An E.R. doctor in the Pacific Northwest who writes a blog called “Movin’ Meat” might seem an unlikely candidate to know the economics of street drugs. But since he treats overdoses, he’s learned a bit.
From Dan Okrent’s recent Q&A about Prohibition: “No factor played a larger role in the repeal of Prohibition than the government’s desperate need for revenue as the country fell into the grip of the Depression.” In short: governments who hate vice suddenly hate it much less when cash flow is slow. And we are seeing that again today.
Infants exposed to this heroin substitute in utero experience vision problems.
We all know that information is valuable, and that more information is generally better than less.
But in the realm of pharmaceutical research (as in others, to be sure), there’s a troubling paradox: while successes are widely publicized, and while the results of clinical trials are usually published, the research from projects that fail before that stage is usually kept hidden.
When athletes are exposed as dopers, we heap scorn and doubt on their accomplishments. What about college students? An estimated 25 percent of them now illegally use concentration- and memory-boosting drugs to help them make the grade. One researcher wonders if academics are willing to subject themselves to the same anti-doping circus now dogging sports.
Last week’s horrific killings at the Ciudad Juarez drug treatment center were front-page news in Texas. The murders are partly the result of what happens in a market when restrictions on supply are imposed in a related market.
If it’s not caffeine or alcohol, it’s Xanax or marijuana or morphine or cocaine or crack. There’s a apparently universal human drive to alter our consciousness, to a greater or lesser degree, whether it’s legal or not. How we go about doing that is the subject of Ryan Grim‘s new book This Is Your Country on Drugs, reviewed here.
In 2001 Portugal, facing one of the most serious drug problems in Europe, decided to decriminalize drug possession, including marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. People caught with small quantities of drugs were no longer sent to prison; they were sent to rehab. Since then, drug use in the country has plummeted, along with the HIV infection rate from addicts sharing dirty needles.
If deliberately practicing your way to success seems like a lot of work, there’s always the prescription drug route. In The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot explores the increasing use of cognitive-enhancement drugs. Tests have indicated that the drugs improve concentration but their effect on abstract thought and creativity is unclear. As one scientist put it, “I’m a little concerned that . . .
| Can sound waves win the war on drugs? The Sound Advice Project, an anti-drug campaign, lets parents record a six-second message of support for their kids, then mails them a 3D plastic representation of the recording’s unique waveform for their kid to wear as a bracelet. It’s a cool commitment device, but also a cool birthday gift to a . . .
Nothing grabs headlines like dire warnings about homicide trends. And there is no criminologist better at garnering headlines than James Alan Fox, whom you might remember from Freakonomics for the ominous reports he produced about juvenile homicide for Attorney General Janet Reno in the 1990’s, even as crime began to plunge. James Alan Fox is baaaack with a new report . . .
I often get emails from blog readers asking me to shed light on some issue that, in the mind of the email writer, is a pressing social or economic issue. Sometimes it is a big issue like immigration or the financial crisis. More often it is something less mainstream, like election fraud or an unusual application of incentives. And then . . .
Doctors at several hospitals in Leipzig, Germany, could not figure out the cause of a recent rash of lead poisoning. Was there an environmental disaster underway? They kept seeking the source and, after several weeks, as they write in the New England Journal of Medicine: … we detected a common pattern: the patients were young, were unemployed or were students, . . .
Michael Shermer, author of Mind of the Market and columnist extraordinaire at Scientific American, delivers an excellent column in this issue on sports doping. Shermer, it turns out, was a competitive cyclist who observed the rise of doping first-hand. He offers a number of suggestions for fighting illegal doping, such as disqualifying all team members from any event if one . . .
Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank is introducing a bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana on the federal level. He says existing laws unfairly target legal users of medical marijuana in states like California. We held a Freakonomics quorum late last year to debate the pros and cons of legalizing the drug, and many of you weighed in. With Frank’s legalization . . .
A story on the Internet noted that New Zealand is banning the so-called party pill, a stimulant that is already illegal in the U.S. The ban goes into effect April 1. Sales after that date are outlawed, and possession will be illegal after October 1. The fines on sellers after April 1 will no doubt cause a decrease in supply, . . .
This blog has regularly featured items on the pharmaceutical industry, including posts here, here, and here. It was this post in particular, highlighting an interview with the CEO of Genentech, that made me want to post a quorum on the subject. So we’ve gathered up some willing and able candidates — Dr. Stuart Apfel, Zola P. Horovitz, Dr. Harlan Krumholz, . . .
How much influence do the primaries really have? Despite the “War on Drugs,” illegal drugs still a multi-billion dollar business. Holiday gifts for data addicts. (HT: Consumerist) Guatemala’s government moves to regulate baby trade.
“[H]ybrid record label and blog” launches with new plan for selling music. (Earlier) A lesson in “Marijuanomics 101”. (HT: Economics International) A classic aptonym. (Earlier) Japanese engineers develop “musical roads”. (HT: BoingBoing)
A couple of years ago, we wrote a column about crack cocaine, which ended with a discussion of the federal sentencing guidelines for crack vs. powder cocaine: This disparity has often been called racist since it disproportionately imprisons blacks. In fact, the law probably made sense at the time, when a gram of crack did have far more devastating social . . .
I have a favorite thought exercise: look at an issue that’s important, complex, and interesting — something like healthcare, education, or electoral politics — and pretend that you could rebuild the system from scratch, without the convoluted histories and incentives that currently exist. What would the new system look like? How differently would you think about key issues if there . . .
Does file sharing really have no effect on record sales? (Earlier) Four men charged with selling steroids on MySpace. (Earlier) Consultants build a business around “nonverbal cue” coaching. Smaller Volvo marketed to new group of “enlightened consumers”.
What’s the solution to air pollution in China? Becker and Posner speak. (Earlier) Also in China: man dies after three straight days of online gaming. (Earlier) More than a quarter of a billion people to use mobile dating services by 2012. Does smoking marijuana have long-term effects?
Match the drug to the warning label. (Hat tip: BoingBoing) Does Consumer Reports need a lesson in data analysis? (Earlier) Meet Harvard macroeconomist Robert Barro. Hotels grapple with going green.
Levitt discusses poverty and wage issues raised in writer-turned-New York cop Edward Conlon’s book, “Blue Blood.”
We recently solicited your questions about street gangs for Sudhir Venkatesh, the then-grad student we wrote about in Freakonomics who is now a professor of sociology at Columbia. His answers are, IMHO, fascinating. Your questions were really good, too; thanks. Venkatesh will publish a book, Gang Leader for a Day, in early 2008. Q: Do you think the HBO series . . .
August 2 marks the 70th anniversary of the passage of the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937, which, while not explicitly banning the drug, did effectively render it illegal by assigning a tax to “[e]very person who imports, manufactures, produces, compounds, sells, deals in, dispenses, prescribes, administers, or gives away marihuana.” While the tax itself ($1 a year) wasn’t bad, . . .
In today’s New York Times, Jennifer Steinhauer writes about California farmers whose irrigation systems are being stripped of their copper wiring, presumably by methamphetamine addicts who sell the metal in the recycling market: Theft of scrap metal, mostly copper, has vexed many areas of American life and industry for the last 18 months, fueled largely by record-level prices for copper . . .
For those seeking a little variety in the name department, the U.K. Times ranks the fifty “craziest celebrity baby names,” including such gems as “Aurelius Cy,” “Fifi Trixibell,” “Moxie CrimeFighter” and “Jermajesty.” Lucky for them, none of the featured celebrity parents live in Malaysia. Reader John Wilson alerted us to his blog, WhereIsJohnWilson, which documents his quest to have his . . .