I don’t normally return to posts this soon, but the March issue of Prospect magazine has an interesting take on the story. Elizabeth Pisani argues that users effectively internalise an assessment of the harm of drugs in their behaviour – and the police follow. There are a couple of  extracts from her article below the fold.

Elizabeth Pisani writes:

At the time [ecstasy came on the market in the late 70s] the drugs advisory council worried that ecstasy—Methylenedioxymethamphetamine or MDMA to its regulators, and simply “e” to its friends—would be the next LSD. The government slapped it in the class A category of drugs, along with heroin and cocaine… Consumers, on the other hand, found that it was nothing like LSD, heroin or crack. It doesn’t make the street turn into a spinning, multicoloured fairground as LSD can, it doesn’t make you zone out as smack will and it doesn’t make you want to thump someone, as crack so often does. The worst it does is make you hug a lot of strangers and dance for hours to really bad doof-doof music. Most of the 20 or so annual deaths attributed to ecstasy are caused by dehydration on the dance floor.

The science has caught up with what users have found out for themselves, and the police seem to have followed, Pisani suggests. It’s only the government which is out of step:

The drug advisory council’s review, commissioned by the government and published in February, found that, for the vast majority of users, ecstasy is neither addictive, nor does it cause permanent damage to the brain or any other organ. As long as it’s not mixed with other drugs, it doesn’t have much effect on driving—nothing like as much as a couple of pints. And at around £10 for three pills, almost everyone buys ecstasy with money that they’ve earned rather than stolen, so the crime factor is low too. … The police appear to have grasped this: 37 per cent of those booked for ecstasy possession are let off with a caution, compared to only 17 per cent for heroin. So consumers, police and scientists all seem to agree: ecstasy is a much more “do-able” drug than others in class A. But the government, in its infinite wisdom, knows better.

And of course there was a similar story about the downgrading of cannabis, in which Brian Paddick, as Commander in Lambeth, changed the policy – as a pilot scheme – on how his force dealt with possession of cannabis. The police then extended the trial scheme to other areas. The change in policing meant the law had to follow.

Thanks to Joe Ballantyne for the tip on Prospect.

Update 9 April 2009: The drugs activist group Transform has produced a report based on government and other official evidence arguing that the the benefit of de-criminalising drugs (legalising and regulating them) is between £4.5bln and £14 billion – compared to the current model. The report is a direct challenge to the prevailing Home Office assumption, stated last year:

‘The benefits of… [legalisation/regulation] – such as taxation, quality control and a reduction in the pressures on the criminal justice system – are far outweighed by the costs and for this reason, it is one that this Government will not pursue either domestically or internationally.”

There’s a news report here; Transform’s summary is on its blog, along with links to media and blog coverage, and to the full report. From a futures point of view it seems quite a smart attempt to push the legalisation issue slightly further towards the mainstream from the edge.

Data released to mark “World Day Against The Death Penalty”, last Thursday, shows that 94 countries have abolished the death penalty in law (Albania, Rwanda, and the Cook Islands have joined the list during 2008) while another forty no longer execute offenders although they retain the right to do so.

Worldwide there were around 1,250 executions, of which almost nine-tenths took place in five countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States. China leads on this grisly league table, while there are 7,500 people on death row in Pakistan.

Most of the related trends suggest that the world is moving, slowly, away from judicial murder. In Europe only one state, Belarus, still retains the death penalty (abolition is a condition of EU membership). According to Amnesty, in central Asia a number of countries have restricted use of the death penalty: Kyrgyzstan has abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes, Kazakhstan has had a moratorium on executions since 2003, and Tajikistan has had moratoriums on executions and death sentences since 2004. In Africa, the high court in Malawi has declared the mandatory death penalty unconstitutional while Burundi, Gabon and Mali are taking steps towards abolition.

And even in the Unites States, the number of executions fell to 53 in 2006, from a peak in the 1990s; it is the only country in the Americas to use the death penalty. Japan, meanwhile, seems to be running against trend, with an apparent increase in judicial execution.

I first came across this chart which working on a set of scenarios for Foresight’s Brain Science, Addiction and Drugs project a few years ago – perhaps not surprisingly since Professor David Nutt. one of its creators, was a project adviser. (The other creator is Colin Blakemore, a former Chief Executive of Britain’s Medical Research Council.) The version here is from the Royal Society for the Arts’ Commission on drugs, published last year.

If the UK had a sensible drugs policy, there would be a reasonable correspondence between the colours and the ‘harm’ levels (the scores along the left hand edge); A-classification blacks would congregate at the left hand side, unclassifieds towards the right hand, with perhaps a few where their ‘external’ costs had changed their social impact and therefore their classification. The actual correlation is little better than random. The reason – several decades of knee-jerk political responses to drugs issues by successive Home Secretaries. Anthony Barnett has a wry post about this over at Our Kingdom. And, for the record, cannabis consumption in the UK is declining, according to the British Crime Survey, even if some strains are getting stronger.

I haven’t yet read the book, so this post is based on sampling the reviews. The data – as best as can be assembled – suggests that organised crime accounts for 15-20% of the global economy. Other data points (from the Sunday Times’ review):

The EU estimates that identity theft generates £25 billion a year in profits worldwide. Fake goods, from aircraft spares to spurious Harry Potter stories, are worth up to £250 billion annually. China is responsible for 60% of the market in stolen intellectual property.

The causes: a combination of opening up the global economy in the 1980s and the end of the cold war, in particular the collapse of the Soviet Union and the very selective deregulation of the Russian economy. As Anthony Andrew explained (in The Observer):

All price restrictions were removed by government, except those of Russia’s natural resources: oil, gas, diamonds and metals. Overnight, a vast number of Russians were impoverished, while a tiny minority was able to buy up vital commodities at up to 40 times less than their global market price. ‘This process of enrichment,’ Glenny writes, ‘was quite simply the grandest larceny in history and stands no historical comparison.’ In turn the oligarchs required protection, and jailbirds and former KGB agents alike moved into the lucrative if deadly business of the ‘kryshy’ protection rackets, or ‘armed entrepreneurs’.After the failure of the Soviet Union, in which the law was subordinate to shifting party requirements, Russia effectively privatised crime.

$5bln passed through the Israeli economy from eastern Europe following the Communist collapse; an estimated $20bln went to Switzerland. But other oligarchic states do well as well; 150-250,000 barrels of Nigerian oil go missing every day (at around $100 a barrel this all adds up to a tidy amount pretty quickly). But the drugs trade is the driver; 70% of the black economy is fuelled by drugs money.

David Goldblatt (in the Independent) picks up on the globalisation point:

Our misfortune is that the explosive growth of this shadow economy coincided with the deregulation and globalisation of financial markets. … On every page Glenny lays bare human mendacity and greed, failing or failed police forces and judicial systems. But, just as surely, he takes us to the insatiable maw of the North as consumer of cheap labour, cheap sex and cheap drugs. He makes us see a grotesque irony of globalisation; that the very people made rich by the global economy return to its illegal shadow to sate the insecurities and neuroses of their opulence.

The losers, of course, are also hidden in the shadows: Chinese migrant labourers and their gang-masters, the trafficked Moldavian prostitute in Tel Aviv. All of this seems to me to be something of a blindspot in many readings of the global economy, the State of the Future notwithstanding. And even when we see the symptoms, as we did for a moment after the Morecambe Bay tragedy, the response is muted. Any effective response would have to be political, as John Dickie argues in the Guardian:

McMafia amasses an irresistible weight of evidence to support some simple but telling conclusions. Transnational crime is a far bigger threat than terrorism. Offshore banking havens should be shut down. Capitalism without sound law enforcement is banditry. Tooting cocaine, visiting prostitutes and hiring untaxed immigrant maids are no mere peccadillos. And for any politician who hankers after immigration controls or yet another war on drugs, Glenny has a blunt message: it’s the black economy, stupid.

And probably transnational as well. It’s probably not “misfortune” (and I suspect Goldblatt was being ironic) that the growth in organised crime has gone hand in hand with the financial deregulation that was an essential component of the latest wave of globalisation. They go hand in hand. In structural terms, organised crime operates in the gap between where “fair markets” have failed, and where politics and jurisprudence are not accountable. The Salon review has a relevant quote from the book:

“For globalization to work, the world needs to be a level playing field: the West has to stop its protectionist practices and it has to reassess its resistance to the free, or at least a freer, movement of labor. The developing world in turn needs to address the issue of corruption and the strengthening of the rule of law. This raises the awkward question of global governance and standards that might be compatible across the world.”

The Times has a podcast of Glenny talking about his research.

The UK Gambling Commission finds no increase in prevalence of addiction – but uncovers some interesting contradictions in attitudes; perceptions of UK child poverty, and cyber-bullying moves in from the edge; the UN takes on corruption in Africa; booming demand for global shipping capacity; and a folksong take on honour killing.

Almost the first act of the new UK Gambling Commission has been to release its study on the prevalence of problem gambling in the UK. It found that the prevalence was about 0.5% of the adult population, which is the same as in 1999. Problem gamblers tended towards spread betting, fixed odds betting terminals, and betting exchanges. The attitudinal findings may be most interesting: “The average view [among respondents] was that gambling was more harmful than beneficial for individuals, and for society, and should not be encouraged. However, generally people surveyed agreed that there was a right to gamble and rejected total prohibition.”

A curiosity of the way in which the Dare to Care campaign’s findings on children’s perceptions of child poverty was reported was that newspapers seemed more interested in the 20% of 7-16 year olds who thought not having a mobile phone was a sign of a poverty than the larger proportions who thought that not going to be able to go on a trip (44%), not having the right school uniform (40%), not being able to afford a present for a birthday party (28%) or not having a safe place to play (24%) were signs of poverty. The size of the national sample (700) didn’t really sustain the rather wild regional variations which were included in the news release.

UK government research (by the Department of Children, Schools and Families) found that up to a third of 12-to-15 year olds had experienced some form of ‘cyber-bullying’ – through mobile messages or social networking sites. It’s launched a campaign against it. That single data point is all that seems to be available.

The United Nations and the World Bank have launched ‘StAR’ – the Stolen Asset Recovery initiative – o help poor countries recover money looted from their economies through corruption. The scale of the problem? The World Bank estimates that between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion from corruption, crime, and tax evasion crosses borders – up to 25% of GNP of some African states. TED.com has a video of a presentation by Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, sometime finance minister of Nigeria, on why recovery schemes are about more than the money involved

I blogged recently about the long-term growth in shipping volumes. The Guardian has a report on the current short term growth, which seems explosive. Here’s an extract:

Shipowners were celebrating more records last night as booming trade volumes with China – and increasingly India – brought unprecedented demand and a shortage of vessels. The London-based shipping market – the Baltic Exchange – confirmed that its dry bulk index that tracks the cost of shipping commodities such as iron ore and coal, had hit an all-time high at 99,215 points, up 133 points on the day… “The records are beginning to be broken on an almost daily basis,” said Jeremy Penn, chief executive of the Baltic. “It is absolutely booming and almost beyond explanation.”

Reports on the sentencing of an Indian woman resident in the UK for the honour killing of her daughter in law bring to mind a sleeve note on Martin Simpson’s fine new CD Prodigal Son. He writes about “Andrew Lammie”, an old Scots ballad based on real people and real events which (as he points out) unmistakably tells the story of an honour killing in the 17th century.

According to a report published by Liberty (press release here, but report not apparently available online). 48% agreed that “the Government and the public sector hold too much information about me”. (Weighted online survey of 2510 adults conducted by YouGov.)

Anthony Barnett, whose post at Our Kingdom alerted me to the Liberty report – while suggesting that Liberty wasn’t that hot on publicity, quotes an article by the journalist Henry Porter in which Porter says, “The personal information of innocent people, their digital footprints, their movements, as well as the things consenting adults get up to must not be allowed to become the property of the state.”

The creeping nature of the state and its data collection on individuals – in the shape of the DNA database – is also the concern of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics – an expert group which has suggested that people found not guilty should have their DNA samples removed from the UK’s national DNA database – to protect the innocent. The group also said that people convicted of minor crimes should not have their DNA stored on the database. The report and executive summary (in PDF) can be downloaded from here.

So it’s perhaps not surprising, perhaps, that a thousand tomorrows notes – from their base in Antwerp – that the UK’s surveillance technology is only a couple of steps away, if that, from the ‘pre-crime’ world of Philip K Dick’s story Minority Report, in which individuals who show signs of behaviour which are associated with latent criminal behaviour are arrested before they can commit their crime. The latest public surveillance technology, it says, is about pattern recognition.

And it’s also possible to make a worrying connection with some of the offender-based algorithms used in some US states to decided whether prisoners are likely to offend again. These are described in a recent article by Ian Ayres, the author of Super Crunchers (extract published in Financial Times here). In Virginia, those deemed likely to commit a sex crime are promptly locked up again in a state mental hospital. Ayres reports that the one person who was deemed by a judge no longer to be a danger and released subsequently did commit another sex crime. Leaving unanswered, of course, the question about the others whom the algorithm has ratified, potentially incorrectly, as serious risks, or the social, personal, and institutional biases which lean towards incarcerating people based on a risk profile rather than letting them out.

(Thanks to Nick Birks for the Super Crunchers article tip-off).

The Millennium Project was set up in 1996, and is run by the respected futurist Jerome Glenn. This year’s State of the Future report identified three significant threats to world stability. Alongside global warming and fresh water shortages, the third is the continuing growth of organised crime, now worth $2 trillion (almost £1 billion), or around 3% of world GDP. Major revenues are from counterfeiting and piracy, together with drugs. Major costs – of the order of half of revenues – go on bribery of politicians, the report says, and the large majority of these are paid in the affluent world, not the poor world.

This has the effect of corrupting public decisions and making the rich richer, while undermining confidence in government. AIDS, now the fourth largest killer worldwide, has provides orphaned recruits to the crime business. Patterns of AIDS are changing; prevalence in Africa has levelled (and may start to fall) but there are rapid increses in Central Europe and parts of Asia. As for the rich, 2% of the world’s richest people own more than 50% of the world’s wealth, while the poorest 50% of people own 1%. Unlike global warming or water, there’s no strategy for dealing with organised crime or its impacts.

The report’s also concerned about violence against women, which causes more casualties than wars do – 1 in 5 women globally will be the victim of rape or attempted rape during their lifetime.

If that’s the bad news, there is good news. Growth rates across the planet of 5.4% outstripped by some way population increases (1.1%). If this sort of differential continues, world poverty will be cut by half by 2015. Literacy rates continue to rise (18% unable to read, halved since 1970). Life expectancy is on the up; someone bron in 1955 could, on average expect to live to 48, whereas someone born in 2025 can expect to reach 73, And despite the prominence of Iraq, the number of wars is falling; in Africa down to 5 in 2005 from 16 in 2002.

All of this means that their ‘State of the Future’ index is on the up, and is projected to keep rising over the next decade, because the gains outweight the losses. In fact there’s a helpful ‘winning and losing’ chart in the executive summary:

Where we are winning:

• Life expectancy
• Infant mortality
• Literacy
• GDP/cap
• Conflict
• Internet users
Where we are losing:
• CO2 emissions
• Terrorism
• Corruption
• Global warming
• Voting population
• Unemployment

The full report and a CD-ROM with thousands of pages of supporting data going back over the last decade can be bought from the project for $49.95 plus postage.

Although black people are, overall, no more likely than white people to be victims of crime, this is not true of young black people (10-17). Some of the specific data is striking.

• Overall, black people are 5.5 times more likely than white people to be a victim of homicide. Black males account for nearly two thirds of all murders of 10 to 17 year olds.
• In the three year period ending in 2003-04, 31% of black homicide victims were shot compared with just 6% of white people. The black community makes up 2% of the population but one third of gun murder victims and suspects in England and Wales.
• Black people in London are 10 times more likely than white people to be victims of a racist attack, seven times more likely to be homicide victims, three times more likely to be domestic violence victims, three times more likely to be raped, 2.6 times more likely to suffer violent crime and 1.6 times more likely to be victims of robbery. (From figures provided to the Select Committee by the Mayor of London’s office).
• “Throughout the inquiry, it was emphasised to us that young black people primarily fear being attacked by someone of the same ethnicity.” The data supports this. Gus John told the Committee that “young black people’s fear of crime is typically to do with them being attacked by other young black people”.

One of the reasons for these numbers is because there is greater propensity to violence, especially armed violence and gang violence, within communities of young black violence. Lee Jasper of the GLA told the Committee that “we have, quite literally, a crisis in the black community among our young, black people.”  A number of experts argued that there was also media ‘demonisation’ of young black people.  The black academic Tony Sewell said this, for example:

“The media highlight certain crimes; for example, if someone from the City is attacked by a black youth it will be on the front page of the Evening Standard, and rightly so. One wants to report that, but how often do we hear of crimes where a black youth has been assaulted? It happens day in day out and we hear little of it.”

But it’s worth noting that qualitative research done for the Select Committee by Opinion Leader Research (Which is to be made available) suggests a more sophisticated public view of the media coverage. These interlocked issues, however, do suggest that any policy response needs to be sophisticated; it needs to match the complexity of the set of issues invoived.

One other data point identified by the report seems to have potential implications as an emerging issue. Home Office data suggests that 75% of the young black population will be on the DNA database – a far higher proportion than other ethnicities. The Committee’s view is worth capturing here:

It means that young black people who have committed no crime are far more likely to be on the database than young white people. It also means that young white criminals who have never been arrested are more likely to get away with crimes because they are not on the database. It is hard to see how either outcome can be justified on grounds of equity or of public confidence in the criminal justice system.

The report is available here (as a PDF), and it’s not pleasant reading.

• They identified 330 children believed to have been trafficked, while acknowledging that this was probably only the visible tip of the trade
• There’s an assessment of the strength of the evidence – the strongest being categorised as ‘level 4’
• Of level 4 cases, five-sixths were girls – of whom 65% were trafficked for sexual exploitation, and 29% for “domestic servitude” (as they put it)
• Traffickers from China and Albania appear to be most sophisticated
• Traffickers were effective at using child protection and asylum processes to get children into the country while keeping control of them
• More than half of the children identified in the data were missing – some may have been ‘re-trafficked’ to other jurisdictions.