But do note that it was a group of scientists that figured this out - led by one of the more prominent researchers in this area. Science tends to be quite self-correcting - although it sometimes takes a number of years to figure out what went wrong.
No no no, didn't you get the memo? The 1 in a million instances of fraud in the scientific community means we have to throw out anything Science™ has ever done and never trust it again.
Except if the fraud is something we like, like Vaccines cause Autism. In that case, the fraud is what is correct.
+1
And scientists rooted out that one as well.
But some people just have to have their conspiracy theories...
But do note that it was a group of scientists that figured this out - led by one of the more prominent researchers in this area. Science tends to be quite self-correcting - although it sometimes takes a number of years to figure out what went wrong.
No no no, didn't you get the memo? The 1 in a million instances of fraud in the scientific community means we have to throw out anything Science™ has ever done and never trust it again.
Except if the fraud is something we like, like Vaccines cause Autism. In that case, the fraud is what is correct.
+1
And scientists rooted out that one as well.
But some people just have to have their conspiracy theories...
Boy ole' boy, you guys should get a room. Good thing you are not solving a crime....you'd miss a ton.
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by? Strange how that step in the process was overlooked by a trolling poster and a science teacher.
A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself.
~Livy
youthathletics wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 1:50 pm
Boy ole' boy, you guys should get a room. Good thing you are not solving a crime....you'd miss a ton.
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by? Strange how that step in the process was overlooked by a trolling poster and a science teacher.
It wasn't overlooked, it's just super rare that it happens so it's not worth worrying about in everyday life. There's just not much fraud to "root out". Most of it is caught, but we're human so stuff slips through once in a blue moon. Certainly not worth questioning all of "Science" because of it.
You have a small chance of getting in a car crash every time you go somewhere. Do you just sit at home and never go out, or do you trust that you're probably gonna get there safely?
youthathletics wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 1:50 pm
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by?
Is this a serious question, OS?
Do you REALLY not know the answer?
Lemma check in with Fauci first. I am honored you called me OS.
Whoops. YA. You gents need shorter names!
You don't have to check with Fauci. Check with your doctor, my man. Same as it's ever been. No scapegoating. No stupid politics. No "some guy on the internet sez so".
Just you and your doctor. Just like it is for every other health care event in your life.
My question to you is: now that you know a single study was corrupt, does this mean you're going to stop going to your doctor when you have serious health issues?
The answer is an obvious no. Which is why I asked if you were serious.
youthathletics wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 1:50 pm
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by?
Is this a serious question, OS?
Do you REALLY not know the answer?
Lemma check in with Fauci first. I am honored you called me OS.
Whoops. YA. You gents need shorter names!
You don't have to check with Fauci. Check with your doctor, my man. Same as it's ever been. No scapegoating. No stupid politics. No "some guy on the internet sez so".
Just you and your doctor. Just like it is for every other health care event in your life.
My question to you is: now that you know a single study was corrupt, does this mean you're going to stop going to your doctor when you have serious health issues?
The answer is an obvious no. Which is why I asked if you were serious.
Oh...you mean like the flawed USDA food pyramid that was put together by all those dr's....the one that caused so many health issues, and likely contributed to obesity and higher BMI's.
Let's put it in real world terms and we all have some experience with this, I deal with it all the time, as I am in the tech field, & a beta tester for our factory.
A new firmware comes out for a widget that makes is crucial to your success in business, it runs through engineering, test labs, code checks, beta testers, applied testing in the field. You call tech support they tell you to load the new firmware....bam, it fixed one problem and then created a whole new problem. The point and what i tell all my crew, never install new software/firmware until is at least 6 months old or just always stay 2 version behind.
My point, just b/c someone smarter than us says you must do it, does not make it the right thing to do. Sure, take what your dr. says under advisement. But guess what he/she is going to do....send you to a specialists for more tests, and guess what that specialist is likely gonna say, b/c they are the specialist....you need the procedure that I offer. When in fact, you may not really need it, if you try other options, like natural methods, PT, herbal therapy, yoga, etc.
A fraudulent intent, however carefully concealed at the outset, will generally, in the end, betray itself.
~Livy
youthathletics wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 3:11 pm
Oh...you mean like the flawed USDA food pyramid that was put together by all those dr's....the one that caused so many health issues, and likely contributed to obesity and higher BMI's.
No. I mean like your personal doctor. No politics. No business interests like the ones pulling at the USDA, my man. Well, other than profit, which is the system your party prefers, so.......
And remember what happened to poor Michelle Obama when she tried to correct the USDA "pizza is a vegetable" nonsense, and had the gall to try and get real, healthy foods into US schools? Your party destroyed her.
youthathletics wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 3:11 pm
My point, just b/c someone smarter than us says you must do it, does not make it the right thing to do. Sure, take what your dr. says under advisement. But guess what he/she is going to do....send you to a specialists for more tests, and guess what that specialist is likely gonna say, b/c they are the specialist....you need the procedure that I offer. When in fact, you may not really need it, if you try other options, like natural methods, PT, herbal therapy, yoga, etc.
Sounds to me like you want to move to a non-profit health care system where the goal is health care, not money.
For me, the post-Covid context for this discussion is: either follow the science, or get your science from Joe Rogan. Or 'some guy on the internet'....simply because the current science isn't perfect.
"The US intercept, meanwhile, can be explained quite well by obesity. Obesity is likely to have very large negative effects on all manner of health outcomes. It is actually much more predictive of outcomes in the developed world than health spending. Indeed, the effects of obesity and related western diseases may be such that the apparent slope on health spending turns unambiguously negative in the developed world in the future (cross-sectionally, even if not in time series…).
Income is a double-edged sword. Income growth strongly predicts health spending growth, but income growth also predicts rising obesity, diabetes, prescription opioid use, illicit drugs, and likely several other “western” illnesses. While there probably are some idiosyncratic US factors not explained by current income levels (e.g., deep roots), many of these “American” issues are more widespread and more linked to income than most people appreciate. The equilibrium between the positive side (esp. healthcare) and the negative side (overeating, drugs, etc) is likely to seriously confound extrapolation from prior experience because of the non-linearities and tipping effects involved with these different processes."
Steak dinners, expensive bourbons and cigars topped off with a little yayo and a gentlemen’s club is the (institutional/corporate) financial conference unofficial agenda. Just ask the folks who went out to formerly ABS west now called SF Vegas.
Now I love those cowboys, I love their gold
Love my uncle, God rest his soul
Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know
Taught me so well, that I grabbed that gold
I left his dead ass there by the side of the road, yeah
... given my experience I believe it. Stressful lifestyle is the driver in my opinion. SSRIs help, but have a much broader effect than just controlling depression, leveling out all emotion.
The corridor it sticks you in for some is barely living.
Now I love those cowboys, I love their gold
Love my uncle, God rest his soul
Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know
Taught me so well, that I grabbed that gold
I left his dead ass there by the side of the road, yeah
But do note that it was a group of scientists that figured this out - led by one of the more prominent researchers in this area. Science tends to be quite self-correcting - although it sometimes takes a number of years to figure out what went wrong.
No no no, didn't you get the memo? The 1 in a million instances of fraud in the scientific community means we have to throw out anything Science™ has ever done and never trust it again.
Except if the fraud is something we like, like Vaccines cause Autism. In that case, the fraud is what is correct.
+1
And scientists rooted out that one as well.
But some people just have to have their conspiracy theories...
Boy ole' boy, you guys should get a room. Good thing you are not solving a crime....you'd miss a ton.
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by? Strange how that step in the process was overlooked by a trolling poster and a science teacher.
Same thing every parent should tell their children. Trust but verify. Not district and start from a adversarial position. That’s not at all what the concept of “empirical skepticism” means.
Consider the scientist is always looking to increase and further truth. The people looking to poke holes before the argument is even made is coming from a dishonest position and attempting to create and control a narrative inconsistent with truth. Which side do you want to be on? The ones who are interested in truly identifying the truth through real work, scientific inquiry and fact checking? Or the ones who act like Holden Caulfield crossed with the bad guy in Out of the Furnace (played by Woody Harrelson) who wants their worldview to be true even if it means ruining other people’s lives in the process?
Now I love those cowboys, I love their gold
Love my uncle, God rest his soul
Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know
Taught me so well, that I grabbed that gold
I left his dead ass there by the side of the road, yeah
But do note that it was a group of scientists that figured this out - led by one of the more prominent researchers in this area. Science tends to be quite self-correcting - although it sometimes takes a number of years to figure out what went wrong.
No no no, didn't you get the memo? The 1 in a million instances of fraud in the scientific community means we have to throw out anything Science™ has ever done and never trust it again.
Except if the fraud is something we like, like Vaccines cause Autism. In that case, the fraud is what is correct.
+1
And scientists rooted out that one as well.
But some people just have to have their conspiracy theories...
Boy ole' boy, you guys should get a room. Good thing you are not solving a crime....you'd miss a ton.
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by? Strange how that step in the process was overlooked by a trolling poster and a science teacher.
Same thing every parent should tell their children. Trust but verify. Not district and start from a adversarial position. That’s not at all what the concept of “empirical skepticism” means.
Consider the scientist is always looking to increase and further truth. The people looking to poke holes before the argument is even made is coming from a dishonest position and attempting to create and control a narrative inconsistent with truth. Which side do you want to be on? The ones who are interested in truly identifying the truth through real work, scientific inquiry and fact checking? Or the ones who act like Holden Caulfield crossed with the bad guy in Out of the Furnace (played by Woody Harrelson) who wants their worldview to be true even if it means ruining other people’s lives in the process?
The scientist believes what the have failed to disprove. There is no proof of anything, but just inability to disprove. Openness to new data and further investigation is key. Plenty of "bad science" out there.
Sort of sad the education system fails most Americans, but I guess the finer points of the scientific method join most other subjects in the religious whackery discard-pile...
"There is nothing more difficult and more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes. One makes enemies of those who prospered under the old order, and only lukewarm support from those who would prosper under the new."
But do note that it was a group of scientists that figured this out - led by one of the more prominent researchers in this area. Science tends to be quite self-correcting - although it sometimes takes a number of years to figure out what went wrong.
No no no, didn't you get the memo? The 1 in a million instances of fraud in the scientific community means we have to throw out anything Science™ has ever done and never trust it again.
Except if the fraud is something we like, like Vaccines cause Autism. In that case, the fraud is what is correct.
+1
And scientists rooted out that one as well.
But some people just have to have their conspiracy theories...
Boy ole' boy, you guys should get a room. Good thing you are not solving a crime....you'd miss a ton.
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by? Strange how that step in the process was overlooked by a trolling poster and a science teacher.
Same thing every parent should tell their children. Trust but verify. Not district and start from a adversarial position. That’s not at all what the concept of “empirical skepticism” means.
Consider the scientist is always looking to increase and further truth. The people looking to poke holes before the argument is even made is coming from a dishonest position and attempting to create and control a narrative inconsistent with truth. Which side do you want to be on? The ones who are interested in truly identifying the truth through real work, scientific inquiry and fact checking? Or the ones who act like Holden Caulfield crossed with the bad guy in Out of the Furnace (played by Woody Harrelson) who wants their worldview to be true even if it means ruining other people’s lives in the process?
The scientist believes what the have failed to disprove. There is no proof of anything, but just inability to disprove. Openness to new data and further investigation is key. Plenty of "bad science" out there.
Sort of sad the education system fails most Americans, but I guess the finer points of the scientific method join most other subjects in the religious whackery discard-pile...
Right learning from failure, so to speak is the only definitive proof one can find. I’m sometimes bothered it took me until reading Black Swan in my late 20s to understand that myself but it got through eventually.
Point is what is the effort and intention going in? I do it and everyone can be guilty of too much devils advocate which is a fine mine often crossed into sophomoric thinking. However if the starting point is to find flaw or distrust the results before the experiment then it’s bad faith, dishonest from the jump. The same HIFS true in this tournament here.
Now I love those cowboys, I love their gold
Love my uncle, God rest his soul
Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know
Taught me so well, that I grabbed that gold
I left his dead ass there by the side of the road, yeah
youthathletics wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 1:50 pm
Boy ole' boy, you guys should get a room. Good thing you are not solving a crime....you'd miss a ton.
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by? Strange how that step in the process was overlooked by a trolling poster and a science teacher.
It wasn't overlooked, it's just super rare that it happens so it's not worth worrying about in everyday life. There's just not much fraud to "root out". Most of it is caught, but we're human so stuff slips through once in a blue moon. Certainly not worth questioning all of "Science" because of it.
You have a small chance of getting in a car crash every time you go somewhere. Do you just sit at home and never go out, or do you trust that you're probably gonna get there safely?
youthathletics wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 1:50 pm
Boy ole' boy, you guys should get a room. Good thing you are not solving a crime....you'd miss a ton.
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by? Strange how that step in the process was overlooked by a trolling poster and a science teacher.
It wasn't overlooked, it's just super rare that it happens so it's not worth worrying about in everyday life. There's just not much fraud to "root out". Most of it is caught, but we're human so stuff slips through once in a blue moon. Certainly not worth questioning all of "Science" because of it.
You have a small chance of getting in a car crash every time you go somewhere. Do you just sit at home and never go out, or do you trust that you're probably gonna get there safely?
youthathletics wrote: ↑Fri Jul 29, 2022 1:50 pm
Boy ole' boy, you guys should get a room. Good thing you are not solving a crime....you'd miss a ton.
S0 what happens when we are told to trust the science, but it has not yet been rooted out by? Strange how that step in the process was overlooked by a trolling poster and a science teacher.
It wasn't overlooked, it's just super rare that it happens so it's not worth worrying about in everyday life. There's just not much fraud to "root out". Most of it is caught, but we're human so stuff slips through once in a blue moon. Certainly not worth questioning all of "Science" because of it.
You have a small chance of getting in a car crash every time you go somewhere. Do you just sit at home and never go out, or do you trust that you're probably gonna get there safely?
Faith works better than science.
BALCO had more success than the Cubs…
Now I love those cowboys, I love their gold
Love my uncle, God rest his soul
Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know
Taught me so well, that I grabbed that gold
I left his dead ass there by the side of the road, yeah
Booming cocaine production suggests the war on drugs has failed
Now some politicians in Latin America and Europe are saying so publicly
Oct 13th 2022
Coca is ubiquitous in remote rural parts of Colombia. Farmers plant the hardy, high-altitude bush, harvest its foliage and sell it in bulk to the small local laboratories that have made the country into the world’s biggest producer of cocaine. The pickers, known as raspachines, are mostly poor migrants from Venezuela or elsewhere in Colombia. Their hands are often shredded and bloodied by their labour, which involves ripping the leaves off the stalk. But it pays more than cultivating most legal crops. And even being on the bottom rung of the drug business confers a certain glamour. “I’m the raspachin,” trills the singer on a jaunty hit from 2015 by Los Bacanes del Sur, a popular folk band. “And I get all the women.”
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There is no shortage of people willing to plant and harvest coca; and there is no shortage of cocaine. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (unodc), global production hit a record 1,982 tonnes in 2020. That number is up by 11% on the year before, and nearly double the amount produced in 2014 (see chart 1). When Richard Nixon, then America’s president, launched his “war on drugs” in 1971, the flow of cocaine into America was a trickle. Despite billions of dollars spent every year on arrests, asset seizures and destroying coca bushes, it has become a flood. About 2% of Americans—roughly 6m people—are thought to use the stuff. New shipping routes are bringing the drug to consumers in Africa, Asia and Europe (see map).
Plenty of Latin American presidents have said the war is not working—though as Jonathan Caulkins, a drug expert at Carnegie Mellon University, points out, they tend to do so only once they have safely left office. Now some of those in power are beginning to speak up, too. In an interview with The Economist, Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s new president, talked of leniency for repentant gang members, decriminalising coca-leaf production and creating places where Colombians could consume cocaine in a supervised environment. Felipe Tascón, a member of Mr Petro’s campaign team who had been tipped for a role as his drug “tsar”, has flirted with the possibility of outright legalisation, and has talked of collaborating with other Andean countries which produce the drug.
One of those countries is Peru, the world’s second-biggest cocaine producer. Its president, Pedro Castillo, has appointed Ricardo Soberón, a longtime critic of coca-eradication schemes, to head Peru’s anti-drug agency. “After working with coca farmers for 30 years, I know that what they most want is to be treated as citizens,” says Mr Soberón. “They’ve always been treated as narco terrorists, or narco farmers.”
The realities of international politics will limit Mr Petro’s room for manoeuvre. But such public scepticism from a serving head of state marks a big change in the discussion around drugs.
When you’re in a hole, stop digging
Mr Petro and Mr Soberón are right to say that the war on cocaine has failed. The main reason is the vast profits to be made from the drug, which is cheap to produce but expensive to buy. According to Jeremy McDermott of InSight Crime, a website that analyses organised crime, Mexican gangs can buy a kilo of cocaine for $3,000 in Colombia. He estimates that a kilo is worth between $8,000 and $12,000 in Central America, $20,000 in the United States, $35,000 in Europe, $50,000 in China and $100,000 in Australia. Gangs can boost profits even more by cutting coke with cheaper drugs. These days much of the cocaine that is shipped north to the United States comes mixed with fentanyl, a powerful and addictive opioid painkiller. The unodc reckons that toxic combination is the main reason why cocaine-related deaths in America have risen fivefold since 2010 (see chart 2).
Huge profits give gangs both the incentive and the resources to adapt to whatever law enforcement can throw at them. In Colombia, decades of eradication attempts beginning in the early years of this century led, at first, to a fall in production. But it has since roared back, as plantations have moved into more remote and lawless places. At the same time, gangs have been boosting the productivity of their crops.
The unodc reckons that the amount of land dedicated to coca cultivation fell by 9% in Colombia in 2020 compared with the year before. But estimated production of cocaine rose by 8% to 1,228 tonnes, thanks to higher-yielding plants and more efficient processes in the labs that turn leaves into coca paste and then cocaine powder. Indeed, the gangs have achieved efficiency gains that would make a management consultant envious. The unodc calculates that the amount of cocaine obtained from one hectare of coca-bush cultivation rose by a whopping 18% in a single year, from 6.7kg in 2019 to 7.9kg in 2020.
All this means that, although gangs have diversified their businesses over the past few decades—into areas such as human trafficking, illegal gold mining, extortion and producing other drugs such as fentanyl—cocaine remains a core part of their business. Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland (who has contributed to The Economist in the past) reckons that coke still provides most of the revenues for gangs in Mexico.
Gangs fight viciously to control the cocaine trade. That helps make Latin America one of the most violent regions on Earth. With less than a tenth of the world’s population, Latin America is the scene of roughly a third of murders.
In places the gangs are so rich, powerful and well-armed that they outgun the forces of law and order. This has long been the case in remote parts of Colombia and in areas near the Mexican border with the United States. On September 2nd eight police officers were killed in the south of Colombia by unknown assailants. Even Uruguay, Paraguay and Ecuador, countries that have in the past been free of much gang violence, have seen lurid murders in their prisons in the past few years.
Innocent bystanders are often terrorised. In Flor de Ucayali, in Peru, 76 indigenous families live around a clearing of forest near the edge of the Utuquinia river. For years their land has been encroached upon by illegal coca plantations. Last year the police inspected some of the coca fields and destroyed a few maceration ponds, in which harvested coca leaves are soaked with water, lime and kerosene as part of the cocaine-production process.
According to Saul Martinez, a local leader, the coca planting has not stopped, and the state’s intervention has merely left residents more exposed to violence. Villagers have been sent gory videos of dismembered corpses; and last year two men turned up and threatened to kill a young woman. “We have a few rifles, once used for hunting, but they have guns used in war,” says Mr Martinez.
Sometimes the gangs infiltrate the state, and public servants abuse their power to protect or assist the drugs trade. A Colombian report has suggested that, during the country’s decades-long struggle against the farc, a left-wing guerrilla group, “some groups in the army, the police, air force, navy and das [a security agency] enriched themselves from narcotrafficking.” Earlier this year Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras, was extradited to New York to face charges (which he denies) of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States. His critics accuse him of turning the country into a “narco-state”. Tony Hernández, his brother, was given a life sentence for drug trafficking in the United States last year. “The cocaine trade essentially built the criminal infrastructure of Latin America,” says Mr McDermott.
Going straight
As cocaine spreads around the world (see chart 3), that criminal infrastructure travels with it. Guinea-Bissau has become an important route for South American cocaine bound for Europe. An attempted coup earlier this year, in which gunmen attacked the presidential palace, was blamed on drug gangs. Much European cocaine is imported through Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Dutch journalists and lawyers investigating the cocaine trade have been murdered. Earlier this year police discovered a sound-proofed torture chamber built into a shipping crate. The head of a Dutch police union has warned, hyperbolically, that the country is at risk of becoming a “narco-state”.
It is this violence and corruption that advocates of decriminalisation hope to stem. That may seem like a pipe-dream. In most countries, cocaine is, alongside heroin, one of the most tightly controlled drugs. Yet there are exceptions which Mr Petro and like-minded politicians could build upon. Coca leaf has long been legal in Peru and Bolivia, so long as it is not used to make cocaine. Andean farmers have for centuries chewed its leaves as a mild stimulant (the effects are closer to caffeine than doing a line of cocaine). Coca-leaf tea is used to relieve altitude sickness.
Peru has therefore long permitted the growing of 22,000 hectares of coca by around 34,000 farmers who are registered with the government. They sell their crop to the only authorised buyer, Enaco, a state-owned firm. It is a similar story in Bolivia. In 2012 the country’s government, then headed by Evo Morales, withdrew from the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, a treaty from 1961 which aims to harmonise its signatories’ drug policies. Bolivia rejoined a year later with a carve-out allowing the decriminalisation of coca-leaf chewing. The idea was to give legal protection to a small domestic market supplying coca-related products, such as drinks and toothpaste.
The star product is coca liquor. In La Paz, the capital of Bolivia, sits the distillery for El Viejo Roble, which has been making liquors from coca leaf for years. Adrian, the manager, extols the supposed health benefits of coca so enthusiastically that the orange-tinted goggles on his forehead keep falling over the round glasses that give him the air of a Bolivian John Lennon. “Look at the teeth of old campesinos (peasants),” he says. “They’re green, but they’re perfect.” His firm makes around 500 bottles a month. Drinking the stuff provides a mild buzz. The government buys bottles to give to foreign diplomats.
Bolivia’s trade unions are in charge of how much coca is grown. Encouragingly, violence in Bolivia is low, and seems to have fallen further since this model of “community control” came into force. According to Joaquin Chacin, a Bolivian coca researcher at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón in Cochabamba, between 2004 and 2021 there were 15 deaths from coca-related conflicts. Between 1982 and 2003 there were 120.
But creating a legal coca-leaf market is not without its problems. For a start, having legal coca growers does not seem to put off the illegal ones. After a change of government in Bolivia in 2019, the area under coca cultivation rose by 15% in 2020, to just under 30,000 hectares, of which only 22,000 were legal.
It is a similar tale in Peru, where the area under cultivation rose by 30% in 2021 to just under 81,000 hectares. Once again, that is far in excess of the government-mandated limit. And the state-sponsored system is leaky. The official registry of farms has not been significantly updated since it was first created in 1979, making it hard to keep track of what is being grown where. Enaco also tends to offer low prices. The amount of coca leaf it has managed to buy has halved in the past 20 years. At least some of the missing coca is diverted into the illegal cocaine trade, where the prices offered are much higher. Mr Soberón, for his part, wants to abolish Enaco’s monopoly, and allow other buyers that might offer something closer to the market rate.
Ivan Muralanda, a liberal Colombian senator, has floated a more radical idea. In 2020 he introduced a bill to the Senate that proposes that Colombia buy up all the coca produced in the country at market prices. Mr Muralanda reckons that would cost around 2.6trn pesos ($560m), less than the 4trn pesos spent on eradication each year. More controversially, the bill—which passed its first reading before being shelved in the run-up to the presidential election this year—would also legalise cocaine for domestic use. Few Colombians indulge, at least at the moment. Mr Muralanda estimates that around 260,000 use the drug. Under his proposal, it would become available for over-18s who pass a medical exam. Steve Rolles, of Transform, a British drug advocacy group, thinks that even such a small-scale experiment could “open up the debate.”
However, there is not much about tackling illegal groups in the bill, admits Lorenzo Uribe, a researcher who helped draft it. And legalisation would probably come with serious drawbacks. In a paper in 2016 Dr Caulkins, the Carnegie Mellon professor, examined what might happen were cocaine to be legalised in Latin America. He concluded that, although it might generate a legal cocaine market worth “somewhere between hundreds of millions and low single-digit billions per year,” the price would be that the country in question would become an “international pariah”. Dr Caulkins reckons America and others would impose sanctions in retaliation.
Nor would it stop international crime. Legalising cocaine in places where consumption is low would do little to dent the profits over which the gangs fight, which mostly come from countries where consumption is high. And weak law enforcement could allow gangs to dominate newly legal markets just as they have dominated illegal ones. Several American states have legalised cannabis in the past few years. But Vanda Felbab-Brown of the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, points out that Mexican gangs have started to move into those legalised markets too.
And legalisation in a Latin American country could even, perversely, end up increasing violence in the region. Another paper, also published in 2016, this time by Daniel Mejia, an economist at the University of the Andes, and his colleagues found a link between coca eradication policies in Colombia and increased violence in parts of Mexico where several drug gangs compete against one another. If cocaine were to become harder for Mexican gangs to get their hands on—because the government was buying up all of the crops, as in Senator Muralanda’s bill—the extra competition could lead to even more bloodshed.
A problem of demand
“The problem is in consumption, not production,” says Mr Petro. His view is that “the competitive society…the ideology of the last few decades…is the one that generates addiction. And it is what generates widespread drug use.” Mr Petro’s explanation is dubious. But his diagnosis is surely correct. So long as cocaine remains illegal in the rich countries that consume it, then legalising it in the poorer places that produce it will have only a small effect.
Full-on decriminalisation, let alone legalisation, is not about to happen in the West. But attitudes have shifted notably in the past few years. In 2020 the state of Oregon decriminalised the possession of all drugs, cocaine included. Portugal has had a similar policy since 2001. On October 7th Femke Halsema, Amsterdam’s mayor, told a meeting of European justice ministers that she thought that the war on drugs had failed, and that cocaine should be decriminalised. If decriminalisation happens in Latin America, it could put more momentum behind such ideas.
And even America’s government is not as hostile as it once was. At a meeting with Mr Petro on October 3rd Antony Blinken, America’s secretary of state, said diplomatically that President Joe Biden’s administration supported the Colombian president’s more “holistic approach” to tackling drugs. Coming from the country that began the drug war five decades ago, that feels like a significant concession. ■
Correction (October 14th 2022): The original version of this article misstated the price of a kilo of cocaine in Mexico. Sorry.
Now I love those cowboys, I love their gold
Love my uncle, God rest his soul
Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know
Taught me so well, that I grabbed that gold
I left his dead ass there by the side of the road, yeah
South Dakota voters decide to extend Medicaid coverage to 45,000 people Yet another Medicaid expansion ballot measure passed in a Republican state.
"In the face of that obstruction from Republican state officials, health care advocates have taken the issue directly to voters in largely Republican states, with remarkable success."
“Direct democracy has been a path for important change and also a path of last resort,”
CU88 wrote: ↑Wed Nov 09, 2022 7:28 am
Awesome for all Americans!
South Dakota voters decide to extend Medicaid coverage to 45,000 people Yet another Medicaid expansion ballot measure passed in a Republican state.
"In the face of that obstruction from Republican state officials, health care advocates have taken the issue directly to voters in largely Republican states, with remarkable success."
“Direct democracy has been a path for important change and also a path of last resort,”
