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Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Why James Comey’s heroin strategy could just make the problem worse

Speaking in Virginia this week, FBI Director James B. Comey pointed to a classic anti-drug strategy to fight the current heroin epidemic: “Our job is to try to crack down on the supply, literally, to be very blunt, to drive up the price to make it less and less attractive for people who are addicted to pills to move to heroin,” he said alongside DEA Administrator Chuck Rosenberg.

This “supply-side” approach has been in place at the federal level since the dawn of the drug war: The federal drug budget has traditionally emphasized approaches like destroying plants,intercepting drug shipments and arresting the people who sell drugs. The logic is straightforward: You reduce the supply of drugs, those drugs become more expensive, and the higher prices drive down demand and use of the drugs. Economics 101, right?

In the real world, it hasn't quite worked out that way. Here, for instance, is data on federal spending on supply-side drug control going back to 1981. The numbers are adjusted for inflation to 2012 dollars.

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6 comments:

  1. thats going to increase violent crime. addicts will go to any length for a fix.

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  2. For starters, heroine dealers should be charged with attempted murder.

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  3. Anything Comey touches is tainted. He needs to be repealed & replaced! System failure in that bot. 🤖🤖🤖

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  4. This strategy hasn't worked yet, and it's been in place for fifty or more years, so why would it now?

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  5. 9:10 You would then have a bunch of users in jail. Time to stop the flow of heroin into this country...that is were the focus should be not worrying about low level users and dealers. Waste of time.

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  6. Just let the drug users die. It is called "Natural Selection", the good people stay alive and drug free, the dirt bags, and bums die.

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