Hide table of contents

In the last 4 months, I’ve come to believe drug policy reform, changing the laws on currently illegal psychoactive substances, may offer a substantial, if not the most substantial, opportunity to increase the happiness of humans alive today. I consider this result very surprising. I’ve been researching how best to improve happiness (i.e. increase happiness whilst people are alive) for nearly 2 years. When I argued effective altruism (‘EA’) was overlooking mental health and happiness a year ago, drug reform featured nowhere in my analysis, nor had I heard anyone (inside or outside EA) suggest it was seriously important. This is the first in a series of four posts for the EA forum where I examine drug policy reform (‘DPR’) and explain why I think it should be taken seriously. I don’t claim to know all the empirical facts, nor do I claim to have a fully considered set of suggestions for what to do next. I wanted to share the problem with others as I’ve reached the limits of my knowledge and expertise on the topic and hope other brains can help.[1]

I want to thank Lee Sharkey for his assistance. We started collaborating on this before work commitments dragged him elsewhere. He wrote section 2.2 (on pain) and I wrote the rest with him providing helpful comments. Many of the ideas are his.[2] Because the entire analysis came to over 15,000 words, which seems unreasonably long, even for EA standards, we decided to split the essay into four parts I’ll upload on consecutive days [edit: have uploaded over consecutive days]. The motivation for this unusual move is to make the topic more readable and to keep the discussion of the different parts of the problem into separate places.

Here are the lengths and contents of the four parts:-

Part 1 (1,800 words): introduction and cause summary.

Part 2 (8,000 words): I make the case for DPR, explain why it might do a lot of good and anticipate objections.

Part 3 (3,000 words): I’ll discuss how drug policy could and should be reformed and take a stab and its tractability and neglectedness.

Part 4 (3,500 words): I provide some simplistic but illustrative cost-effectiveness estimates comparing an imaginary campaign for DPR against current interventions for poverty, physical health and mental health; I also consider what EAs should do next.

[Edit 10/08/2017: this forum post originally contained what I above call parts 1 & 2 because Lee and I thought we should divide this topic into three posts. A commentator below suggested this was still too big and we should split this four ways; Lee and I agreed, so we've moved part 2 into a another forum post. This may make the comments from before 10/08/2017 slightly confusing, sorry.]

What follows is a summary of DPR as a cause area.

1. Summary

All around the world, governments restrict access to psychoactive drugs, drugs that change how you think or feel, because they deem them unsafe to the public. These are the sorts of things your parents probably told you to stay away from when you were growing up: LSD, magic mushrooms, cocaine, cannabis, ecstasy and so on. While a drug is anything that has a physiological effect on the body, by ‘drugs’ I am more narrowly referring to those that are both psychoactive and illegal. This rules out things like antibiotics (not psychoactive) and alcohol and caffeine (not typically illegal). Legality may change from country to country, though all countries nominally subscribe to the international scheduling and control of certain drugs under UN treaties. A full list of the drugs controlled by the UK government can be found here

Drug prohibition causes two sets of effects, each of I’ll claim causes unnecessary misery. The first comes from the fact these bans are (at least somewhat) successful in restricting access to drugs. They make it harder for people to use drugs for medical or recreational purposes or to conduct research into their impact.

The second surround the efforts required to enforce these bans. Governments worldwide have been a fighting a ‘War or Drugs’ since the 1960s, punishing those who try to create, transport, distribute or use drugs, often by putting them in prison, sometimes by killing them.

I think we can identify six separate pathways drug reform, either by changing what’s banned, or how those bans are enforced, could improve happiness. I’ll list these briefly and explain them in more detail in the next section, provide numbers and citations. 

  1. Fighting mental illness. Many currently illegal drugs, such as LSD and magic mushrooms, have shown great promise for treating mental health conditions in recent small-scale trials. The ability to conduct research or provide these to patients is greatly restricted by drug policies.
  2. Reducing pain. Many people in physical pain (and often dying from terminal illnesses) lack access to effective pain relief, such as morphine, again because governments restrict access. This is primarily a problem in the developing, rather than developed, world.
  3. Improving public health. Perversely, prohibition may cause more harm by pushing people towards more harmful drugs. Where addicts fear punishment, they don’t seek help.
  4. Reducing crime, violence, corruption and instability. The drug trade can destabilise entire drug-producing countries (e.g. Afghanistan, Columbia). In drug-consuming countries it creates a demand for criminal gangs to distribute drugs, turns recreational users into criminals, leads individual addicts to engage in petty crime (e.g. theft) to fund their habit and takes up the time and focus of police, courts, prisons and politicians.
  5. Raising revenue for governments. Governments around the world spend billions (unsuccessfully) fighting the war on drugs, both at home and abroad. If they stopped, they would save money. If they legalised (some) drugs and taxed them, governments would have much more money to spend on other policies.
  6. Recreational use. Many people unproblematically consume alcohol, a legal recreational drug, and think it improves their enjoyment of life. It’s possible (although uncertain) other drugs could increase happiness too.

As we can see, there are several different ways drug reform might do considerable good. Those who wish to claim we should maintain the status quo approach have a considerable task. It’s not sufficient to show one or two of above avenues fail. What’s needed is to show DPR is, on balance, bad. I’ll explore each of the six avenues in the next section and suggest the case for DPR seems strongly positive overall.

For those who think DPR is promising, there is still a very open question about what the best policies would be. There are a range of options here and the legal situation is slightly complicated, so I won’t explain this in any depth until part 2 in the series. For those what want some concrete suggestions to chew on, my current, tentative view is we should:

  • change the medical classification of several drugs, such as LSD, MDMA (‘ecstasy’), psilocybin (‘magic mushrooms’), so it’s much easier to conduct research on their effects and use them in treatment of mental illnesses.
  • improve access to morphine worldwide so it can be used to treat pain.
  • decriminalise, but not necessarily depenalise, all drugs and offering addiction treatment, rather than prison cells, to users.
  • legalise the less dangerous common recreational drugs, perhaps cannabis and ecstasy, and treating them like alcohol and tobacco; putting a minimum age limit on them and taxing them heavily.

In terms of neglectedness and tractability, I think this is (highly) neglected, both within effective altruism and the world as a whole. In contrast, tractability is up for debate. What’s ultimately required is changing the law, which requires changing public opinion. It’s not clear how much public opinion would need to change, what the best ways are to change it, or much this would cost (assuming money does help). Attitudes towards drugs are changing: many states in the USA are legalising weed, and there seems to be growing agreement the War on Drugs is a failure. Once we add to that the sudden de-stigmatisation of mental health and the realisation certain drugs, such as LSD, may offer new, cheaper, more effective treatments for mental health, we can suddenly see a few reasons to believe drugs policy reform is tractable now whilst it wasn’t before. There are still open questions on whether the best thing to do would be to fund a public advocacy group (e.g. the ACLU), a drug policy reform group (e.g. the Beckley Foundation), start a new EA organisation or fund clinical trials testing the safety and efficacy of drugs, or something else. I don’t have a firm view on this yet.

The final question is whether DPR does more good than other interventions EAs might support. I assume DPR would be of most interest to EAs who focus on benefiting humans alive today and therefore support poverty and physical health interventions (e.g. Give Directly, SCI and AMF). I produce some cost-effectiveness numbers which indicate funding a campaign for drug policy reform in the UK, if it costs less than £10bn, would be more cost-effective than giving money to AMF. This is on the assumption roughly $9,000 to AMF caused 45 years of happy life to be lived. Roughly then, if you think we could successful pull off a DPR campaign in the UK for less than £10bn (which, for what it’s worth, I do), you should think DPR is a more cost-effective than AMF. I stress this requires several assumptions I won’t discuss here but set out in part 3. Those with different assumptions will reach alternative conclusions and I encourage others to run their own numbers.

I’m uncertain whether those who currently believe X-risk or animal welfare are the top causes should believe DPR would do more good (in expectation) than their present priorities. This is because I don’t know how many times more cost-effective such people believe their causes are than near-term, human-focused alternatives. Hence, I’m unsure how many more times effective I would need to show DPR is than current options, such as AMF, before, say animal welfare advocates, would switch from animal welfare to DPR. I don’t touch on how DPR might help animals, but I do identify some ways DPR could benefit humanity over the long run in addition to how it should increase the happiness of humans alive today. In reality, I don’t expect to convert people who aren’t already focused on near-term human interventions, but I would invite such people to offer me some simplistic estimates explaining how much more effective their top causes are to improve the debate.

Links to the articles in this series:

Part 1 (1,800 words): Introduction and Summary.

Part 2 (8,000 words): Six Ways DPR Could Do Good And Anticipating The Objections

Part 3 (3,000 words): Policy Suggestions, Tractability and Neglectedess.

Part 4 (3,500 words): Estimating Cost-Effectiveness vs Other Causes; What EA Should Do Next.


[1] I’d like to thank to Sam Hilton, Eli Nathan, Konrad Seifert and Aaron Nesmith-Beck for their substantial written feedback and I’d like to thank Haydn Belfield and a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous for their comments on the argument overall.
 
[2] All the bad ones, obviously.
Comments15


Sorted by Click to highlight new comments since:

Thanks so very much for this Michael. I think it would be great if you had the Summary on a page by itself, with links to the three parts. Then it wouldn't be so intimidating.

point taken, this is now exactly what we're doing!

Some useful contacts in case you're interested (I could probably get you an intro if you like)

Hello Sanjay.

I'd like to speak to TDPF and your 'circus days' friend, that would be useful. Thanks for the Vienna declaration, of which I was unaware, too.

Re: "change the medical classification of several drugs, such as LSD, MDMA (‘ecstasy’), psilocybin (‘magic mushrooms’), so it’s much easier to conduct research on their effects and use them in treatment of mental illnesses."

I'm not sure about other countries, but under the US Controlled Substances Act, theoretically no drug is off-limits for medical research. The problem is that getting approval to conduct research on schedule I substances is very difficult. So the solution doesn't necessarily require rescheduling—Congress could pass a law making it easier to get approval.

Thanks for this. I'm only really familiar with the situation in the UK. If you can dig up some info on how things work in the US and what looks like is required there, that would be really helpful!

A lot of the heavy lifting in US law is being done here:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/823

TLDR it's possible to get a license to do research with schedule I drugs, but the licensing hurdles are higher than those for prescribing even schedule II drugs (which in the US includes cocaine and methamphetamine). Those hurdles could be lowered in various ways, perhaps with reference to the general procedures for researching new drugs described here:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/355

I have some background in the drugs space (in fact you'll see my face in the Channel 4 documentary about drug decriminalisation that was made about 7 years ago!)

The question I've never seen answered is this:

  • Alcohol is legal, and it gets used a lot. If other drugs were legal, might they also get used more, meaning that if even if the quality of the drugs were better and the support available were better, the number of people addicted may go up. If we believe that addiction is really bad (I do!) this is a worry. (Sorry if you've answered this, I haven't read everything fully)

Hello Sanjay,

We talk about this a bit in the health section of part 2, mentioning Portugal's decriminalisation and the use of psychedelics to treat addiction. Do we answer your questions there? if not, could I ask you to raise (further) concerns in that thread itself, just to centralise discussion for anyone else who reads this later.

FYI your footnotes are still links within a private document on file:///C:/Users/Michael/Dekstop.

ah, hadn't spotted that. Must have been caused by copying and pasting it across from a word doc. Can you suggest a way I can reformat it so clicking citations in text takes you down to the footnotes and clicking them in the footnotes takes you to where they are in the text?

https://delib.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205061169-Creating-footnotes-HTML-anchors

It might be possible to fix in a not-too-tedious way, by using find-replace in the source code to edit all of the broken links (and anchors?) at once.

If you delete the "file:///C:/Users/Michael/Desktop/drug%20policy%20reform%20part%201.docx" part in all the links it should work!

Wow. Thank you for doing this. After a quick skim, one question—re: the UK-style regime you mention addressing the fourth point in section 3, will you go into more detail on how that regime works in your next post?

We've rejigged the posts, sorry, so your comment now refers to text in the next part.

We don't go into more detail on how the UK regime works. What was it you wanted to know exactly?

Curated and popular this week
trammell
 ·  · 25m read
 · 
Introduction When a system is made safer, its users may be willing to offset at least some of the safety improvement by using it more dangerously. A seminal example is that, according to Peltzman (1975), drivers largely compensated for improvements in car safety at the time by driving more dangerously. The phenomenon in general is therefore sometimes known as the “Peltzman Effect”, though it is more often known as “risk compensation”.[1] One domain in which risk compensation has been studied relatively carefully is NASCAR (Sobel and Nesbit, 2007; Pope and Tollison, 2010), where, apparently, the evidence for a large compensation effect is especially strong.[2] In principle, more dangerous usage can partially, fully, or more than fully offset the extent to which the system has been made safer holding usage fixed. Making a system safer thus has an ambiguous effect on the probability of an accident, after its users change their behavior. There’s no reason why risk compensation shouldn’t apply in the existential risk domain, and we arguably have examples in which it has. For example, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) makes AI more reliable, all else equal; so it may be making some AI labs comfortable releasing more capable, and so maybe more dangerous, models than they would release otherwise.[3] Yet risk compensation per se appears to have gotten relatively little formal, public attention in the existential risk community so far. There has been informal discussion of the issue: e.g. risk compensation in the AI risk domain is discussed by Guest et al. (2023), who call it “the dangerous valley problem”. There is also a cluster of papers and works in progress by Robert Trager, Allan Dafoe, Nick Emery-Xu, Mckay Jensen, and others, including these two and some not yet public but largely summarized here, exploring the issue formally in models with multiple competing firms. In a sense what they do goes well beyond this post, but as far as I’m aware none of t
LewisBollard
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
> Despite the setbacks, I'm hopeful about the technology's future ---------------------------------------- It wasn’t meant to go like this. Alternative protein startups that were once soaring are now struggling. Impact investors who were once everywhere are now absent. Banks that confidently predicted 31% annual growth (UBS) and a 2030 global market worth $88-263B (Credit Suisse) have quietly taken down their predictions. This sucks. For many founders and staff this wasn’t just a job, but a calling — an opportunity to work toward a world free of factory farming. For many investors, it wasn’t just an investment, but a bet on a better future. It’s easy to feel frustrated, disillusioned, and even hopeless. It’s also wrong. There’s still plenty of hope for alternative proteins — just on a longer timeline than the unrealistic ones that were once touted. Here are three trends I’m particularly excited about. Better products People are eating less plant-based meat for many reasons, but the simplest one may just be that they don’t like how they taste. “Taste/texture” was the top reason chosen by Brits for reducing their plant-based meat consumption in a recent survey by Bryant Research. US consumers most disliked the “consistency and texture” of plant-based foods in a survey of shoppers at retailer Kroger.  They’ve got a point. In 2018-21, every food giant, meat company, and two-person startup rushed new products to market with minimal product testing. Indeed, the meat companies’ plant-based offerings were bad enough to inspire conspiracy theories that this was a case of the car companies buying up the streetcars.  Consumers noticed. The Bryant Research survey found that two thirds of Brits agreed with the statement “some plant based meat products or brands taste much worse than others.” In a 2021 taste test, 100 consumers rated all five brands of plant-based nuggets as much worse than chicken-based nuggets on taste, texture, and “overall liking.” One silver lining
 ·  · 6m read
 · 
Cross-posted from Otherwise. Most people in EA won't find these arguments new. Apologies for leaving out animal welfare entirely for the sake of simplicity. Last month, Emma Goldberg wrote a NYT piece contrasting effective altruism with approaches that refuse to quantify meaningful experiences. The piece indicates that effective altruism is creepily numbers-focused. Goldberg asks “what if charity shouldn’t be optimized?” The egalitarian answer Dylan Matthews gives a try at answering a question in the piece: “How can anyone put a numerical value on a holy space” like Notre Dame cathedral? For the $760 million spent restoring the cathedral, he estimates you could prevent 47,500 deaths from malaria. “47,500 people is about five times the population of the town I grew up in. . . . It’s useful to imagine walking down Main Street, stopping at each table at the diner Lou’s, shaking hands with as many people as you can, and telling them, ‘I think you need to die to make a cathedral pretty.’ And then going to the next town over and doing it again, and again, until you’ve told 47,500 people why they have to die.” Who prefers magnificence? Goldberg’s article draws a lot on author Amy Schiller’s plea to focus charity on “magnificence” rather than effectiveness. Some causes “make people’s lives feel meaningful, radiant, sacred. Think nature conservancies, cultural centers and places of worship. These are institutions that lend life its texture and color, and not just bare bones existence.” But US arts funding goes disproportionately to the most expensive projects, with more than half of the funding going to the most expensive 2% of projects. These are typically museums, classical music groups, and performing arts centers. When donors prioritize giving to communities they already have ties to, the money stays in richer communities. Some areas have way more rich people than others. New York City has 119 billionaires; most African countries have none. Unsurprisingly, Schill