Is there an evidence-based argument to support the continuation of the “War on Drugs” in America?
I saw this question asked on Facebook and it got me thinking about what is “evidence-based” when referring to an evidence based argument or policy and does an evidence-based argument even drive us to the best policies?
Let’s start with a definition of what evidence-based policy really is.
I think Wikipedia’s definition does a good job:
“Evidence-based policy (EBP) is a term that came to be widely used in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century. It has been applied in multiple fields of public policy to refer to the idea that policy decisions should be based on, or informed by, rigorously established objective evidence.”
The problem with any argument or policy that is “evidenced-based” is:
A) All reasonable arguments and policy should be evidence based, in that they are grounded in reality and supported by facts. Otherwise, your argument is just based on ideology and personal beliefs / feeling. Such an argument isn’t an argument at all... it’s just an opinion.
B) Facts and statistics can be easily misinterpreted, poorly analyzed, cherrypicked, manipulated, or even counterfeited to serve a narrative. Both sides of a dispute often have fairly reasonable looking “facts” backing up their arguments so how do you decide which set of facts is closer to the Truth? Sometimes this problem is simply that one side is better informed and the other side is misinformed, but more often each side is obtaining real facts about the same problem but they are measuring different sides of the problem. This goes back to the Buddhist parable of two blind men feeling an elephant. One touches its leg and states it’s a tree. The other touches its trunk and claims it’s a snake. Without ever checking what the other man was experiencing, the two men get into such a heated debate that they end up striking each other. The conclusions both men made seemed reasonable, given their limited information, but both ended up being fools.
Illustrator unknown - From The Heath readers by grades, D.C. Heath and Company (Boston)
C) Evidence in the form of facts and statistics are only informational. Facts can guide how we pursue a path but don’t produce the values for why we pursue that path. Each path that the facts put in front of us will have a different mixture of costs and benefits. Values are what end up guiding us to choose which benefits are worth their associated.
For example: When we are making a decision about what type of transportation we want to use for a cross-country trip, we could be given all of the data about the types of transportation (planes, trains, cars, bus, boat, etc.) and each’s price, speed, safety record, carbon footprint, convenience / comfort, risk of catching a disease, etc. But, the specific form of transportation you end up choosing will be dependent on which set of facts you find to be the most valuable. A person travelling for business may not want to be away from their family longer than necessary and choose the fastest mode of travel. Another person may be an environmental activists and choose the mode with the lowest carbon footprint. “Evidence” can only take us so far and thinking that there must be something wrong with a person who disagrees with you because your side is aligned with the “facts” is a very closedminded and often foolish perspective.
So to answer the original question:
The War on Drugs is currently unfavorable on the Left (because of the push for pot legalization) and on the Right (because of the growing strength of Libertarianism), so the current political climate is pretty unfavorable to the War on Drugs. However, if the War of Drugs became politically favorable, pundits would start cherry-picking numbers and constructing arguments. I can imagine some of these arguments would be something similar to, “the War on Drugs has been successful at preventing X crimes by putting N violent criminals behind bars” or “the War on Drugs prevented X car accidents and Y overdoses by removing Z drugs off of the street”. Such facts would be challenged by other fact-based narratives about examples of other countries with looser drug laws not having the health and mortality burdens predicted by the other side. Then the anti-drug side would return with how those other countries are not representative and so on and on.
The point is that the “facts” stop at the numbers we have observed. Everything else is prediction, speculation, theorizing, and, of course, value judgements. When a line has to be drawn in the sand, some people are more willing to accept to risks associated with drug legalization while other people are more comfortable paying the costs of the status quo. I think it’s intellectually dishonest to claim that one side of the argument is “evidence-based” and the other side is not.
