System Dynamics on Drugs

So the UK's own war on drugs has failed?

The government's chief drugs adviser has said the UK is "floundering" in its attempts to control the online mephedrone market.

more (audio report, BBC News 19 July, 2010).

He's not the only one :

Enforcement officers, such as police and customs, have admitted the UK drugs market will not be eradicated, an independent report will reveal today.

The study, by the UK Drug Policy Commission, concludes that traditional enforcement actions such as arrests and drug seizures have "no apparent long-term" impact on reducing supply.

In some cases, enforcement even exacerbates the problem such as leading to turf wars or pushing markets to more sensitive areas such as outside schools or residential areas.

rest of article (Daily Telegraph, 30 Jul 2009)

Meanwhile, Lisbon has "legalised" its drug policy, but gets clean :

But the seedy dark alleyway was now sunshine-filled with a pretty boutique on the left and a view over the red roofs of Lisbon on the right.

I cannot pretend that the clean-up of the old city is all down to the decriminalisation of drugs. Dealing is after all still done by criminal gangs.

But for me, that street at least is not a place to be afraid of any more.

article (From Our Own Correspondent, BBC, 18 June 2009)

There are many, many examples of how policies (e.g. on the legal status of certain drugs), operational choices (policing of drug use, and in particular, whether to have war or not) and effects (health, disease, crime) are distinctly non-linear, perhaps even counterintuitive. You can see how safe and crime free were the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, quite recently, to see how the US War on Drugs has been progressing (Jamaica is a key, er, logistics hub for the US cocaine market).

Drugs policy is an emotive issue, involving concepts like sin, personal responsibility and punishment, as a well as the usual tribulations of measuring effectiveness in complex situations. That might explain why the policy drivers seem perversely immune to the realisation that a complex systems reacts to its environment, including attempts to control it.

System Dynamics is a helpful modelling tool in this area, since it's able to model the feedback between a social system (the drug users) and its environment (the laws and policing).

System Dynamics is a methodology for studying and managing complex feedback systems, such as one finds in business and other social systems.

System Dynamics Society, Jan 2009

There are quite a few System Dynamics case studies in exactly this area, in turns out. As as a modelling technique is especially useful for teasing out cause, effect and, potentially, optimal policy choices. Here are a couple of examples and articles:

Heroin-Crime SD model (MIT, 1997) [PDF]

Dynamics of the Drug-Crime Relationship, (Helen White & D. M. Gordon, NCJRS, 2000) [PDF]