Alcohol Advertising in College Newspapers
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:35 PM

The state of Virginia has a law that bans most alcohol advertising in college newspapers. Make that, they had a law -- a federal court has declared the law to be a violation of free speech guarantees. As a matter of law, the decision probably is sound. The state provides no evidence that the ad ban actually promotes the cause of reduced underage drinking -- and hence one of the planks of the "Central Hudson" test governing US commercial speech jurisprudence, that a valid regulation has to directly advance some substantial government interest, is not met. But as a matter of policy, I wonder if the standard approach to commercial speech is appropriate for vice-related goods. Not just "wonder" -- I believe that stricter controls on commercial vice speech will lead to increased freedom, as more vices will be legal if their advertising can effectively be controlled. (I prefer a version of the Posadas approach.)

Hard liquor advertising probably will continue to stay away from Virginia's college newspapers: the code of conduct for the spirits trade association does not allow ads in college papers. The Beer Institute's code has no such rule, but does preclude advertising that doesn't comply with a college's own regulations.

Labels: alcohol, litigation, marketing, teens

 
Three Updates
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:53 PM

(1) Following up on this February 22 post.... the Missouri Senate has voted to ban those alcohol vaporizers that have been shown to cause untold -- oh wait, that is right, they haven't been shown to be problematic:

'That's just death waiting to happen if we don't ban these,' said Sen. Luann Ridgeway, R-Smithville, whose bill prohibiting the devices received initial Senate approval by voice vote.

Ridgeway said she hasn't heard of any problems in Missouri as a result of the machines and described her legislation as a preventive measure that would allow law officers to confiscate them.

Senator Ridgeway, I have my suspicions about Meat Lover's Pizza -- would you get to work on that, please? And at this time of year, especially, I think all of us need to know that the law stands ready to protect us from these.

(2) Today's Chicago Tribune's front page includes this story about the swell of states questioning the minimum drinking age of 21 -- no doubt the Trib is channeling Vice Squad's March 1 post. The online version includes this map showing state drinking ages before 1984. [Earlier in the week, the Trib apparently forgot that alcohol and nicotine are drugs: "... methamphetamine, the narcotic scourge that has wounded middle America as no drug ever before...."]

(3) Today's New York Times points to the attractiveness for some intellectuals of drugs like Adderall that might be performance-enhancing (recalling, of course, Vice Squad posts from February 23 and January 19). Time for a Congressional investigation!

Labels: alcohol, inhaler, solipsism, teens

 
The National Age Minimum for Alcohol Threatened?
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 11:28 PM

A bill is progressing in the Vermont Senate that would call for an examination of lowering the state's drinking age. Unless the feds alter their own legislation, any state that transgresses federal will by instituting a drinking age below 21 will pay -- to the tune of 10 percent of the state's share of federal highway funds. Nevertheless, there is revolt brewing in various state legislatures.

Vermont is the home of Middlebury College, whose former president has been an advocate for a lower minimum drinking age. He now directs Choose Responsibility, a nonprofit organization devoted to the cause. Here is part of the Waiver proposal from Choose Responsibility:

Choose Responsibility believes federal legislation should not penalize states who choose to participate in a pilot alcohol education program based on a minimum drinking age of 18. Thus, it is our belief that:

• States that present a plan for educating and licensing young adults that can maintain low levels of fatalities while lowering the drinking age ought to be granted a waiver of the 10% reduction penalty for a minimum of five years.
• States should create a mechanism to collect relevant data required to monitor the effects of the change in law.
• State should submit these statistics to Congress (or its designate), along with an analysis of the effects of the waiver from its inception, and may or may not request either an extension of he waiver.
• Individual state proposals must include the guidelines for eligibility and suspension of licenses proposed in the model program.

Vice Squad supports the end of the federal mandate on the minimum drinking age, though any transition period to a lower age could be tricky. Beyond Choose Responsibility's education and licensing suggestions, higher alcohol excise taxes could be used as a supplementary method to help limit teen drinking when a state abolishes its prohibition on 18 to 20-year-old drinking. (Vice Squad supports higher alcohol taxes generally, but another possibility might be to have an age-specific tax, where 18-20 year olds face higher taxes.) Also, the drinking age could be staggered, such that 19 and 20 year olds, for instance, could be licensed to purchase wine and beer, but not spirits.

New Zealand lowered its drinking age from 20 to 18 in 1999. Though there have been reports of increases in some types of alcohol-related harms, efforts to re-raise the age have not garnered sufficient political support.

Labels: alcohol, federalism, New Zealand, teens

 
One Student's Adderall Story
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 11:10 PM

Via Reihan writing at Andrew Sullivan's blog we learn of this article by a college senior describing her experiences of studying under the influence of Adderall. She thinks the drug was performance enhancing for her, at least if "performance" refers to grades. Here's a brief excerpt:

If the proof is in the transcript, then Adderall is hardly a self-punishing habit. Sometimes I think about how Marion Jones has to return all the prize money she earned while taking steroids, and I wonder whether I should be stripped of all the A’s I received for papers written on Adderall. This is a haunting or a comical thought, depending on my mood.

Despite the grade enhancement, she stopped using Adderall in her senior year -- grades aren't everything. As for her ability to study and churn out papers while using Adderall, in her case, "It turns out that the feverish moral imperative to work was an effect of the drug, not a cause."

The use of pharmaceuticals for "recreational" purposes is much more prevalent in the US than is the use of cocaine and heroin and hallucinogens, combined. Yet another good reason to legalize and regulate the currently illicit drugs: it isn't that hard to find close substitutes among the legal drugs.

Here's a table reproduced from SAMHSA showing prevalence rates:

70410

Table 1.1B – Types of Illicit Drug Use in Lifetime, Past Year, and Past Month among Persons Aged 12 or Older: Percentages, 2005 and 2006

Drug	TIME PERIOD
	Lifetime		Past Year		Past Month
	2005	2006	2005	2006	2005	2006
*Low precision; no estimate reported. a Difference between estimate and 2006 estimate is statistically significant at the 0.05 level. b Difference between estimate and 2006 estimate is statistically significant at the 0.01 level. 1 Illicit Drugs include marijuana/hashish, cocaine (including crack), heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants, or prescription-type psychotherapeutics used nonmedically. Illicit Drugs Other Than Marijuana include cocaine (including crack), heroin, hallucinogens, inhalants, or prescription-type psychotherapeutics used nonmedically. 2 Nonmedical use of prescription-type psychotherapeutics includes the nonmedical use of pain relievers, tranquilizers, stimulants, or sedatives and does not include over-the-counter drugs. Source: SAMHSA, Office of Applied Studies, National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 2005 and 2006.
ILLICIT DRUGS1	46.1	45.4	14.4	14.5	8.1	8.3
Marijuana and Hashish	40.1	39.8	10.4	10.3	6.0	6.0
Cocaine	13.8	14.3	2.3	2.5	1.0	1.0
Crack	3.3	3.5	0.6	0.6	0.3	0.3
Heroin	1.5	1.5	0.2	0.2	0.1a	0.1
Hallucinogens	13.9	14.3	1.6	1.6	0.4	0.4
LSD	9.2	9.5	0.2	0.3	0.0	0.1
PCP	2.7	2.7	0.1	0.1	0.0	0.0
Ecstasy	4.7	5.0	0.8	0.9	0.2	0.2
Inhalants	9.4	9.3	0.9	0.9	0.3	0.3
Nonmedical Use of Psychotherapeutics2	20.0	20.3	6.2a	6.6	2.6	2.8
Pain Relievers	13.4	13.6	4.9	5.1	1.9	2.1
OxyContin®	1.4b	1.7	0.5	0.5	0.1	0.1
Tranquilizers	8.7	8.7	2.2	2.1	0.7	0.7
Stimulants	7.8	8.2	1.1b	1.4	0.4	0.5
Sedatives	3.7	3.6	0.3	0.4	0.1	0.2
ILLICIT DRUGS OTHER THAN MARIJUANA1	29.5	29.6	8.3	8.6	3.7	3.9

Labels: prescription drugs, teens

 
Steroids and Kids
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 12:05 PM

Vice Squad is on the road, and has only a few minutes at a public library today. Probably not a good time to bring up a subject that we have studiously avoided in the past -- steroids in sports. (Radley has been posting and debating on this issue.) Our general approach to vice would suggest that if adults want to use steroids, there should be some not-too-onerous legal means of accommodating them. Transfer of steroids to kids could be forbidden, of course. But what about sports leagues, like Major League Baseball. As private businesses, can they make whatever decision they want to with regards to steroids?

Our interest in protecting kids can justify some collateral restrictions upon adults, such as the ban on transfers to youths that I mentioned above. For the "traditional vices" I do not think that this interest can justify prohibitions on adult use or vice activity, however -- and I believe that this is the case with steroids, too.

Nevertheless, I am not sure that a requirement that professional sports leagues ban steroid use would not be acceptable on the grounds of protecting kids. [I acknowledge the controversy over the extent and likelihood of potential harms from steroid use, and then there are issues with the enforceablity of any ban. If a ban on use by kids would be easy to enforce, then any controls on professional sports leagues, presumably, would have to be justified on other grounds. But what if the ban on kid steroid use were quite leaky?] If professional baseball allowed steroid use, promising young teen ballplayers, of whom only a handful would make it to the major leagues and perhaps most would not even make it into the minor leagues, would be faced with a difficult choice. To the extent that those drugs really are performance enhancing, then such kids will feel significant pressure to get a leg up on the competition by using steroids. In the limit, we have the usual positional externality story, where everyone uses steroids without affecting their relative ranking. Of course, the same would be true of major leaguers, too.

It is extremely hard for someone to become a professional athlete if that person was not training for that role at an early age. And professional athletics is a career that, unlike most office jobs, seems to capture the imagination of lots of kids. I also think (following J.S. Mill) that the fact that professional sports league are businesses that offer their wares to the public (and rely on the legal system for their organization, and so on), means that the personal liberty objection to a ban on steroid use by professional athletes is obviated.

Anyway, I haven't really thought this through, as I suppose is obvious. But I seem to be coming down on the side of (or merely rephrasing) Judge Posner's position on steroids.

Labels: drugs, teens

 
A Class Gift
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:53 AM

Remember when previous graduating classes would donate a plaque or a water fountain or a bench to their old high school? How passe'. Southington High School in Connecticut has received a magic wand, that when waved in the vicinity of a student, reveals whether the potential miscreant has imbibed alcohol. The wand, the linked article notes, can be used for random tests!

Wand-like mechanisms are referred to as passive alcohol sensors. They are so passive that you can be tested for alcohol without even knowing that you are being tested. I am not sure if our Supreme Court will go along with that, however -- they seem to prefer big dogs providing more active searches for contraband. (For drugs, the accuracy of such dogs lends new meaning to the phrase "random search".) Here's a ten-page pdf that argues that such passive alcohol searches are constitutional when used in the context of traffic stops. And here is a touching tale about the use of drug-sniffing dogs in a Florida school district.

Labels: alcohol, dogs, search, teens

 
Parents Who Supplied Alcohol to Teens Out of Jail
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:52 PM

They invited teens over to their older son's 16th birthday party, collected car keys, and served alcohol. The idea was that the guests would all spend the night. Other parents were not informed of the alcohol, however. At any rate, no one was injured -- except for the host family, that is. Loud music brought a phalanx of police and dogs to their Charlottesville, Virginia home about 11PM. The teens, who initially scattered, were tested for alcohol, and nine of the sixteen who were tested came up positive. The mom and dad, now divorced, were convicted and sentenced to eight years -- a sentence that eventually was reduced to 27 months. The oldest son, the birthday celebrant, dropped out of school because of the case, and to look after the temporarily orphaned younger son, who was himself 16 when the jail terms began. After serving five months, the parents were released from jail before Thanksgiving.

Here's a Washington Post story dating from the start of the jail terms. Here's a BBC News story, not very sympathetic to the Virginia authorities, from a few days after the jail terms started. (This early attention led to difficulties with the other inmates, so the mom was moved into protective solitary confinement.) Here's today's Washington Post story on the mom's release from jail; in it, we learn of someone else negatively affected by the case, the prosecutor, who lost a campaign for re-election that highlighted a crackdown against underage drinking. Here's addiction expert Stanton Peele's Wall Street Journal op-ed (via Radley) on the benefits of introducing alcohol to your kids at home.

Labels: alcohol, harm reduction, teens

 
Drinking at School
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 6:32 AM

A public secondary school in Cornwall, with students aged between 11 and 18, has acquired a liquor license, according to this article in The Guardian. The reason is to make dual use of the school's facilities: school auditorium by day, "Planets Arena" hosting musical events for the community at large by night. The Arena, along with other ways of raising funds and saving cash, is the brainchild of the school's business manager; he is also the British equivalent of a vice principal, though he has no teaching experience or qualifications. He seems to have a head for business, however:

"Schools can no longer rely on local authority and government funding alone. Instead of going round with a begging bowl, they should be using their premises 24/7 to make money to plough back in for the benefit of their pupils - and offer a service to the community as well," [the school's business manager] says.

The drinking age in Britain is 18, and the school, of course, does not serve to the underaged at its nighttime musical events.

Labels: alcohol, Britain, teens

 
Subsidize Safer Cigarettes?
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:14 PM

A friend of Vice Squad brought our attention to "A Two-Cigarette Society," an op-ed by David G. Adams in last Monday's New York Times. The idea is to prohibit the sale of "regular" cigarettes to youths, perhaps those under 21. But cigarettes that have very low levels of nicotine would be available at an earlier age. The motivation is harm reduction: don't try to keep older teens from smoking, but try to guide their smoking in a direction that is not very harmful. Presumably the negligible amounts of nicotine in the "youth" cigarettes would not stoke addiction, so that when the youthful smokers want to quit -- and the vast majority of habitual smokers say they want to quit -- they will be able to do so easily. (The author even sees the low-nicotine cigarette as a stepping stone to eventual prohibition of the fully nicotinized version.) One related idea that we could implement without the rest of the two-cigarette solution would be to base cigarette excise taxes on nicotine content, to encourage the production and consumption of lower-nicotine varieties. And then there is snus, of course, as a complementary form of tobacco harm reduction.

The two-cigarette proposal motivated two letters, published in today's Times, in response. The first letter recapitulates the usual zero tolerance v. harm reduction debate: the two-cigarette proposal represents "one of the worst ideas I have heard in a long time;" the letter writer's alternative: "Let’s continue focusing our resources on gradually, but finally, creating a no-cigarette society."

Labels: harm reduction, smoking, teens, tobacco

 
Zero Tolerance for Alcohol With Youthful Drivers
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:55 PM

Vice Squad is not all that keen on zero tolerance (ZT) policies aimed at adult vice. But Phil Cook's Paying the Tab notes at least one dimension of success with respect to zero tolerance policies targeted at young drivers (those under 21, and hence, in the US, unable to legally purchase alcohol) who consume alcohol. Congress pressured individual states to adopt ZT laws (not unlike the manner in which in Congress adopted an effectively national minimum drinking age and blood-alcohol standard for drunk driving), which enhanced penalties for underage drivers who were operating their vehicles after drinking any detectable amount of alcohol whatsoever.

All the states had come into line by 1998. The resulting natural experiment generated strong evidence that the ZT laws reduced by 13-20 percent binge drinking and total alcohol consumption by males. Thus, the demand for alcohol was reduced by limiting one unfortunately complementary activity, namely, driving.

The quote, minus an internal citation, is from pages 78-79 of Paying the Tab.

Labels: alcohol, Cook, driving, teens, zero tolerance

 
Bingeing on Beer
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 11:09 AM

Adult drinkers in the US who binge -- that's 5 or more drinks at a sitting -- tend to binge on beer. That's not surprising, but it turns out that when teenagers binge, they binge on hard liquor. These results come from two just-published CDC-sponsored studies, as described here.

My previous understanding had been that beer was the alcohol of choice for the younger set. So this new study makes me wonder if efforts to police underage drinking -- the teens in the study were mainly high schoolers -- are actually having more of an effect. And as the country as a whole found out in the 1920s, a prohibition pushes consumers towards more potent forms of their substances. When the prohibition against teen drinking was lightly enforced, this line of thinking would go, teens preferred beer, and for the same reasons as adults: relatively cheap and relatively available. But make alcohol harder for kids to come by, and the couple of bottles of vodka -- more easily transported and hidden, and perhaps easier to consume more quickly -- begin to look better than a case of beer.

One of the policy issues this touches upon is the tax mix among different forms of alcohol. I have long believed that hard liquor is almost a different drug than beer or wine, and much more dangerous. Therefore, I think a policy that taxes hard liquor more heavily than wine and beer (and regulates it more strictly in other manners) is generally a good idea. And though I am against the current federally-imposed drinking age of 21, the fact that underage kids now prefer to drink heavily with hard liquor reinforces my view that the hard stuff should be differentially taxed.

Labels: alcohol, taxes, teens

 
Bhutan's Tobacco Ban
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 6:31 PM

Bhutan banned sales of tobacco about two and a half years ago, following up with a rather comprehensive public smoking ban. (Vice Squad, prescient as ever, noted the forthcoming ban a full year in advance, on December 9, 2003.) How have things worked out in the tobacco-free paradise? Well, perhaps not as swimmingly as one might have hoped -- Bhutan is landlocked, incidentally -- according to this article from India eNews. Detailed regulations implementing the ban have not yet been adopted, and tourists, diplomats, and NGO workers are excluded from the prohibition (their health being less important, presumably). The black market thrives -- who would have thought of that? But I will not go so far as to blame a 7,000 acre forest fire on the public smoking ban (as the linked article seems to do); teenagers were the culprits, and they are likely to smoke clandestinely even when public smoking by adults is legal.

The Bhutanese are not averse to all vice. According to one of the kingdom's official web pages, chang (a beer), arra (a distilled spirit), and betel nuts are all common, along with salted butter tea.

Labels: Asia, Bhutan, Prohibition, smoking ban, teens, tobacco

 
COPA Redux
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:56 PM

When the Child Online Protection Act last went before the Supreme Court, the preliminary injunction preventing its enforcement was kept in place. Nevertheless, a full hearing at the district court level still had to take place, and the Supremes expressly noted (in keeping with their decision on internet filters in libraries) that a look at advances in filtering technology would be in order. The district court opinion (84-page pdf) was handed down earlier this week, and Judge Lowell Reed struck down COPA as inconsistent with the First and Fifth amendments to the Constitution.

One important element in Judge Reed's reasoning was the notion that filters installed on individual computers (or through portals such as AOL) are quite effective at screening kids from adult content. Indeed, it seems as if filtering technology has made vast strides in the last five years or so. Another element is that age verification (via credit cards or otherwise), which would have been required of commercial adult-oriented websites under the terms of COPA, is not yet at the same level of reliability, and such barriers are costly for websites (or web surfers) to implement and maintain.

COPA is a content-based restriction on speech -- speech that is legal for adults -- and as such is subject to 'strict scrutiny' by the courts. This means that COPA can only be upheld if it is narrowly tailored to achieve the compelling government interest of keeping kids away from internet smut, and if there do not exist alternatives, less restrictive upon speech, that similarly serve the government interest. Judge Reed ruled that the US had not shown that other alternatives are less effective than COPA -- because COPA would not apply to foreign-based websites, there is a strong case to be made that filters are more effective than COPA at shielding kids from internet pornography. And COPA's under and over-inclusiveness indicates that it is not narrowly tailored, either. Oh yeah, COPA was ruled to be vague and overbroad, too.

Labels: internet, pornography, teens

 
Tracing Alcohol Consumed By Teens
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 10:54 AM

For decades now, identifying serial numbers have been required for all firearms manufactured in (or imported into) the US. Guns recovered after their use in a crime can then be traced back to the store which originally sold them. These traces (which do not represent a random sample of all crime guns) indicate that some firearms dealers are the initial sellers for a disproportionately large number of the traced crime guns. Regulatory scrutiny can be directed at such sellers, to ensure that they are not knowingly supplying criminals.

This general idea is now being applied to underage drinking in Scotland, according to this article in the New Statesman:

As part of a pilot scheme launched on 29 January, alcopops, fizzy wine and other drinks popular with teenagers are being branded with a number specific to their place of sale.

Police in Ayrshire plan to use the codes to trace shopkeepers and adults supplying drink to under-18s.

Some 100 sellers have signed up for the voluntary program, which could be be extended and made mandatory if the trial is deemed a success.

Labels: alcohol, Britain, teens

 
Prosecution & laws gone wild
- posted by Michael @ 1:08 PM

A few days ago, a substitute 40-year old teacher in Connecticut was convicted of exposing students to pornography on a computer at a middle school. The teacher was apparently a victim of spyware that caused x-rated ads to pop up on the screen after she accessed a website completely unrelated to pornography. A good discussion of the case is here. This is indeed a fine example of prosecutorial excess and I don't have much to add to that point. It's not that unusual for the prosecutors to be overzealous, however. Just look at the Duke lacrosse case. What is perhaps more amazing is that apparently the jury (I assume it was a jury trial) went along with the prosecutors here. Generally, I do not like to question jury decisions, because they hear the entire case and I don't. But in this particular case, it is hard to avoid reasonable doubt.

Even more outrageous, however, is the fact that a person can get 40 years in prison (and presumably be labeled a sex offender for the rest of her life) for exposing children to pornography. The entire argument in the case was apparently whether the teacher clicked on the porn sites herself or whether it was a pop-up caused by spyware. But what was going through the head of the state legislators who came up with a 40 year prison term for this crime?

The sentencing is on March 2.

Labels: internet, pornography, teens

 
"Kids Helping Kids": A Bizarre Drug "Treatment" Program
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 3:35 PM

What is it about Milford, Ohio? That's where an outrageous, $60,000 undercover sting operation was pulled off in a high school by the District Superintendent. Now we find that it is the home of Kids Helping Kids, an odd, and troubling, drug treatment program for kids.

I highly recommend that you watch the video available at this local TV news webpage. The sound starts a few seconds before the video, and it has some unfortunate local TV elements, but it is also quite informative.

One parent offers a sentiment that sounds about right to me: "No one should be abused emotionally or physically in the name of treatment." Incidentally, there don't seem to be any doctors involved in this "treatment".

Kids Helping Kids doesn't seem to be the worst treatment program out there.

Update: Radley Balko has more, a whole lot more, first here and then here. It's worse than I thought.

Labels: drugs, teens, treatment

 
Marketing Caffeine to Young Athletes
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 1:39 PM

Sunday's New York Times included this article about AdvoCare International's product Spark, an energy drink aimed at kids. According to the article, Spark "contains several stimulants and is sold in two formulations: one for children 4 to 11 years old that includes roughly the amount of caffeine found in a cup and a half of coffee, and one containing twice that amount for teenagers and adults." The marketing seems to hope to appeal to young athletes, in particular, though the Times story indicates that AdvoCare International executives claim that Spark is directed towards healthy living, not just sports. The Times article also notes many voices of concern at the marketing of high-caffeine products towards kids. If the popularity of products such as Spark increases, I expect that litigation or legislation eventually will impose limits on marketing, if not on caffeine content directly. Will schools suspend students who bring substances such as Spark to class?

Labels: caffeine, marketing, teens

 
What, No Guns Drawn?
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 8:00 AM

A middle school in Pennsylvania was placed in "lockdown" at 2PM on Tuesday:

Students were kept in their classrooms while three dogs searched the building, looking for marijuana, cocaine, crack, amphetamines, heroin and ecstasy.

The dogs were claimed to have "alerted" on 31 lockers -- this school might be the very fulcrum of the global trade in illegal drugs. So the authorities padlocked the highly suspicious lockers (along with neighboring ones), then went about securing a search warrant. It isn't clear why they didn't follow their own policy and just open the lockers and look inside, but one gets the suspicion (or at least I get the suspicion) that they were hoping to lay some heavy criminal charges on the student druggies -- charges that might have been compromised by having school officials muck about in a bunch of lockers. Four hours later, the search warrant dutifully was issued and arrived -- dog sniffs establish probable cause, of course; come to think of it, not just probable cause, but near certain guilt. If it's a dog's alert versus some kid's word, or even my own eyes, I'll go with the dog every time. But before they executed the search pursuant to the warrant, they let the kids out of school -- hey, what sort of half-hearted "lockdown" was this? -- so that the youthful scholars could see whose lockers had fallen afoul of the canine coppers. Oh yeah, no drugs were found. Zero-for-thirty-one. Better days ahead, drug sniffing pooches. Naturally, officials, parents, and even some students, with some exceptions, are rushing to express their support for this first-rate operation. Among the exceptions, however, are some sensible police.

Add Mechanicsburg Area Middle School to the honor roll that includes such stalwarts as Stratford High and Milford High.

Thanks to Ken at Crim Law for the pointer; Ken got the word from Christopher Coyle.

Update: Though it is obvious, I just want to mention that the wrongheadedness of this operation is independent of the fact that no drugs were found (though that should be more reason to question the efficacy of dog sniffs); as in the other school cases, these over-the-top tactics wouldn't be salvaged by having a few illegal drugs show up in one or two lockers.

Labels: dogs, drugs, search, teens

 
Jack Cole on Undercover Drug Work, and Regret
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 9:44 PM

That outrageous undercover operation at Milford High School in Ohio is still, shall we say, a bee in my bonnet. (Or it would be, if I had a bonnet.) Today I was reading "End Prohibition Now!", by former undercover narcotics officer (and now Executive Director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) Jack Cole. In the previous Vice Squad post I expressed concern for the high school informant, who might one day recognize that her actions were perhaps not all that praiseworthy. Former officer Jack Cole learned this the hard way:

As we all know, when you fight a war you must have spies and so much more so in the war on drugs. The use and sale of illegal drugs are in effect victimless crimes; both the dealer and the user get something they want from the transaction. In the war on drugs the police undercover-operatives are the spies. A spy must necessarily be insinuated into the middle of a drug transaction if it is to be discovered and arrests are to be made. In the longest war this country has fought, spying was my job. For fourteen years of the more than three decades America has been fighting the drug war, I held that position. When I worked undercover I imagined I was a chameleon. As children, my friends and I had bought these little lizards at the circus. When we put them on our shirts, their skin changed to the color of the material - protectively blending in with their external environment for safety. Each time I met a new person the police targeted me against I became that chameleon. Changing everything but the color of my skin I quickly blended in with their environment and became exactly what they expected or wanted - easily gaining their trust. As an undercover agent my job was to do whatever was necessary to become each individual's best friend - his or her closest confidant - so I could betray them and send them to jail. And my job was to repeat that scenario with each new target: friendship - then betrayal - over and over again with hundreds and hundreds of individual human beings.

The main problem I experienced as an undercover agent was that I was never able to emotionally detach myself from the people whose lives I was affecting so dramatically; the vast majority of whom were non-violent offenders, their relatives and friends. When I posed as their confidant, for even a relatively short time, I was witness to their humanity as well as their faults. Instigating each person's ultimate arrest and imprisonment cost me something also. I am not a religious man but locked somewhere in my mind from my earliest childhood memories is the Golden Rule, as my mother taught it to me, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." Facing my quarries in court, testifying that all I had shared with them was lies and manipulation designed to enhance my ability to betray their trust, could in no way be interpreted as living by that rule. Why I chose to abandon my deepest belief is still something of a mystery to me but I know it had something to do with falsely agreeing that "The ends justify the means" - the golden rule as taught by many drug-warriors.

I would guess I took part in over a thousand arrests during the time I worked in narcotics. I don't know how many kids' lives I have ruined but I'm sure the count is huge. I was responsible for putting away young people in their formative years whose only "crime" was testing their newfound freedoms, "dipping and dabbing" in the illegal drugs so easily accessible in our culture.

Labels: drugs, informants, policing, teens

 
Much Drink and Lechery
- posted by Jim Leitzel @ 8:08 PM

It turns out that the effects of drug taking depend quite a bit on what you think those effects will be. If people think that drinking alcohol will increase their interest in sex, then they will express a greater interest in sex when they think they are drinking alcohol -- –even when, unbeknownst to them, their drink is actually alcohol-free. The effects of drugs depend upon, in the famous trio of Norman Zinberg, "Drug, Set, and Setting." In other words, the effects of a drug depend upon the chemical properties of the drug, the mind set of the person consuming it, and the environment in which it is consumed.

The May, 2005 issue of Addiction contains "Automatic effects of alcohol cues on sexual attraction," an article by Ronald S. Friedman, Denis M. McCarthy, Jens Förster, and Markus Denzler. This paper takes the sexual interest and alcohol story even further. Instead of people mistakenly thinking that they are consuming alcohol, the subjects of the experiment were just shown some alcohol-related words. Further, they were shown the words in brief spurts, so brief that the words could not be consciously read and understood. Of course, a control group -- these were college males, incidentally -- were flashed non-alcohol words. (If I were not a college teacher I would here insert the following old joke: "The subjects of the experiment were college students, but the experimenters are thinking of repeating their study on human subjects.") Then they were asked to rate the attractiveness and the intelligence of young women whose pictures were shown to the subjects. (I suppose people do estimate the intelligence of strangers when shown a photo!?) Anyway, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that the fellows who were flashed the alcohol-related words found the young women to be more attractive, but not more intelligent, than did the control group. (The finding is a bit more complicated than I have let on, but I don't think that I have distorted it too badly.)

Labels: alcohol, sex, teens