Would gun control work in the U.S.?

There are lots of studies that have been done looking at the effectiveness of gun control when it was implemented in the past. I will look over some of these below.

The first type I will discuss looked at what happens to death rates after gun control laws are passed. One such study design looks at trends in gun deaths before and after such laws are passed, as happened in Victoria, Australia from 1979 to 2000. During this time, two mass shootings occurred there, in 1988 and 1996, both of which led to gun control laws being passed. A 2004 study found that "Dramatic reductions in overall firearm related deaths and particularly suicides by firearms" occurred after these laws were passed. Another similar study found that after the gun control law Bill C-51 was enacted in Canada in 1977, gun suicide rates fell significantly. Similar results were found in yet another study of New Zealand's 1992 gun control law on gun suicides in that country. The study concluded, "Following the introduction of legislation restricting ownership and access to firearms, firearm-related suicides significantly decreased, particularly among youth." 

Some gun-rights advocates argue that people who want to kill themselves "often find a way to do so — guns or no guns." The implication is that gun control won't work because suicidal people will just switch to another means if they can't find a gun. However, a 2006 study of Australia's gun control laws found "No evidence of [a] substitution effect for suicides or homicides," and a 2003 study in the U.S. looking only at suicide, and a 1998 review, reached similar conclusions. A 2005 review also said that "the risk of substitution or displacement towards other methods seems small." 

Other studies have looked at the correlation between gun availability and homicide/suicide rates. Without citing any studies, the Cato Institute claims that "the facts show that there is simply no correlation between gun control laws and murder or suicide rates across a wide spectrum of nations and cultures." So does the evidence support this claim? A 2000 study found that "Across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides." Another study from 2002 found that "A disproportionately high number of 5–14 year olds died from suicide, homicide, and unintentional firearm deaths in states and regions where guns were more prevalent." There is also a more recent study which looked at 4 handgun laws (waiting periods, universal background checks, gun locks, and open carrying regulations) in the United States. This study found that "Each law was associated with significantly lower firearm suicide rates and the proportion of suicides resulting from firearms. In addition, each law, except for that which required a waiting period, was associated with a lower overall suicide rate."

I have gotten tired of writing this, because there are so many studies available on this subject, so I'll end it with a systematic review which concluded that "Access to firearms is associated with risk for completed suicide and being the victim of homicide." So much for guns making us safer. 

This post was originally going to be much longer, and address more arguments about both why (according to gun rights activists) gun control wouldn't work and whether it is constitutional. But then I got tired of doing research on this, and later of doing research on gun control's effectiveness, so I cut it short.
























Sources:


http://www.businessinsider.com/why-guns-are-a-divisive-issue-in-america-2015-7
http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/did-the-sandy-hook-shooting-prove-the-need-for-more-gun-control
http://www.usnews.com/debate-club/should-high-capacity-ammunition-magazines-be-banned
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/10/5/280.short
http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1993.72.3.787
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/j.1440-1614.2006.01782.x
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423192/gun-control-suicide-rates-ezra-klein
http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/12/6/365.short
http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203764804577059841672541590
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457505000400
http://journals.lww.com/jtrauma/Abstract/2000/12000/Firearm_Availability_and_Homicide_Rates_across_26.1.aspx

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/23/battleground-america

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/second_amendment
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/gun-control-myths-realities
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26270305

The case for and against legalizing marijuana (Part II: Economics)

Note: If you haven't read the first part of this series, do so now by clicking here.

A study by the ACLU found that enforcing marijuana possession laws cost the 50 states in the US $3.6 billion in 2010. (1) Even the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) (which opposes legalization) acknowledges this, but responds by saying that "While Federal, state, and local laws pertaining to marijuana do lead to criminal justice costs, it is important to understand how decriminalization or legalization might further exacerbate these costs.  Alcohol, a legal, carefully regulated substance, provides useful context for this discussion.  Arrests for alcohol-related crimes, such as violations of liquor laws and driving under the influence, totaled nearly 2.5 million in 2010 — far more than arrests for all illegal drug use, and certainly far more than arrests for marijuana-related crimes. It is therefore fair to suggest that decriminalizing or legalizing marijuana might not reduce the drug’s burden to our justice and public health systems with respect to arrests, but might increase these costs by making the drug more readily available, leading to increase [sic] use, and ultimately to more arrests for violations of laws controlling its manufacture, sale, and use." (2) The problem is that not only did this not happen in Colorado after marijuana was legalized in 2012, marijuana arrests dropped there by 95%. (3)

As discussed in the previous post in this series, marijuana legalization would lead to increased use. (4)(5) As also discussed in the previous post, marijuana is not harmless, so there would be adverse public health effects if marijuana use was legalized. So how bad would they be? One way to answer this, or at least try to do so, is look at the economic cost of such effects.

Some opponents of legalization warn that it would lead to an increase in drugged driving. However, in Colorado, after marijuana was legalized, highway deaths actually dropped considerably. (6)  

Then there is the clearest economic benefit from legalization--tax revenue. Just this past June, Colorado collected $9.7 million in marijuana sales taxes. (7) The legal marijuana industry in Colorado has an estimated value of $700 million. (8) And yet the ONDCP still says that "research suggests that the economic costs associated with use of the drug could far outweigh any benefit gained from an increase in tax revenue." (2) They then go on to claim that illegal drugs cost America $193 billion in 2007, and although the link provided is dead, I was able to revive it through the Wayback Machine. (9) It seems that the word "marijuana" is used a total of 4 times in this document (which was produced by the now-defunct National Drug Intelligence Center, a division of the DOJ), and each time, nothing specific is said about this drug's impact as compared with that of other illicit drugs. Therefore, it seems misleading to conflate marijuana with other illegal drugs in this way as the ONDCP does. 

The ONDCP then cites a RAND Corporation report (10) which found that marijuana legalization in California would probably lower the price of marijuana (before tax) by more than 80%. Presumably, what they are arguing is that if the price drops, revenue will be much lower than expected as well because taxes are proportionate to price. They then say that "higher prices help keep use rates relatively low." In other words, a decrease in price, such as the one predicted by RAND, would, according to the ONDCP's logic, seem to lead to an increase in use. Sure, this might, conceivably, lead to more adverse health effects among the public, but it would also lead to more tax revenue being collected. 

But perhaps the most misleading argument advanced by the ONDCP is an implicit equating of marijuana with alcohol in the following analysis: "The tax revenue collected from alcohol pales in comparison to the costs associated with it.  Federal excise taxes collected on alcohol in 2009 totaled around $9.4 billion; state and local revenues from alcohol taxes totaled approximately $5.9 billion.  Taken together ($15.3 billion), this is just over six percent of the nearly $237.8 billion adjusted for 2009 inflation) in alcohol-related costs from health care, treatment services, lost productivity, and criminal justice." (2) The implication is that legalizing marijuana would lead to huge societal costs because of the harms of marijuana and their huge economic costs. Presumably, if marijuana is illegal and alcohol legal, the ONDCP would have us believe that, despite the evidence discussed last post, the economic cost of alcohol is less than that of marijuana! As mentioned above, this seriously undermines their credibility because the two drugs are quite different. 

Let's review: enforcing marijuana laws is expensive and way fewer people would be arrested for violating these laws if marijuana were legalized, as the Colorado experience shows. More people would use it, but Colorado's experience also suggests that the effects on driving wouldn't be as bad as some had predicted. Maybe we wouldn't make as much money from taxes because the price would go down, but if that does happen, use will go up, which would counteract the price decrease and make tax revenue go back up. Saying that it will be just like alcohol only makes sense if they are both equally harmful, but they aren't. And the boost to the economy independent of taxes would be significant as well. Economically, like medically, there doesn't seem to be a very good argument against keeping marijuana illegal.



Sources:
1. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/04/marijuana-arrests-cost-racially-biased_n_3385756.html
2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/frequently-asked-questions-and-facts-about-marijuana
3. http://www.ibtimes.com/marijuana-arrests-colorado-down-95-legalization-arrest-rates-still-twice-high-blacks-1866294
4. http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR770.html
5. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1360-0443.2011.03561.x/abstract
6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/08/05/since-marijuana-legalization-highway-fatalities-in-colorado-are-at-near-historic-lows/
7. http://time.com/4003262/colorado-pot-revenue/
8. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/12/colorados-legal-weed-market-700-million-in-sales-last-year-1-billion-by-2016/
9. http://web.archive.org/web/20110526175318/http://www.justice.gov/ndic/pubs44/44731/44731p.pdf
10. http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2010/RAND_OP315.pdf

The case for and against legalizing marijuana (Part I: health)

The issue of whether to legalize marijuana (recreationally, not medically, to be clear) is a depressingly politicized one, which I will try to get to the bottom of here (though this is of course a task far too daunting for one blog post, so I won't cover everything out of necessity). At least one politician has been caught claiming that marijuana is "infinitely worse" than tobacco. (1) But if you read the New York Times (which 1.87 million people do every day) (3) you may hear that in criminalizing marijuana the federal government has "inflict[ed] great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol." (4) The implication to all these statements is that legal drugs should be those that aren't that harmful compared to their illegal counterparts. So are there any studies comparing the safety of marijuana with that of legal drugs?

The answer appears to be yes, but not as many as one would expect, given that this issue is so important with respect to drug laws and so widely discussed. Or at least, I would expect. One of the most highly publicized studies in this area was published earlier this year, to considerable media attention. (5) Its conclusions were that alcohol and tobacco are considerably more harmful than marijuana. In fact, at one point, the authors say that alcohol is the highest-risk drug, while pot is the lowest-risk one. They also point out that their results are in line with those of Nutt et al., (6) whose (also highly publicized) results found that marijuana was overall the 8th most dangerous drug, with alcohol and tobacco in 1st and 6th places, respectively. 

So what does this mean? If it is true that, as discussed above, marijuana is safer than tobacco or alcohol, does that mean we have to legalize it? Not necessarily, because economic issues could arise that would make doing so unfeasible, and this will be discussed in the next post. Nevertheless, it suggests that our current drug laws don't really make sense, as Nutt et al. noted ("the findings correlate poorly with present UK drug classification, which is not based simply on considerations of harm.") (6) So there are two ways to fix this: we could make alcohol illegal, or we could make the illegal drugs that are less dangerous than it legal (or both). The former, of course, has already been tried, and it failed--or at least that's what everyone thinks. Even the Times started out its pro-legalization op-ed by saying that "It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished." (4) Since this post is about health, I will focus on three words in the previous quote: "people kept drinking". The problem with this claim is that it's not true: alcohol consumption plummeted during prohibition, as did death rates from cirrhosis and hospital admissions for alcoholic psychosis. (7) 

So this means that, presumably, making something illegal makes people use it less, and vice versa. For this reason, the White House argues that "Increased availability and acceptability of marijuana would likely lead to increased consumption of the drug," which, in turn, "leads to higher public health and financial costs for society." (8)

The research suggests that marijuana is not harmless, but that it is nowhere near as harmful as tobacco or alcohol, both of which are, of course, legal. This in-between status makes it hard to decide what to do with it--legalization advocates want to drag it to the (almost) harmless side, but their opponents want to exaggerate its dangers.

I think that marijuana legalization is justifiable from a public health perspective only if we make alcohol and tobacco (which kill 3.3 million (9) and almost 6 million people per year (10)) illegal, in order to be consistent. At the very least, keeping it in the schedule I category is clearly unjustifiable.

Part 2 of this series will be titled "The case for and against legalizing marijuana (Part II: economics)".

Sources

1. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-marijuana-legalization-canada-mexico-perspec-1108-20151106-column.html

2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/ondcp-fact-sheets/marijuana-legalization

3. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-04-30/new-york-times-leads-major-newspapers-with-18-circulation-gain

4. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/high-time-marijuana-legalization.html

5. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311234/

6. http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(10)61462-6/abstract (full text http://www.sg.unimaas.nl/_old/oudelezingen/dddsd.pdf)

7. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/16/opinion/actually-prohibition-was-a-success.html

8. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/ondcp/issues-content/marijuana_and_public_health_one_pager_-_final.pdf

9. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs349/en/

10. http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/fast_facts/

Obligatory Introductory Post

I have decided to start a blog that will focus on pretty much everything, especially medicine and politics.

My name is Jinkinson Payne Smith. I am 20 at the time of writing this, and I am in college. I am a biology major who wants to go into epidemiology after graduating, which I hope to do in 2017. I frequently edit Wikipedia (username Everymorning, formerly Jinkinson). [Update: Now 22, and have updated this to better describe new scope.]