police and biased scientists are up for much criticism, the applicability for deriving social costs is therefore a long way off. These frameworks are not ripe enough to yet take the theory into practise (allocation of resources). Berl seem well aware of this limitation given they have qualified the report with -
"All work is done, and services rendered at the request of, and for the purposes of the client only. Neither BERL nor any of its employees accepts any responsibility on any grounds whatsoever, including negligence, to any other person. While every effort is made by BERL to ensure that the information, opinions and forecasts provided to the client are accurate and reliable, BERL shall not be liable for any adverse consequences of the client’s decisions made in reliance of any report provided by BERL, nor shall BERL be held to have given or implied any warranty as to whether any report provided by BERL will assist in the performance of the client’s functions."
Post your response…
This topic is closed.