How Prohibition Makes Heroin More Dangerous

Jacob Sullum|Feb. 4, 2014 11:21 am

Because someone famous died in Manhattan from an apparent heroin overdose on Sunday, The New York Times has a front-page story today about "a city that is awash in cheap heroin." How cheap? The Times says a bag of heroin, which typically contains about 100 milligrams, "can sell for as little as $6 on the street." Yet it also reports that the Drug Enforcement Administration's New York office last year "seized 144 kilograms of heroin...valued at roughly $43 million." Do the math ($43 million divided by 144,000 grams), and that comes out to about $300 per gram, or $30 for a 100-milligram bag—six times the retail price mentioned higher in the same story. So how did the DEA come up with that $43 million estimate? Apparently by assuming that all of the heroin it seized would have ended up in New England, where a "$6 bag in the city could fetch as much as $30 or $40."

In addition to illustrating the creative calculations behind drug warriors' "street value" estimates, the story shows how prohibition magnifies drug hazards by creating a black market where quality and purity are unpredictable:

Recently, 22 people died in and around Pittsburgh after overdosing from a batch of heroin mixed with fentanyl, a powerful opiate usually found in patches given to cancer patients. Heroin containing fentanyl, which gives a more intense but potentially more dangerous high, has begun to appear in New York City, said Kati Cornell, a spokeswoman for Bridget G. Brennan, the special narcotics prosecutor for the city. An undercover officer bought fentanyl-laced heroin on Jan. 14 from a dealer in the Bronx, she said. The dealer did not warn of the mixture, which is not apparent to the user; subsequent testing revealed it. (The patches themselves had turned up in drug seizures in the city before, she said.) 

Ultimately, users have no way to be sure what they're buying. "There's no F.D.A. approval; it's made however they decide to make it that day," Ms. Brennan said.

According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, fentanyl is "roughly 50-80 times more potent than morphine," so it's the sort of ingredient you'd want to know about before snorting or injecting that white powder you just bought. This kind of thing—passing one drug off as another, delivering something much more (or less) potent than the customer expects—almost never happens in a legal market. When was the last time you bought a bottle of 80-proof whiskey that turned out to be 160 proof? The main reason liquor buyers do not have to worry about such a switcheroo is not that distillers are regulated, or even that their customers, unlike consumers in a black market, have legal recourse in case of fraud. The main reason is that legitimate businesses need to worry about their reputations if they want to keep customers coming back. It is hard to build and maintain a reputation in a black market, where brands do not mean much:

The same shipment of heroin may be packaged under several different labels, she said. "At the big mills, we'll seize 20 stamps. It's all the same."...
The Police Department on Monday said detectives were working to track down the origin of the substances Mr. Hoffman used, though a police official conceded it could be difficult to determine. "Just because it's a name brand doesn't mean that anyone has an exclusive on that name," the official said. "Ace of Spades; I would venture to say that someone else has used that name."

The takeaway: After a century of attempts to stamp out the heroin trade, the drug is cheap, plentiful, and much more dangerous than it would otherwise be.

Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a nationally syndicated columnist.

Finally, a Confession ABout Global Warming and the Turn it Has Been Taking for a While Now.

Will Sidelining Science Help Advance the Climate Debate?

By Keith Kloor | February 4, 2014 3:17 pm

From the Department of Counterintuitive Thinking:

"The debate about climate change needs to become more political, and less scientific."

That is from climate researcher Mike Hulme, in a provocative essay at The Conversation. The above quote makes more sense when you read the sentence that follows:

"Articulating radically different policy options in response to the risks posed by climate change is a good way of reinvigorating democratic politics."

I’m all for this, but you can only have a robust debate about potential solutions if enough people feel strongly that there is a globally significant threat worth discussing and acting on. But the nature of the climate problem–its complexity and timescale–make it hard for us to wrap our minds around. For a recent explanation on why that is, read this piece by Bryan Walsh in Time, headlined:

Why we don’t care about saving our grandchildren from climate change

The biggest stumbling block, as Walsh notes, is that “climate policy asks the present to sacrifice for the future.” Even western Europe, which has perhaps the most climate-concerned citizenry, is now less inclined to do this.

So context is everything in the climate debate. Hulme argues that we should proceed from this framework:

What matters is not whether the climate is changing (it is); nor whether human actions are to blame (they are, at the very least partly and, quite likely, largely); nor whether future climate change brings additional risks to human or non-human interests (it does)…in the end, the only question that matters is, what are we going to do about it?

No, what matters equally is just how much we feel threatened (right now) by the risks of climate change. This is what David Ropeik gets into when he talks about our “risk perception gap.” (See here and here.) Several years ago, Andy Revkin helpfully summarized a body of behavioral research:

a large part of the climate challenge is not out in the world of eroding glaciers and limited energy choices, but inside the human mind.
There’s the “finite pool of worry” (Did we pay the rent this month?). There’s “single action bias” (I changed bulbs; all set.) There are powerful internal filters (dare I say blinders?) that shape how different people see the same body of information.
And of course there’s the hard reality that the risks posed by an unabated rise in greenhouse-gas emissions are still mainly somewhere and someday while our attention, as individuals and communities, is mostly on the here and now.

I agree with Hulme when he says that debates about climate change “will not be settled by scientific facts,” but rather will turn on “debates about values and about the forms of political organisation and representation that people believe are desirable.”

This is why I’ve said numerous times that the symbolic importance of the Keystone pipeline is under-appreciated by many commentators. In of itself this one pipeline isn’t going to affect the trajectory of climate change, but climate activists have effectively used it as a means to build a larger movement that is very much values-oriented, as in: Should we continue supporting an energy infrastructure that reinforces societal dependence on fossil fuels ?

That is an important question to take up in the context of climate change. And it’s likely more productive to engage it from a values–rather than a risk–perspective.

CATEGORIZED UNDER: climate change, climate policy, climate politics, climate science, global warming

 

MORE ABOUT: climate change, climate policy, global warming, Keystone pipeline

A Beautiful Map of Global Ocean Currents

A fitting addition to his interactive global windmap, Cameron Beccario's interactive map of Earth's ocean currents takes near-realtime data-mapping to the seas – and the results are mesmerizing.

If the previous incarnation of Beccario's weather-modeling applet bore a passing similarity to NASA's spellbinding Perpetual Ocean video, this newest version resembles it even more. As with the Agency's visualization, Beccario's earth portrays the surface currents that flow and twist their way across Earth's surface. The key difference between earth and Perpetual Ocean, however, is that the latter depicts currents between June 2005 and December 2007, whereas the former depicts them in near real-time. As with similar weather-maps, earth relies on data compiled by NOAA's Global Forecast System to update its global wind patterns every three hours, and OSCAR Earth & Space Research to update its ocean surface current patterns every five days.

The ability to select from eight different map projections when visualizing the data adds an extra layer to the experience. Go try it out for yourself!

Why Bill Nye the Science Guy is trying to reason with America's creationists

Tonight's debate between Nye and the head of the Creation Museum is yet another effort to ensure US children learn science

 

theguardian.com, Tuesday 4 February 2014 10.45 EST

 

Bill Nye, aka the 'Science Guy', will debate Ken Ham, head of the Creation Museum, on 4 February 2014. Photograph: Guardian

Tonight Bill Nye the Science Guy will debate Ken Ham, president of the Creation Museum. Ham believes the earth was created 6,000 years ago and fossils were formed in Noah's flood. Nye accepts the mountains of evidence which support the theory of evolution, the best explanation scientists have for the diversity of life on the planet. It's a debate between reality and someone who is completely detached from reality.

Nye has been criticized for agreeing to this debate. What Nye is doing gives creationists "the oxygen of respectability in the world of real science", according to Richard Dawkins. Ham is relishing the opportunity to misinform the public and pretend that real scientists take his work seriously.
In science, debates aren't what decide which explanations best describe natural phenomena. Instead, scientists set up controlled experiments and test and retest hypotheses. As we've continued to conduct experiments about evolution, the evidence has mounted to unquestionable levels. Creationism doesn't meet basic standards in the "world of real science" and a debate will give it false legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

Unfortunately, with or without the Nye debate, much of the American population already sees creationism as a scientifically valid alternative to evolution. There isn't a single legitimate research lab in the country studying biblical creation or Noah's flood, but creationism is still influencing public policy and is still being taught in public school science classes.

According to Gallup, nearly half of the country rejects evolution. Forty-Six percent of Americans believe humans were created in their present form, by God, in the last 10,000 years. Over the past 30 years, belief in creationism has remained relatively stable, despite creationism's repeated court losses.

That's why Nye agreed to this debate, he wants to raise awareness that "this belief [in creationism] is still among us" and it is a political issue that cannot be ignored. Creationism still "finds its way onto school boards in the United States".

This debate isn't about the world of real science. In the scientific community, the support for the theory of evolution is unquestionable. Instead, this is about alerting the whole population that creationism is still an issue and that teaching it to students is a moral wrong.

In September, I heard Nye speak and he explained that he had spoken out because he had a moral responsibility to oppose the teaching of creationism. He's said creationism is "completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe" and miseducating a generation of students by teaching creationism will harm our country because "we need scientifically literate voters and tax payers for the future".

Nye is doing his part by raising awareness of the issue, but as citizens, we all have a moral responsibility to speak out and make sure the next generation of students is scientifically literate. We can do that by fighting back against policy that would allow creationism into public school science classes.

My home state of Louisiana has a creationism law, the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act. This law allows creationism to be snuck into public school science classrooms through a loophole: teachers can bring in unregulated supplemental materials to "critique" evolution and, according to state Senator Ben Nevers, who sponsored the law, it was meant to allow the "scientific data related to creationism should be discussed when dealing with Darwin's theory".
This legislation that allows "critiques" to be snuck into public school classes is the modern day strategy of creationists. Federal courts, including the Supreme Court in Edwards v Aguillard, and Judge John Jones III in Kitzmiller v Dover, have invalidated the teaching of creationism or if its offshoot, intelligent design creationism in public schools. Creationists are now resorting to stealth and this type of stealth legislation is what we must fight against today.

Tennessee has a law based off Louisiana's that allows creationism to be snuck into the classroom, and each year we see dozens of copycat bills introduced across the country to attack the teaching of evolution. Already in 2014, there have been five bills that promote creationism or attack evolution in four different states (Virginia, Oklahoma, Missouri, and South Dakota). Some bills aren't even as clever as Louisiana's; In South Dakota, 13 legislators signed onto a flagrantly unconstitutional bill to "prohibit schools from preventing the instruction of intelligent design".

Texas also has problems with creationism. The largest charter program in the state, Responsive Education Solutions, is teaching creationism. They describe evolution as "dogma", call the fossil record "sketchy", and explain that supernatural creation is an equally valid explanation of life on earth and a competing theory among scientists. Facing challenges by watchdog organizations, the CEO of Responsive Education Solutions, Chuck Cook, explained that he wasn't violating any laws, because Texas science standards call for teaching "all sides" of evolution. The Texas Education Agency appears to agree with him, although it is "voluntarily" doing a review now.

In schools across America, creationism remains a problem. According to a report in Science magazine (pdf), 13% of public school biology teachers are teaching creationism instead of evolution and another 60% are avoiding endorsing either.

This harms our students and our country. We need our kids educated about evolution and the scientific method, so that they can be scientifically literate citizens and make the discoveries that will fuel our economy in the years to come. That's why I'm with Bill Nye. Let's raise awareness that there is a real issue with teaching creationism in American schools. Let's fight back.