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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

The chart of illegal drug expenditures as a percentage of average person consumption is wild. People did a lot of drugs in the 1970s and 1980. “In total, this paper calculates that illegal drugs accounted for 5 percent of total PCE in 1980. This high expenditure share is consistent with contemporaneous reports. For example, a Washington Post article estimated that Americans bought $35 billion of cocaine (O’Toole 1981).” That figure has fallen to under 1% today. Maybe the war on drugs worked.

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Going from "we don't use as much coke as in the 80's" to "the war on drugs worked" is a bit like going from "we have less teen pregnancy now than in the 90s" to "abstinence worked". It's not only ignoring a very large number of alternate factors, but it's assuming the latter is a successful strategy, when all of the evidence points to the contrary.

Interesting you bring up abstinence because kids are having way less sex nowadays than in the past.

Most definitely not because of abstinence education

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/national...

Because proving causation is always difficult if not impossible? Or because in both cases we have a personal bias that makes us not want those programs to have worked, despite not being able to disprove causation either?

Because in neither case has anyone actually even made a coherent argument for a causal effect that doesn't ignore all the other factors? Besides, when "all the evidence points to the contrary" is usually a bad sign...

There are a lot of things you aren't able to disprove that are (probably) not true.

Maybe, maybe not; cuz drugs have gotten cheaper, and there are how “legitimate sources” of drugs like opiates

That's an excellent point. It would be interesting to see a chart of the growth of legal pharmaceutical opiates vs the growth of illegal opiates in the past few decades. It won't necessarily show causation ( and maybe not even correlation ) but it would be nice to see how these two opiate markets ( legal and illegal ) grew during the war on drugs.

> Maybe the war on drugs worked.

Meh. If you look at the next chart you can see that drug prices started to plummet in the mid 70s, probably aided by the opening up of smuggling routes from Colombia (my theory).

So expenditure on drugs isn't a reliable indicator here - if they had figures for quantities (ie, weight) bought/sold you may reach a different conclusion.

Weight isn't ideal either. You would need to adjust for dose and interval.

I have a rock that keeps tigers away. Ever since I got it there have been no tigers in my house.

I want to buy your rock.

or its as simple as drug market got more competitive and diverse while wages also rose

This is correct.

The numbers are % of PCE. So that number could go down for a number of reasons:

1. People buying less drugs

2. People spending less money on the same amount of drugs (lower prices)

3. People’s PCE is growing faster than the amount they spend on drugs

There are others I’m sure.

An explanation for 2 could also be drugs getting stronger. Given how much more potent modern cannabis is than it was in the 20th century, people might be spending the same amount relative to THC content--but there's much more THC in a gram of cannabis than there once was, so they have to buy much smaller amounts of cannabis for the same amount of THC.

That's a strange statistic to use to define success. Cocaine is expensive because it's illegal and is associated with harsh prison sentences. Cracking down on the drug might have increased the percent of income spent on it.

Naw everyone just moved on to different drugs

Hah - the overdose rate in the US and the casualty of people killed abroad say... war on drugs is a horrible failure

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