TL;DR:
- Alcohol $7.8b
- All illicits: $1.8b
- Meth: $0.365b
I wanted a figure for cannabis and found this from 2020:
- All illicits: $1.9b
- Meth: $0.824b
- Cannabis: $0.911
I notice that the per kilograms measure for harm is also useful to account for volume of usage, but think that per ‘dose’ would be better.
- Meth: $1.1m per kg with 743kg consumption
- Cannabis: $0.35m per kg with 58000kg consumption
These figures include ‘associative crime’ as harm. So it apparent counts the cost of buying it as harm, it also counts the tax loss of that expenditure, so IMHO it skews unfavourabley to higher expenditure. But put that aside.
These figures show that all illicit drugs combined are less harmful to society than alcohol, and tautologically the harm is inflated by illegality.
Heard an interesting perspective from a criminal lawyer on this. They think we should copy the Portugal model because meth is attracting the cartels like Sinaloa, and cartel presence normally corrupts police.
We have a tendency to use prison to handle all behaviour we don’t like, when realistically each behaviour has much more effective interventions, but it’s different per behaviour so it’s harder to organise and coordinate, and especially campaign on. It’s easier to just build more prisons, even if it’s not effective.
The trouble with that is, we get so much more crime this way. Like you say, there’s much better interventions.
I’m not sure that it’s just logistics and fear of the unknown (though given how long it took Aucklanders to be okay with building a subway, that obviously comes into play)!😀
But talking to people over the years I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a sizeable chunk of people for whom punishing criminals is much more important than having less crime. I can understand feeling that way, but emotions probably isn’t the best thing to base policy on.
A study in the US found that different judges gave vastly different sentences for the same crime. One of the factors they found is that sentences were very different depending on if the judge thought prison was for punishment vs prevention or rehabilitation.
The punishment angle is still very popular, even if we know that it makes crime worse long term. You can even see plenty of it on Lemmy in the right threads.