The Drug-Violence Myth

https://casetext.com/posts/the-drug-violence-myth#924

by minapurna • 11 years ago

47 69 11 years ago

beat5• 11 years ago

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.

misiti37802• 11 years ago

im confused - who was outside for 15 minutes ?

Jtsummers• 11 years ago

The officer(s) before entering GP's home. Based on witnessing things like this and other reports, probably waiting for backup or perhaps authorization (legal or not, perhaps just a nod from a higher-up).

dalke• 11 years ago

"The cop on the witness stand"

beat5• 11 years ago

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.

thwaway3142357• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

bittercynic• 11 years ago

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

mbrutsch• 11 years ago

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

qnaal7• 11 years ago

"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

civilian• 11 years ago

Said in 1993. Ouch. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell#Is_Reality_Optio...

verbin217• 11 years ago

Tradition isn't the solution.

djfm• 11 years ago

Also applies very well to an old software project.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

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.

happyscrappy6• 11 years ago

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

nitrogen• 11 years ago

The article quoted national statistics, which would probably include inner cities in those statistics.

Also, the question isn't whether guns imply drugs, but whether drugs imply guns. P(A|B) != P(B|A).

seanp2k2• 11 years ago

I think that the distinction between drug use and black-market drug distribution is important here as well, I.e. If legalizing or decriminalizing certain drugs would lead to less violence.

angdis• 11 years ago

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.

rconti• 11 years ago

I recommend reading the article.

borkabrak2• 11 years ago

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.

anigbrowl2• 11 years ago

I can't help observing that the major vendors of alcohol, tobacco, and coffee - all three of which I hope you'll agree qualify as recreational drugs in terms of psychactivity - somehow manage to stay in business without shooting each others' employees or attacking each others' distribution operations with violence. You could certainly say they engage in a sort of abstract violence through ruthless profit-driven corporate behavior or through selling products that are likely to damage your health to some degree, but they don't get engaged in shootouts the way some illegal drug dealers do.

qnaal7• 11 years ago

perhaps one could alternatively say the violence is black market related

gress• 11 years ago

The police use violence to protect the regular market. One could just as easily say that violence is market related.

trhway2• 11 years ago

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

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

lukifer• 11 years ago

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.

api2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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?

beat5• 11 years ago

Well, the article pointed to three different sources of drug violence - violence from intoxication, violence from getting money for drugs, and violence from selling drugs. They need to be dealt with as separate issues.

Violence from intoxication depends on the drug. Alcohol is probably the worst, followed by amphetamines and cocaine. Nobody wants to break a nose because they're high on pot. So the laws don't line up with violent potential.

Violence from getting money for drugs is because drugs are expensive, and addicts tend to be social outcasts. It's also incidental to property crime in general.

Violence from drug sales is 100% the result of prohibition. During alcohol Prohibition, alcohol business crime was widespread. Today, it's nonexistent. Likewise, there's virtually no violence in the field of loosely handled prescription drugs. If drugs (not just marijuana, but hard drugs like cocaine and heroin) were broadly legalized and readily available in a safe and competitive market, violence from both the drug trade and the cost of drug addiction would disappear.

Which makes one ask, "Why do we do this?", when it makes so little sense. Then one might answer, "Is racism a root cause of the war on drugs?", and a whole bunch of people would howl with indignation.

jayess• 11 years ago

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

bjourne3• 11 years ago

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.

beat5• 11 years ago

Alcohol contributes to far more intoxication-related violence than any other drug. If the violence of intoxication is to be a factor, there's no reason at all to ban marijuana, and every reason to ban alcohol.

bjourne3• 11 years ago

Yes, I believe the link between alcohol and increased levels of violence is very, very obvious and not contested by anyone. The link between drugs and violence is just as obvious.

arbitrage• 11 years ago

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.

devilshaircut2• 11 years ago

Actually I believe it is you who misread the article. To pull a quote from the article:

"Both nicotine and alcohol are strongly linked to violence."

The poster specifically referred to alcohol in his/her post:

"In one case it was someone raging on alcohol and being angry at the world."

bjourne3• 11 years ago

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.

trhway2• 11 years ago

low quality drugs "cut" with some bad stuff because good quality cheap drugs are just not available due to the Prohibition. Or may be it was somebody just mentally ill.

And speaking of connection between violence and soberness - Tsarnaev brothers were model of soberness, and the older was even a real drug fighter - he killed 3 grass smokers/dealers about a year before the bomb attack explicitly because of their drug "sin". Or Roof, or Colorado theater shooter, or McVeigh - all sober... Probably we need to outlaw soberness.

mschuster912• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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

mschuster912• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

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...

---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---

The Drug-Violence Myth

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