De-criminalization of Drugs?

[Michael Agar]

All due respect, for a critical view a reader needs to go beyond RAND. Some of many good examples based on solid research:

The FIX : SOLVING THE NATION'S DRUG PROBLEM (Hardcover)
by Michael Massing

The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Paperback)
by Alfred W. McCoy "

Smoke and Mirrors : The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Paperback)
by Dan Baum

And for Roger--It was fascinating to watch NIDA pioneer much of brain science, and climb gratefully into the non-political lab science category at NIH, with the discovery that neurotransmitters like endorphins, dopamine and seratonin were stimulated by those plants that people liked to drink and chew and smoke--in age old traditional pattens--and synthesize and inject in more modern times. It's said that no sooner did they invent writing in Sumer than they mentioned that opium was good medication but also a lot  of fun. I haven't looked at the original (:

Mike

>>> gd17 at andrew.cmu.edu 12/22/05 8:17 PM >>>
Owen asked for serious research on the subject of drug policy. Some of the
best is done by RAND, including that by my colleague at Carnegie Mellon, Jon
Caulkins. See
http://www.rand.org/multi/dprc/pubs/trends_national_1996-00.html

Cheers, George


On 12/22/05, Roger Critchlow <rec at elf.org> wrote:

>
> On 12/22/05, Michael Agar <magar at anth.umd.edu> wrote:
> > No question but that the US "War on Drugs" has been and continues to be
> > a spectacular failure on several grounds. New Mexico, by the way, is
> > famous among drug policy reformers nationally, partly because of Gary
> > Johnson's comparatively sane ideas, partly because of the endemic and
> > destructive concentration of heroin addiction in Rio Arriba. The
> > questions around the shape drug policy reform should take and its many
> > consequences go on and on, You could check out the sanest reform lobby
> > in the US, the Drug Policy Alliance, www.drugpolicy.org, if you're
> > interested.
>
> One of the more startling factoids that turned up in the past month
> was this article in PLOS Biology:
>
>
> http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0030387
> -----------------------
> Ancient and Recent Positive Selection Transformed Opioid
> cis-Regulation in Humans
>
> Changes in the cis-regulation of neural genes likely contributed to
> the evolution of our species' unique attributes, but evidence of a
> role for natural selection has been lacking. We found that positive
> natural selection altered the cis-regulation of human prodynorphin,
> the precursor molecule for a suite of endogenous opioids and
> neuropeptides with critical roles in regulating perception, behavior,
> and memory. Independent lines of phylogenetic and population genetic
> evidence support a history of selective sweeps driving the evolution
> of the human prodynorphin promoter. In experimental assays of
> chimpanzee*human hybrid promoters, the selected sequence increases
> transcriptional inducibility. The evidence for a change in the
> response of the brain's natural opioids to inductive stimuli points to
> potential human-specific characteristics favored during evolution. In
> addition, the pattern of linked nucleotide and microsatellite
> variation among and within modern human populations suggests that
> recent selection, subsequent to the fixation of the human-specific
> mutations and the peopling of the globe, has favored different
> prodynorphin cis-regulatory alleles in different parts of the world.
> -----------------------
> So, we may have language, we may use tools, but natural selection has
> been making us into opioid factories.
>
> -- rec --
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at Mission Cafe
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
>

--
George T. Duncan
Professor of Statistics
Heinz School of Public Policy and Management
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
[phone]