K2 BAN WON'T DETER USE, BUT WILL INCREASE COSTS

Early last month, Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice William Ray
Price Jr. called for reforms of our criminal justice system,
including incarcerating fewer nonviolent offenders. Price argued
that such changes would both decrease recidivism and save the state
money by decreasing prison budgets, and he was widely applauded by
editorialists across the state for his stance.

However, when a bill to ban K2, a chemical used as a synthetic
substitute for marijuana, received its first public hearing little
more than a week later, newspapers were equally eager to support the
restriction. It should not be necessary to point out that increasing
the number of nonviolent offenses is not obviously compatible with
decreasing the number of nonviolent offenders behind bars.
Furthermore, although enforcing a ban on K2 would require spending
additional tax dollars, it is unlikely to lower the rate of drug use
significantly.

According to Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, federal, state, and
local governments spend more than $44 billion per year in their
attempts to stop people from using certain drugs. It is difficult to
determine exactly how much money is spent on specific drugs, but
given that there were 847,863 arrests for marijuana during 2008 -
half of all drug arrests - it is safe to say that spending on
marijuana enforcement is higher than for any other drug, and far out
of proportion to the dangers of a drug that is relatively innocuous
in comparison to most others.

Still, despite the billions of dollars spent and millions of people
arrested over the years, legal restrictions on marijuana appear to
have had little to no impact on decreasing its use.

Although exact statistics for the period during marijuana's initial
prohibition are impossible to come by, when it was first outlawed in
1937, its use was confined almost exclusively to Mexican immigrants
in the West and only a tiny proportion of the population had ever
smoked it. Marijuana use skyrocketed during the 1960s, when simple
possession still typically triggered jail time across the
country. As use of the drug continued to increase throughout the
1970s, some states began decriminalizing marijuana possession,
indicating that marijuana use tends to influence the law - not the
other way around.

The 2008 Monitoring the Future Survey, published annually by the
National Institute on Drug Abuse, concedes that "A study of the
effects of decriminalization by several states during the late 1970s
found no evidence of any impact on the use of marijuana among young
people, nor on attitudes and beliefs concerning its use." The report
does go on to note that some more recent studies find that teens
living in states where marijuana possession is decriminalized are
more likely to smoke marijuana, but this correlation does not
indicate causation. As noted earlier, the idea that higher use rates
drive decriminalization is a better fit for the timeframe, and it
could also be that a third variable - such as wider adoption of more
socially liberal views - help to cause both decriminalization and
higher rates of marijuana use.

As of 2009, 102 million Americans - a third of the population - have
used marijuana, according to estimates from the Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration. Almost all of them did so
after marijuana was made illegal 73 years ago. Clearly, the law does
not stop people from obtaining and using marijuana. Usage rates have
changed dramatically over the years, but those changes are driven far
more by wider social changes and shifting attitudes than by any
law. Only politicians could be so vain as to believe their dictates
are the guiding force in the lives of millions of people.

A ban of K2, or of any similar drug, will not stop people from
becoming intoxicated in some politically incorrect way. In fact,
given that K2 is being sold primarily as a legal substitute for
marijuana, banning it may simply send K2 users back to marijuana use,
an outcome that I do not believe the bill's supporters intend.

However, if people truly enjoy K2, no law passed by a legislature
will ever repeal the law of supply and demand. Market forces will
provide consumers with the goods they want - even illicit ones.
Banning K2 would increase the already stratospheric costs of
enforcing our drug laws, without making an appreciable dent in drug
use. Reasonable people would laugh such proposals out of the
legislature, but when it comes to the war on drugs, we abandoned
reason a long time ago.