Wednesday, May 29, 1996
Soon-to-be UCLA Prof. Mark Kleiman suggests a more 'rational' approachBy Phillip Carter
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Crime and drugs pervade nearly every area of the American consciousness, coming to dominate political campaigns, classroom discussions and the ordinary routines of average Californians.
In recent years, a cadre of academic experts on crime and drug control strategies has emerged, including Harvard Professor Mark Kleiman, whose provocative work at the Kennedy School of Government has led to his recruitment for the fledgling UCLA School of Public Policy and Social Research.
From treating drug users to sentencing hard-core felons, Kleiman's work advocates for a more "rational" approach to crime policy. In an interview with the Daily Bruin, he discussed these views, as well as his reasons for leaving Harvard University for UCLA.
Q. You have recently been part of a policy task force on the "addiction problem." What do you see as the roots or causes of that problem?
A. The cause of addiction to some sense is the interaction between some chemicals and the nervous system. Scientists will tell you countless stories about the way that works.
The ordinary idea we have about the way that human beings behave assumes that a normal, healthy adult human is capable of managing his or her own behavior in some way that serves his or her own interests as self-perceived. That's "Economic Man" capable of maximizing utility given preferences subject to constraints ...
We all know in our own lives of instances where we're well short of rationality. It doesn't really make sense to write a paper by staying up all night the night before it's due, but probably more than one of your readers has done that. Probably, more than one of our readers on the faculty has done that. Procrastination is an obvious example of where actual behavior doesn't match rational behavior.
I think we can make a list of situations where people fall short of rationality the narrow sort of self-interested rationality systematically more often than they do in average areas. Think of the type of things that people get in trouble with: sex, booze, money, drugs. Probably a longer list. If you compare the ways people actually spend their time with the way people intend to spend their time, they don't match very well.
So take drugs as a specific example. You've got this class of chemicals that produce changes in the nervous system that are pleasurable. The pleasure is immediate and pretty reliable, and the costs are long-term and not obvious and statistical. Most times you drive drunk, nothing bad happens. At some cognizant rational level, you know that driving drunk is a stupid thing to do. But on an experiential level, the last six times you did it, nothing bad happened to you.
Q. If people act irrationally and don't respond to conventional coercion, how can government deal with them?
A. With great difficulty. You've got a class of behaviors with immediate benefits and long-term costs, so you expect a mismatch between actual behavior and rationality. You've got another problem which is intoxication. The specific pleasures of some sorts of drugs, alcohol being the classic example, involve a reduction in foresight; a reduction in the capacity to take the future into account in making pressed decisions.
Think back to the way we try to control people's behavior with threats and sanctions. If someone gets drunk, he's less amenable to being controlled by threats. So we say, "If you drive drunk, we'll punish you." And the punishments are pretty serious. That's enough to deter any reasonable person from driving drunk. And in fact, most people, if they make the decision to drive drunk or not while they're still sober, will decide not to.
But if they have to decide while they're drunk, they're going to make a lot of mistakes. That means that if you want to prevent the very dangerous behavior of driving drunk, you have to prevent the less dangerous behavior of getting drunk. If you remember that someone gets drunk alone not intending to drive may, while drunk, decide to drive, and we all agree that driving drunk is a bad thing we have to move back from controlling people driving drunk to controlling the behavior of drinking. That's hard to do, so you have to take another step back to controlling the price and availability of alcohol.
In order to prevent a very limited incidence of people misbehaving while drunk, we have to prevent a large number of people from doing completely harmless and pleasurable things.
Q. It's obvious from all indices that current drug policies aren't working. Indeed, juvenile drug use the most dangerous indicator seems to be on the rise. How would you critique our current illicit drug policies?
A. For the illicit drugs, our policies are now concentrating on interfering with supply to keep people from using the drugs at all. That may be reasonable, but remember, it's not what we're really aiming for. I think we should worry about people getting damaged or behaving bad.
You've got to fit the policies to the moment. What's difficult is that one of the techniques we use to keep people from using cocaine is to tell them fairy stories about how horrible cocaine is and how it will make you use addictively the first time you try it. That's not true. Most people don't get addicted, and nobody gets addicted the first time.
Now it's true that a lot of people have that first experience and it's so powerful that they want to try it again right away, but that's not addiction. We tell people fairy stories to keep people from using drugs, but the fairy stories then enter into the policy debate as well.
Remember that the same population that we're addressing as potential drug consumers and trying to convince not to use these things ... are also voters. The exaggerations of the drug prevention education effort get fed back into the policy development process.
Q. That seems to happen though in every area of policy, from education to taxes. What are the special implications of that for drug policy?
A. Irrational policy. We wind up making policies based not on the realities of the drugs, but on the exaggerations and oversimplifications that are used to prevent drug abuse. The alcohol-temperance movement, for example, went from saying "Drunkenness is a bad thing" to finally saying "Alcohol is a bad thing."
It's not obvious that they were wrong in their choice of means ... It turns out that if you interview very heavy chronic drinkers, they regard themselves as moderate drinkers. A (professor) at the Harvard School of Public Health did this huge study on 400 college campuses and identified binge drinkers and heavy binge drinkers. When he looked at the heavy binge drinkers (most of them were reporting substantial alcohol-related problems), most of them regarded themselves as "moderate" drinkers. There's a problem with a "moderation" message that people define anything up to twice what they drink as moderate.
But the result of the temperance movement's decision that temperance had to be absolute ... that shift led to prohibition. It led to saying "Look, alcohol is bad, so we're going to make it illegal." The moralistic strain in American politics makes it much easier to say "This is bad, therefore we're going to prohibit it," than saying "This is risky, therefore we're going to regulate it."
Q. One thing that has come out of former-General Barry McCaffrey's Drug Czar office recently has been how he wants to keep going after supply, but refocus especially hard on demand. How effective do you think that's going to be?
A. That's not new. The notion that we need both supply and demand efforts is a classic one. McCaffrey deeply believes in treatment. I think McCaffrey is clearly right to say that we are underinvesting in treatment. Part of the reason that we're underinvesting in treatment is that we've insisted that the only goal of treatment is abstinence. In fact, treatment provides a whole range of benefits for people who don't eventually quit.
If you can take someone who's currently using $50 of heroin a day, sharing needles, engaging in unprotected sex and stealing to support his habit, and get him on a methadone program, get him some counseling, and as a result, he goes down to $10 of heroin a day which he can support out of work earnings rather than stealing for it isn't sharing needles and is more careful sexually, by our current scoring system, this is a failure because the guy's still using. But we've reduced the flow of social damage coming from that person by 80 percent or 90 percent. That ought to count as a success.
Q. What you're in effect saying is that the goal of these drug-treatment programs shouldn't be a complete cure; it should be the incremental reduction of drug use.
A. The clinical goal may have to be some sort of complete cure. That may be what the drug counselor says to the drug addict. But if you're standing outside evaluating the program, lots of times when that goal isn't reached, you're still providing enormous social value. And if we started counting the benefits of that, I think drug treatment would look a lot better ...
I think the mistake that we (make) is assuming that all of our demand-side programs have to be facilitative, rather than coercive. If people don't want to quit, we probably need to help them quit as well. And we need to do that coercively. For example, a person is convicted of burglary, and takes a drug test at arrest and tests positive. The judge will send him to prison or not send him to prison. Right now in California, with all of the cells full of third-strikers, probably not. If he doesn't go to prison, I'd like that person for the next two years to be under specific order to abstain from cocaine and other illicit drugs, under twice-a-week testing, and under a rule that every time he's positive or misses a test, he's going to spend two days in jail. I think you could cut down on abuse of cocaine a lot without using treatment resources which are scarce. If treatment were available, life would be better. But a lot of people can do just fine if they're told to quit, and in fact, everything is backed up with punishment.
And if he does go to prison, I'd like him to be on this kind of program when he gets out. I think we can shrink the amount of cocaine used in this country by about 40 percent if we do just that.
If we took all the drug-addicted offenders arrested in a given year, and put them on a program of testing and sanctions, we can really have an impact.
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Q. Harvard's mystique tends to grow the farther you travel from Harvard, so it's very large here in California. The school has been able to lure a lot of faculty away from UCLA and the UC system. Could you describe what is so special about Harvard that enables its legacy to continue?
A. Governor (Pete) Wilson has given a lot of encouragement to faculty to leave. It was as much the budget-cut situation (in California) that has helped Harvard than anything. It would be interesting to study the rate of departures over time.
Harvard has been around for a long time, and it's pretty relentlessly managed for excellence. And that's important. Harvard is a god that demands human sacrifice. People there are prepared to sacrifice themselves and others on the altar. It would be wonderful to build a place as dedicated to excellence and a little less brutal about it. But if you want to make an economic model about it, given that Harvard has a good reputation, people want to be there both students and faculty. Given that individuals want to be there, it has a good reputation.
Q. Can a school like UCLA compete with that legacy, given that we're so much younger, so much less endowed with money and so far removed from the Ivy League?
A. As I think about the practical problems of starting a school of public policy, you have to make sure that you take only extremely smart students, because the quality of the students we take will establish the reputation of the place in the eyes of employers, who are, after all, our customers.
FRED HE/Daily Bruin
If people don't want to quit, we probably need to help them quit as well.
Mark Kleiman
Harvard Professor