Does Sunscreen Protect Against Cancer?

A while back a prominent user on Twitter posted a pretty funny mother jones article from 1998 entitled “Sunscam.” The article itself has a goofy name, it goes against out intuition, and surprisingly might be correct for it’s time. “Broad Spectrum” sunscreens were less common back then, and we still don’t rate UVA protection in the United States. Now broad spectrum sunscreens are widely marketed for UVA/UVB protection, however people don’t always respond to incentives like we wish they would and sunscreen use has unintended effects. While before it may have been an issue with the product, now we have a problem with behavior. Sunscreen use may create a lulling effect, an action that causes the acceptance of greater risk or complacency.

To start off, sunlight causes skin cancer. No big surprise there. As people moved out of the fields and into the factories then later into the cubical, sun exposure declined. As we got more leisure time, the more recreational sun exposure we got. As people like Coco Chanel popularized tanning as a beauty trend, the average person wanted to follow suit, some of the with fair skin. Sunscreen was originally marketed as suncream (still is for some brands) and was intended to block sunburns. However many people believed that sunscreen would prevent sunburn and instead allow people to stay in the sun longer and eventually achieve a tan. Many of the new sunscreens introduced in the 60s when sunscreen became more effective were marketed as “suntan” lotion as a result.

Sunscreen back in the day was pretty ineffective against UVA light, but very useful for blocking out UVB rays. UVA and UVB light both contribute to skin cancer, but it’s unclear which one is more to blame with what type of cancer. For example much is known about UVB and melanoma but relatively little is known about UVA and melanoma. However there does appear to be a link between UVA and immunosuppression, and it probably elevates risk for malignant melanoma. So it’s very likely that people were elevating their risk of cancer when tanning with UVB sunscreen but it’s not clear by how much. Regardless, melanoma rates continued to climb from the 80s to the early 2000s (the years we have good data).

Source: Welch H Gilbert, Woloshin Steven, Schwartz Lisa M. Skin biopsy rates and incidence of melanoma: population based ecological study BMJ 2005; 331 :481

The “melanoma and cancer” controversy started, an era which the mother jones article Sunscam was largely a product of. Indeed many studies found that sunscreen use was correlated with incidents melanoma. People began referring to the “sunscreen melanoma controversy” in dermatological publications. One article published in JAMA in 2000 entitled Sunscreen and Melanoma Revisited claimed “for the last 20 years, epidemiological data have suggested that sunscreen use could increase rather than decrease the risk of cutaneous melanoma.” Many studies were just uninformative showing no link between sunscreen and melanoma at all.

However a more recent and well done study has found that sunscreen use on a daily basis reduced melanoma risk. Their control group still used sunscreen, but were instructed to use it at their own discretion. Apparently giving people placebo sunscreen for a few years in Australia was deemed “unethical.” So all this really tells us is that sunscreen works, which isn’t that big of a surprise. However, issues arise when we start to talk about “sunscreen abuse.” Yes that is a thing.

Sunscreen abuse/misuse is simply using sunscreen as a tool to prolong sun exposure. People who use higher SPF sunscreens also tend to stay out longer in the sun. Apparently people feel like they can get a “safe tan” experience by using sunscreen. When European students on holiday were given SPF 10 or 30, even though the study was double blind, people with the lower SPF still spent an average of 30 minutes less a day sunbathing compared to their 30 SPF counterparts. A review of sunscreen use literature found “a paradoxical result of observational studies was the higher numbers of subjects reporting sunburns when a sunscreen was used, mainly when the SPF was high.” Even in some studies, while not a significant amount of time, simply labeling a sunscreen “basic protection” or “high/advanced protection” seems to have some impact on subject behavior.

In Dupuy et al. 2005 participants with 40 SPF sunscreen labeled “Basic Protection” spent 12.9 hours over the week in the sun while participants with the same 40 SPF sunscreen labeled “High Protection” spent 14.2 hours. However people who had 12 SPF sunscreen labeled “High Protection” spent 14.6 hours in the sun over the same week. Interesting, but this study is primarily based on self-reported survey entries logged every evening reporting what they were wearing and how exposed to the sun they were every half hour of the day. The duration of sun exposure was also only counted if the participant was wearing a bathing suit or bathing suit equivalent. 14% of the 40 SPF basic protection and 15% of the 40 SPF high protection group got sunburns despite some difference in time spent in the sun. That 1 hour is probably negligible though, and the total time spent in the sun, swimsuit or “any clothes” (the articles category not mine), is .7 hours. Rest in piece those brave 12 SPF souls that consistently spent more time in the sun compared to every other group except the high protection group in the category “light clothes” (16.1 hrs. high protection vs 15.9 hrs. low protection). What may have influenced this is the low SPF sunscreen was considerably easier to spread and they did use three times as much sunscreen compared to the high SPF sunscreen. In this study the participants didn’t know that there was a basic and high protection so this could have also have lead to the lack of a difference between these groups. High certainly implies some sort of greater protection but does basic really imply low protection? I think that this study could possibly have benefited by participants at least being aware of an alternative.

Regardless, the general results are that higher protection leads to more time spent in the sun and lower SPF generally means that people will spend less time in the sun and use more sunscreen. Or maybe it’s all statistical noise. In the end, just remember, sunscreen is horrible for you. Also maybe it’s actually good to use sunscreen, just make sure it’s broad spectrum (having zinc as an ingredient is probably good). Or maybe the real lesson of all of this is that you shouldn’t take health advice from any blogger that doesn’t do cross fit multiple times a day and doesn’t have “Keto” incorporated into their url. Yes, I think that’s probably what I learned from this post.

End.

Rule, Britannia?

A while ago Bruce Gilley wrote a piece called “The Case for Colonialism” in the journal Third World Quarterly. This caused quite a large but somewhat short lived controversy about a scholar defending the colonial regimes of the past. One can just google the Congo Free State to see the horrors of colonial regimes of the past. Some members on the board of the journal resigned citing the content of the article, while others said that the scholarship was not up to snuff of the journal. I think that it is unlikely that any resigned due the quality of the paper. It was peer reviewed, which isn’t a foolproof process by any means as poor quality papers get published often, but on the flip side of that coin this isn’t the only poor quality paper to have been published and in most of those times a large portion of the board hasn’t resigned.

[Epistemic Status: Completely Unsure. Grammatical Status: Very Rough First Draft]

I don’t intend to engage in the points in “The Case for Colonialism” at all. Rather I would like to propose a new type of colonialism that can possibly help some areas. In a few areas there is a duty for some countries to regain sovereignty over that area. This will probably be have to be divorced from the original aims and image of imperialism, with old power colonizing for a variety of reasons from mercantilist view of a world of fixed wealth therefore a need to get a bigger slice of the world to the spread of “civilization” of the british. Whether or not some of these regimes were better than others or had more benefits than costs, the image of colonialism is probably rightly tainted by the abuses of powers by colonial governments. This is not an attempt to justify the regimes of the past but a proposal of a path forward for the future. This is not a panacea, it is a tool to be used when called for and may have shortcomings that I will point out later.

I have always been against colonialism and I think that it has robbed us of a world that could have been. That is a world of exchange, trade, cooperation, and organically grown or imported institutions rather than those transported by force. However when I was looking at videos of the protests something struck me. Flags of British Hong Kong. There is actually a movement of residents of Hong Kong to reunite with their former colonizer. This had me thinking “is this even a good idea?”

Hong Kong was annexed piece by piece by the British Empire during the opium wars. During the Empire’s rule the small island and its surrounding areas were gradually developed under British institutions. Eventually, or so I’m told, these institutions turned Hong Kong into a hub of commerce. However during the final annexation of land the British and Chinese agreed to a lease of the newly annexed parts of Hong Kong beyond the island, making up a bulk of the territory. This lease lasted for 99 years, since the territory was well integrated into a city, it wasn’t practical to keep the territory granted to Britain in perpetuity as a separate entity. So when the clock ran out on British rule the entire territory was given over to China under a two systems agreement. This agreement granted Hong Kong considerable independence from the People’s Republic for 50 years, ending in 2047. This does not mean that Hong Kong’s independence will end at that time but the agreement guaranteeing the independence will end. Now considering the democracy protests such as the Umbrella Movement currently going on despite the independence, I have my doubts about the future of a democratic Hong Kong.

Were the British right to give Hong Kong back to China? I can’t ignore the lease signed between Qing China and the UK. Maybe since the Chinese successor state is in question this lease deserves more attention as to whom the agreement was with but honestly that is beyond what I could confidently write about and would have been a political minefield at the time. So while I can’t ignore the question, bringing it up will have to do for now. Stepping aside from the lease, an important moral question brought up by many is can a democratic regime with decent protection of individual rights transfer power over to an authoritarian regime? The British may have had to, but normally our answer would be no. When it’s a colony however the there are other moral concerns. Returning ill gotten gains of Britain back to China sounds great. This was also one of the last toeholds of a then defunct empire after decades of decolonization. Our moral consciousness has since been raised and we now view colonialism as a negative thing so any holdout of colonialism should end. However Hong Kong wasn’t the Belgian Congo and China isn’t a struggling new democracy. China is a totalitarian regime with a record of human rights abuses.

I think this is a question where the framework of anti-colonialism isn’t enough. The people of Hong Kong weren’t given a vote of what their future would be as giving them even a place at the table was rejected by Beijing. Maybe democracy isn’t the best tool every to make decisions but at least giving them some say in this future changing process should have been part of the process. In some colonies a vote to withdraw from a country was violently suppressed leading to revolutions. Here, because of the lease, a vote on independence was just never really a question when it came to the negotiations between the People’s Republic and the UK. While decolonization is usually seen as a positive, these movements at least in practice wanted a territory to have self rule. In the case of Hong Kong self rule was never really on the table, just how long they could maintain control over their domestic affairs when traded from one country to the next. This may have been seen as another jewel of the colonial crown given back to the country from which the jewel was taken by force, but Hong Kong lacks the same context of the decolonization movements in Africa. Giving up Hong Kong meant that the lives of its citizens would probably get worse in terms of human rights and democracy. I don’t fully know the thought process of the British, whether it was seen as another piece of decolonization, fears of Chinese troops marching into Hong Kong if there was no negotiated transfer, or it just wasn’t worth the effort that keeping Hong Kong would have entailed.

Currently the People’s Republic of China has been flexing its muscles in Hong Kong and the pro-democracy folks aren’t too happy as illustrated by the Umbrella protest/movement. The national government essentially wanted to pre-screen the candidates for the elections in Hong Kong, and the Hong Kongese people, at least some of them, were not happy. This encroachment of power is nothing new but also something unlikely to end considering the protections for Hong Kong end around 2047. While there is some respect for the protections of Hong Kong’s domestic affairs it doesn’t seem to be on the up and up. There are several independence movements in China, from Tibet to the Uyghurs in the north west. None of these seem likely to succeed but the one most likely to succeed is probably the Tibetan movement since it was an independent country with a separate culture and more importantly has a government in exile. Hong Kong right now is in control of the territory of Hong Kong and has many separate institutions but it’s size and chinese identity are major handicaps. China is unlikely to let a small part of its territory go, especially with its appearance on the world stage as a major player and the poor optics of a democratic city state seceding from the coast. Not to mention the cities wealth and global reputation. This leads to the question can Hong Kong really be independent?

Independence here means that could Hong Kong become its own country? It already has olympic teams and it’s own currency, but is that enough? Countries that aren’t that large like South Korea are close by. South Korea is right next to a close ally/kinda not really a puppet state of China, North Korea. They did try to invade a while ago in a little event called the Korean War which was helped by China since the armistice agreement little around that area has changed. In that war South Korea was aided by the UN as well as the US and her allies. The United States still maintains a large military presence at the border. Taiwan or the Republic of China is a kinda ally of the United States, we play ball with the People’s Republic of China but we maintain a military presence in Taiwan and have close relations with its democratic government. The Taiwan and China both claim each other’s territory and compete as the one true china. Japan in a similar story to South Korea, democracy, close by, and US military presence. This is a running theme. So maybe this is a good idea for Hong Kong. However in all of these cases there is a buffer zone between China and the US troops. A big question about North Korea is that if it were to become part of South Korea would the US troops move to the North of the unified country and what kind of response would China have. Taiwan and Japan both have the sea as a buffer zone. If the United States’ exercise in the South China sea was an example of Chinese fears of US military intrusion in what it views as it’s sphere of influence I can’t wait to see what would happen if the US military established a presence in Hong Kong.

Gaining independence from China would necessarily be risky being surrounded by an at best “grumpy” authoritarian state with enough resources to crush you on a whim. Even if Hong Kong was its own sovereign state it would be under intense pressure from China similar to Finland during the Soviet era. Military installments would be at best an international relations nightmare. However I do think that it would be possible, but not ideal. Giving all Hongkongers the option to move to the UK would have also been a great idea but maybe that would be too difficult now. The ideal would be for an independent Hong Kong to exist in harmony with China, but again this is also not practical. This brings me to the point of this entire thing, bringing Hong Kong back under the sovereignty of the United Kingdom.

Hong Kong has some future problems. 300,000 Hongkongers currently living in the city have Canadian passports. 33% of respondents of one survey would leave if they had the chance and 5% have already made plans to leave. 49% of those with college degrees were considering leaving. The cause overwhelmingly cited was the uncertain future of Hong Kong politically, especially due to the events surrounding the Umbrella protests. Staying with China doesn’t seem like a great idea, becoming an independent city state might work but gaining independence would be almost impossible (a problem I’m not exactly looking at too closely in this post) and also a international relations disaster to remain independent with US military installments. So why not reuniting a small piece of the British Empire?

Hong Kong had a shifting degree of democratic self rule, increasingly democratic leading up to the transfer of power, despite China discouraging any democratic developments in the colony. Of course this went back and forth throughout the 20th century, but there was a general trend of creeping democracy. This is obviously an oversimplification but regardless Hong Kong was and is more democratic than China. A lot of colonial cliches existed in Hong Kong like half of the legislature would be elected by the Hongkongers and the other parts by the administration and at one point one third was elected by the chinese Hongkongers, one third by Chinese institutions and the other third by non-chinese. This wasn’t the Belgian Free State, but it was still a colony. However also I am already out of my depth in this paragraph because history isn’t a discipline that I work in. So to sum up my points in this paragraph without trying to be a detailed and 100% accurate historical account of the democratic developments in Hong Kong:

1. Hong Kong wasn’t always a democracy under the UK.
2. Hong Kong became largely democratic during the later years of colonial rule.
3. Colonies have a legacy of being shitty to their subjects.
4. Hong Kong had a general trend of democratic inclusion during the decolonization period.

 

I didn’t really want to go back to far, but I just wanted to point out that colonial rule under the UK wasn’t great by any means but the institutions set up by the British helped Hong Kong become a commercial hub as well as a democracy. I also wanted to say that because when colonialism is brought up it can be easy to look like a defender of the colonial legacy, which this post isn’t intended to do. I think the best solution would be for Hong Kong to again transfer sovereignty to the UK. The UK isn’t in the same struggle for power that the US and China are in, although that isn’t to say their relationship is friendly. Under British protection Hong Kong could negotiate with China on fairly good terms, the UK isn’t exactly a rival to china but it is an ally to the US. While China may not view the UK as an existential threat, it may view invading it’s territories as one. The UK could grant stability to Hong Kong’s political future, a stability that is needed as the clock inches to 2047. A non-Finlandized Hong Kong could provide a refuge for freedom from China. The UK could ensure human rights can continued to be respected in Hong Kong without the international problems of 30,000 US troops being stationed there. Having a country negotiate with you could also provide leverage. As with the Scottish referendum, being under the UK doesn’t mean that independence would be off the table after a transfer of power. If a major part of the country is allowed to vote if it will remain or stay, then Hong Kong would probably be afforded the opportunity to do the same. I’m unsure if China would interfere with any vote about Hongkonger independence currently, and I do think that the UK could provide stable sovereign oversight to a self-ruling Hong Kong.

Maybe my proposal of a British Hong Kong is horrible, eurocentric, and neo-colonial to the core. I will admit it could easily be just that. I do think thought that the options for the people in Hong Kong are also limited, it’s future is uncertain, and at some point the protections afforded to it is going to run out. Is it possible to reform colonialism and turn it into something better? I have no idea. As I was writing this I felt a need to divorce this plan from the colonial legacies of the past. Colonialism was at many times evil but would transferring sovereignty to from an authoritarian regime next door to a democratic regime far away be evil? I don’t think so. I don’t think this proposal will happen but I do think it would be the best shot for Hong Kong to retain its democratic government and fantastic market institutions. Ideally every country would respect human rights but the facts on the ground show that this ideal isn’t reality. Hong Kong needs a flag to fly that won’t inflame international tensions but will lead to terrible consequences if invaded. This should have been done by a vote but even the Chinese weren’t willing to hear out the people they were supposedly trying to unify. We shouldn’t bring back colonialism but protecting a democratic society without coercion or condescension shouldn’t be considered colonialism.

 

Driving Laws Are Kinda Misguided

Do driving licensing requirements and regulations lead to better outcomes? I first ran into this thought when watching the Samantha Bee segment on the Libertarian Party, during which the moderator of the LP debate of the presidential nominees asked if an individual should be required to have a drivers license to operate a vehicle. Of course all the nominees answered no, with the exception of the more moderate Gary Johnson. Although I am a libertarian, I think the empirics of driving are still very interesting and unsettled to say the least.

First lets start with Graduated License structures. At this point nearly every state has one. This means you start your journey to becoming a driving adult with your learners permit and then move on to a restricted form of license allowing you to drive independently. The restrictions to this are typically that you can’t have passengers (with a couple of exceptions), you can’t operate your vehicle at certain times in the night and typically the earliest you can get it is at 16 and 6 months old. Many of these requirements were picked up during the 80s, the same time parents were also trying to lower the drinking age.

When I started looking into the literature about licensing I came upon many studies finding that Graduated Licensing are beneficial. It makes intuitive sense, practice makes perfect, or at least better. Even without looking at the literature, people view libertarians as kooks for objecting to something as basic as requiring a drivers license. Even in the Samantha Bee clip, she intuitively knows that having a drivers license is just a common sense requirement, and subsequently makes a joke about “Big DMV” at the expense of the debate candidates (although many of them weren’t exactly showing their calm and rational sides at least that day).

However the more I started looking into research about vehicle safety, the more surprised I was. First off, study after study concluded that there were certainly some benefits for 16 year old drivers. The only catch is that in most cases any benefit from restricted licenses disappears at 17. Note that on teens get their restricted license at 16 and 6 months in most states. Another cut against the case for graduated licensing is research by Mike Males that finds “16-year-old drivers subject to the GDL (Graduated Driver License) experienced a 15% fatality decline, while 18 year-old drivers experienced a 15% increase”. This implies that many of the people who would be causing accidents their licenses from after they turn 18, rendering the benefits from graduated licensing null. When New York enhanced their already existing GDL system in 2003 there was also a decline in licenses issued, as noted by Motao Zhu, Haitao Chu, and Guohua Li.

Sixteen-year olds experienced a 21% decline in licensure rates between 2001 and 2005. GDL implementation had no appreciable impact on driver injury and licensure rates for 17- and 21–24-year olds.

 

Another thing that surprised me when it researching driving requirements is that there is very little evidence showing benefits of driver education/training in most circumstances. To quote Beanland et al. “evidence suggests that traditional driver training programs have not reduced young drivers’ crash risk” and “most evaluations of pre- and post-licence driver training have failed to find a relationship between driver training and subsequent crash rates.” A table shamelessly borrowed from Beanland illustrates that driver education is pretty ambiguous.

That isn’t to say driver safety can’t be learned at all, it’s possible that policy makers just don’t know how to do it properly yet.

Overall I found the abyss of driving research to be highly interesting most of the time and I don’t think it gets nearly enough attention as it should. Or who knows maybe driverless cars will finally be implemented and that entire statement will seem like someone complaining about the training of telegraph operators a few years before the mass adoption of the telephone. Regardless, it seems like drivers licenses, at least graduated drivers licensing, as well as educational requirements for licenses, don’t appear to work.

Addendum: 2 Fun “facts” from transportation research!

Did you know that around age 30 it starts to become more dangerous to drive alone?

Source: Carrying Passengers as a Risk Factor for Crashes Fatal to 16- and 17-Year-Old Drivers. JAMA. 2000;283(12):1578–1582. doi:10.1001/jama.283.12.1578

How about that you have a greater chance of crashing your car sober then when you have a BAC between  0.01-.05? (It’s almost definitely not, probably just the model at work)

 

The Electoral College Can Save US

I am nowhere close to a Trump supporter. The man has shown that he has zero moral consistency, his only consistent trait this election has been his impulsivity and erratic behavior. That being said, one issue has come up while browsing the news and my social media feed, the electoral college. There are people who wish to abolish the electoral college because Hillary won the popular vote, and many more who are urging the Electors to become “unfaithful” and divert their votes to Hillary instead of Trump. Typically these are the same people.

Many point out the fact that Hillary won the popular vote, I would like to point out the fact that she won by .27%. If .14% of voters, a mere 90’000 people had decided to vote for Trump we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Instead, we would still be egging the Electors to divert their votes. This is why I think that tossing out the electoral college seems short sighted, sure it may have been a bust this time, but what about next time? I don’t think that everyone who holds these two opinions simultaneously are hypocrites, but it’s likely that many are. I doubt people would even talk about the electoral college if an additional .14% of voters had decided instead to vote for Trump. Of course, the main objective of all these plaintiffs is to stop Trump, still many try to stand on the high ground posting about how the Electoral College is obsolete (it’s weird that so many people are passionate about the Electoral College all of a sudden). At the end of the day, I think it’s important to look at how institutions that fail can actually prevent “catastrophe”, and maybe we shouldn’t be arguing based on .27% of voters preferring Clinton.

Additionally, we had a popular vote system, it may have been the case that even more Trump supporters would have voted, as there would be no “safe” deep red or blue states. Take Texas, which had a voter turnout of around 42%, if 3% more had went to the polls, Trump probably would’ve won the popular vote. The Electors probably won’t vote for Hillary, but who knows with this election. All in all, I don’t think that getting rid of the Electoral College would have definitively solved anything this election cycle. We should view the Electoral College as a component of the checks and balances that are a strong part of American Democracy. I’m be willing to bet that this whole movement will basically shut down if Hillary actually wins the election due to unfaithful delegates.

China’s Rising Uncertainty

From an article on zerohedge:

Once again, on a Saturday night (US time), Sunday morning (China) a sudden burst of buying pressure in Bitcoin, driven by Chinese buyers, has spiked the virtual currency higher on dramatic volume. With Bitcoin now trading at its highest level since May 2014 (in Yuan), and up 250% since we first suggested this an outlet for desperate-to-leave capital outflows in September, we note that the ‘arbitrage’ of over 150 Yuan points to massively more demand from Chinese buyers for now.

This is an interesting development for monetary policy, and an interesting development a sort of prediction market about the future of the Chinese economy. The Chinese economy will likely go through a great recession of its own. However driving up the price of bitcoin is an incredible way of measuring perceived risk in future investment, although it is unlikely to harm Chinas exports.

A Brief Note on Divestment Tactics

In a previous post I expressed a few of my qualms with the divestment movement. Although I would consider myself a pragmatic environmentalist, I disagree with campaigns to move away from fossil fuels. Yet, I can’t help but think of how they could achieve the goal of a “greener” planet more effectively.

1. Don’t target the Industry as a whole, this is unlikely to yield any beneficial long term momentum.  There is no complete replacement for fossil fuels yet.
2. Since there is no alternative energy panacea for fossil fuels, it makes little sense to demonize an entire industry that is, at worst, a necessary evil.
3. Some firms in this industry are more environmentally friendly than others (maybe their regulatory compliance is better).
4. Some firms are more environmentally destructive.
5. Targeting specific firms for greater accountability would be more effective than targeting an entire industry that civilization depends on.

Protests against non-union grape farmers or the Birmingham bus boycott were specifically targeted and had clear substitutes. With grapes it was easy to just not buy grapes or buy grapes from farms that didn’t need to be unionized. With the bus boycott people could walk or carpool, it wasn’t a protest that involved not using any transportation at all, ever (its also worth noting that the bus company wanted to desegregate soon after the protests started, it was only the law that held them back). With energy, there is no clear substitute for fossil fuels, with the exception of nuclear in non-transportation energy production. Total industry divestment means pushing towards an energy system that can’t feasibly be meet our needs. All things considered, why not push for a cleaner environment instead of taking a total stand against the fossil fuel industry that reliably powers our hospitals, refrigerates our food and vaccines, and enable humans to travel the world.

Legalizing Heroin

In my home state of Massachusetts, we are currently going through an opioid “epidemic”. There certainly more people using opioids now than 10 years ago. It’s incredibly hard to detect an true drug epidemic . To make policy decisions even more difficult there is certainly a global pain epidemic. Drug laws do more harm than good and are the product of public outcry. I find that some people get angry at the idea of heroin being legal or even decriminalized.

The next question to ask: “have many drug users’ lives been made better by sending them to prison?”. There is a high probability that the answer is no. This is especially likely if you know someone who has been arrested for possession or distribution of marijuana. Marijuana is currently the drug gaining the most traction towards decriminalization/legalization. This is great news, but a worrying prospect is that the “end the drug war” types will stop with that victory.

There is a sentiment that marijuana is essentially harmless and that all other drugs are bad. Marijuana is certainly less harmful than most substances, but public perception is still highly inaccurate when assessing other drugs.  When asked if someone without any prior offenses was caught with a small amount of heroin, 13% of Americans favor “A fine or no punishment” which is higher than many expect. Yet 10% favored imprisonment for “10 years or more”. This poll is 3 years old, and the “heroin epidemic” has been getting more attention, especially in Massachusetts. Recently governor Charlie Baker emotionally signed a new law that is rather toothless at best, and at worst an annoyance. Patients have to go back to their doctors after a week to get a new painkiller prescription, adding to the cost of having a pain problem whose severity requires opioids.

Aside from all the moral panic going on, teen drug use has remained stable or declined in the past decade. The number of high school students who used heroin or painkillers sometime within a month-long period prior to being surveyed (an important statistic to indicate addiction) has been declining over the past decade as well. Dr. Carl Hart estimates that only 20-25% of all heroin users are actually addicted using the measure of disrupted socioeconomic functioning. Governments measure overdoses using incredibly inaccurate methods, typically if someone dies with opioids in their system, it is counted as an opioid-related death. The public fear of opioids as the result of flawed government reports and anecdotes puts pressure on legislators, regardless of what they actually think, to do something. An overdose death has an immediate emotional impact, while someone who dies from lung cancer after decades of smoking isn’t as visceral. Although people may favor making cigarette-smoking illegal, virtually none would want to impose a 10+ year prison sentence on someone for smoking.

Behavioral Health Trends in the United States: Results from the 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health

 

(Monitoring Future National Survey Results on Drug Use 1975–2014)

 

People engage in all kinds of unhealthy behaviors. Some people eat a big mac and drink Coke while other people smoke weed or crack. More importantly, we retain more users in the health system when heroin use isn’t a criminal offense, which allows people who truly have a problem to ask for help with relative ease. People could sue heroin producers for making drugs of questionable quality, which is a moderate factor in drug overdoses. They could also tarnish a producer’s reputation by some other means (rating websites, etc), creating a market incentive to produce the “good stuff”. Additionally, moving the drug trade from black market to free market internalizes the cost of the industry. Drug enterprises would have to compete for customers rather than fight with other gangs over turf in zero sum games. A large number of violent deaths could be reduced by legalizing drugs. I’ve never heard of Budweiser having a shootout with Corona over product placement at a bar.

 

Divestment is terrible

Northeastern, Harvard, and UMass Amherst all have divestment movements. These are largely symbolic campaigns against University endowments investing in the fossil fuel industry. They claim to represent the global poor and the impact of climate change on their communities. Their ideology doesn’t reflect todays economic reality, and does more harm than good.

Many in divestment campaigns want to harm the fossil fuel companies in some way. This is a fledgling movement and they will need to get to the size of the colossal divestment protests of South African companies. Yet, even the massive anti-Apartheid divestment campaign had no impact. Shares were pretty much bought up in seconds when an institution divested. They don’t harm the financials of the fossil fuel companies.

An argument that attempts to make up for the fact that it will hurt colleges’ financial portfolios is that fossil fuels are only a short term investment. This argument is terrible from the beginning. First of all, fossil fuels wont run out for hundreds of years, and we’re constantly finding more and more. People then point to the example of a college in Maine that divested from fossil fuels and then made up for the gap with increased donations. Does a temporary increase in donations seem like a long term solution compared to the hundreds of years it will take the earth to run out of fossil fuels? Additionally, decreased revenues from investments in fossil fuels will raise tuition and cause more students to take on more debt. A symbolic gesture shouldn’t cause other people to suffer.

Next up: the fact that they claim to represent the global poor. I doubt many of them have met the real global poor, those that Paul Collier calls “The Bottom Billion”. These are people who are living on less than 1.25$ a day, a poverty line defined by the United Nations (although Lant Pritchett contests that low number). These past two decades are likely the best that humanity has seen. Climate deaths are down 99% over the past 100 years. Note, that the population in 1900 was 1.6 billion and today it is over 7 billion. Storms may be growing in intensity, but industrial civilization is clearly becoming more “climate resistant”. People need electricity to preserve vaccines and other medications, to use modern farming equipment, and for running industrial activity to escape poverty and starvation. Moreover, everyone knows that more energy allows civilization to do wonderful things.

Symbolic gestures may have their place, but don’t make other students pay for your symbolic gesture. Now if divestment campaigners were willing to take on any debt that other students might take on, I wouldn’t be complaining. All in all, divestment campaigns don’t harm fossil fuel companies, they have no panacea alternative to hydrocarbons at the moment, and this will not help the global poor. These campaigns do not take into account other student’s financial situation, and I doubt the global poor are watching this movement with bated breath and tears of joy in their eyes. Best case scenario, many students waste tons of collective hours for no reason.