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Record W2477664339 · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511470219.021

The monetary cost of enforcing prohibition

2002· book-chapter· en· W2477664339 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Wayne Hall, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula

Bibliographic record

VenueCambridge University Press eBooks · 2002
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldMedicine
TopicCannabis and Cannabinoid Research
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPossession (linguistics)CannabisEnforcementBusinessLawLaw enforcementLaw and economicsPolitical scienceEconomics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

It is widely understood that it is expensive to enforce a policy of prohibition, whether the prohibition is on the sale of cannabis or just the simple possession and use of cannabis. Critics of cannabis prohibition, and some judges and law enforcement officers, have criticised the allocation of scarce police and judicial resources to the prosecution and judicial processing of minor cannabis offences (e.g. Kaplan, 1970). The fact that prohibition is an expensive policy to pursue, coupled with a belief that it has not been successful at reducing cannabis use, has led some countries to consider alternative policies that are believed to result in lower overall societal costs (Senate Standing Committee on Social Welfare, 1977; Canadian Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, 2002). Most of the alternative models that have been tried to date are models that retain a prohibition on the sale/supply of cannabis but reduce penalties for possession and use. They therefore eliminate the costs associated with enforcing a prohibition against users but retain the costs associated with enforcing a prohibition against supply. Although there is general agreement among its critics that prohibition is an expensive policy, there is surprisingly little information on the costs of implementing it in any country. In fact, in a recent summary of cannabis policies in Europe, Australia and the United States, the Canadian Senate Report was unable to identify any studies that could quantify the total cost of prohibiting the supply and demand of cannabis for any of the countries it examined (Canadian Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, 2002). Instead, estimates were made by attributing some fraction of the total drug budget for a country to cannabis prohibition. For reasons discussed below, this type of estimate presents a very poor assessment of the real cost of prohibiting cannabis sale and use. In the absence of any good estimates of the cost of prohibiting cannabis we should not assume that these costs are trivial. Indeed, estimates have been made of the costs of enforcing specific aspects of prohibition, such as adjudicating and imprisoning offenders. These suggest that the cost of enforcing the prohibition may be very high.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.040
Threshold uncertainty score0.134

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0040.004
Open science0.0010.001
Research integrity0.0020.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0400.007

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.026
GPT teacher head0.225
Teacher spread0.199 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2002
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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