Wednesday, May 29, 1996
Soon-to-be UCLA Prof. Mark Kleiman suggests a more ‘rational’
approachBy Phillip Carter
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Crime and drugs pervade nearly every area of the American
consciousness, coming to dominate political campaigns, classroom
discussions and the ordinary routines of average Californians.
In recent years, a cadre of academic experts on crime and drug
control strategies has emerged, including Harvard Professor Mark
Kleiman, whose provocative work at the Kennedy School of Government
has led to his recruitment for the fledgling UCLA School of Public
Policy and Social Research.
From treating drug users to sentencing hard-core felons,
Kleiman’s work advocates for a more "rational" approach to crime
policy. In an interview with the Daily Bruin, he discussed these
views, as well as his reasons for leaving Harvard University for
UCLA.
Q. You have recently been part of a policy task force on the
"addiction problem." What do you see as the roots or causes of that
problem?
A. The cause of addiction to some sense is the interaction
between some chemicals and the nervous system. Scientists will tell
you countless stories about the way that works.
The ordinary idea we have about the way that human beings behave
assumes that a normal, healthy adult human is capable of managing
his or her own behavior in some way that serves his or her own
interests as self-perceived. That’s "Economic Man" Â capable
of maximizing utility given preferences subject to constraints
…
We all know in our own lives of instances where we’re well short
of rationality. It doesn’t really make sense to write a paper by
staying up all night the night before it’s due, but probably more
than one of your readers has done that. Probably, more than one of
our readers on the faculty has done that. Procrastination is an
obvious example of where actual behavior doesn’t match rational
behavior.
I think we can make a list of situations where people fall short
of rationality  the narrow sort of self-interested
rationality  systematically more often than they do in
average areas. Think of the type of things that people get in
trouble with: sex, booze, money, drugs. Probably a longer list. If
you compare the ways people actually spend their time with the way
people intend to spend their time, they don’t match very well.
So take drugs as a specific example. You’ve got this class of
chemicals that produce changes in the nervous system that are
pleasurable. The pleasure is immediate and pretty reliable, and the
costs are long-term and not obvious and statistical. Most times you
drive drunk, nothing bad happens. At some cognizant rational level,
you know that driving drunk is a stupid thing to do. But on an
experiential level, the last six times you did it, nothing bad
happened to you.
Q. If people act irrationally and don’t respond to conventional
coercion, how can government deal with them?
A. With great difficulty. You’ve got a class of behaviors with
immediate benefits and long-term costs, so you expect a mismatch
between actual behavior and rationality. You’ve got another problem
which is intoxication. The specific pleasures of some sorts of
drugs, alcohol being the classic example, involve a reduction in
foresight; a reduction in the capacity to take the future into
account in making pressed decisions.
Think back to the way we try to control people’s behavior with
threats and sanctions. If someone gets drunk, he’s less amenable to
being controlled by threats. So we say, "If you drive drunk, we’ll
punish you." And the punishments are pretty serious. That’s enough
to deter any reasonable person from driving drunk. And in fact,
most people, if they make the decision to drive drunk or not while
they’re still sober, will decide not to.
But if they have to decide while they’re drunk, they’re going to
make a lot of mistakes. That means that if you want to prevent the
very dangerous behavior of driving drunk, you have to prevent the
less dangerous behavior of getting drunk. If you remember that
someone gets drunk alone not intending to drive may, while drunk,
decide to drive, and we all agree that driving drunk is a bad thing
 we have to move back from controlling people driving drunk
to controlling the behavior of drinking. That’s hard to do, so you
have to take another step back to controlling the price and
availability of alcohol.
In order to prevent a very limited incidence of people
misbehaving while drunk, we have to prevent a large number of
people from doing completely harmless and pleasurable things.
Q. It’s obvious from all indices that current drug policies
aren’t working. Indeed, juvenile drug use  the most dangerous
indicator  seems to be on the rise. How would you critique
our current illicit drug policies?
A. For the illicit drugs, our policies are now concentrating on
interfering with supply to keep people from using the drugs at all.
That may be reasonable, but remember, it’s not what we’re really
aiming for. I think we should worry about people getting damaged or
behaving bad.
You’ve got to fit the policies to the moment. What’s difficult
is that one of the techniques we use to keep people from using
cocaine is to tell them fairy stories about how horrible cocaine is
and how it will make you use addictively the first time you try it.
That’s not true. Most people don’t get addicted, and nobody gets
addicted the first time.
Now it’s true that a lot of people have that first experience
and it’s so powerful that they want to try it again right away, but
that’s not addiction. We tell people fairy stories to keep people
from using drugs, but the fairy stories then enter into the policy
debate as well.
Remember that the same population that we’re addressing as
potential drug consumers and trying to convince not to use these
things … are also voters. The exaggerations of the drug
prevention education effort get fed back into the policy
development process.
Q. That seems to happen though in every area of policy, from
education to taxes. What are the special implications of that for
drug policy?
A. Irrational policy. We wind up making policies based not on
the realities of the drugs, but on the exaggerations and
oversimplifications that are used to prevent drug abuse. The
alcohol-temperance movement, for example, went from saying
"Drunkenness is a bad thing" to finally saying "Alcohol is a bad
thing."
It’s not obvious that they were wrong in their choice of means
… It turns out that if you interview very heavy chronic drinkers,
they regard themselves as moderate drinkers. A (professor) at the
Harvard School of Public Health did this huge study on 400 college
campuses and identified binge drinkers and heavy binge drinkers.
When he looked at the heavy binge drinkers (most of them were
reporting substantial alcohol-related problems), most of them
regarded themselves as "moderate" drinkers. There’s a problem with
a "moderation" message that people define anything up to twice what
they drink as moderate.
But the result of the temperance movement’s decision that
temperance had to be absolute … that shift led to prohibition. It
led to saying "Look, alcohol is bad, so we’re going to make it
illegal." The moralistic strain in American politics makes it much
easier to say "This is bad, therefore we’re going to prohibit it,"
than saying "This is risky, therefore we’re going to regulate
it."
Q. One thing that has come out of former-General Barry
McCaffrey’s Drug Czar office recently has been how he wants to keep
going after supply, but refocus especially hard on demand. How
effective do you think that’s going to be?
A. That’s not new. The notion that we need both supply and
demand efforts is a classic one. McCaffrey deeply believes in
treatment. I think McCaffrey is clearly right to say that we are
underinvesting in treatment. Part of the reason that we’re
underinvesting in treatment is that we’ve insisted that the only
goal of treatment is abstinence. In fact, treatment provides a
whole range of benefits for people who don’t eventually quit.
If you can take someone who’s currently using $50 of heroin a
day, sharing needles, engaging in unprotected sex and stealing to
support his habit, and get him on a methadone program, get him some
counseling, and as a result, he goes down to $10 of heroin a day
 which he can support out of work earnings rather than
stealing for it  isn’t sharing needles and is more careful
sexually, by our current scoring system, this is a failure because
the guy’s still using. But we’ve reduced the flow of social damage
coming from that person by 80 percent or 90 percent. That ought to
count as a success.
Q. What you’re in effect saying is that the goal of these
drug-treatment programs shouldn’t be a complete cure; it should be
the incremental reduction of drug use.
A. The clinical goal may have to be some sort of complete cure.
That may be what the drug counselor says to the drug addict. But if
you’re standing outside evaluating the program, lots of times when
that goal isn’t reached, you’re still providing enormous social
value. And if we started counting the benefits of that, I think
drug treatment would look a lot better …
I think the mistake that we (make) is assuming that all of our
demand-side programs have to be facilitative, rather than coercive.
If people don’t want to quit, we probably need to help them quit as
well. And we need to do that coercively. For example, a person is
convicted of burglary, and takes a drug test at arrest and tests
positive. The judge will send him to prison or not send him to
prison. Right now in California, with all of the cells full of
third-strikers, probably not. If he doesn’t go to prison, I’d like
that person for the next two years to be under specific order to
abstain from cocaine and other illicit drugs, under twice-a-week
testing, and under a rule that every time he’s positive or misses a
test, he’s going to spend two days in jail. I think you could cut
down on abuse of cocaine a lot without using treatment resources
which are scarce. If treatment were available, life would be
better. But a lot of people can do just fine if they’re told to
quit, and in fact, everything is backed up with punishment.
And if he does go to prison, I’d like him to be on this kind of
program when he gets out. I think we can shrink the amount of
cocaine used in this country by about 40 percent if we do just
that.
If we took all the drug-addicted offenders arrested in a given
year, and put them on a program of testing and sanctions, we can
really have an impact.
* * *
Q. Harvard’s mystique tends to grow the farther you travel from
Harvard, so it’s very large here in California. The school has been
able to lure a lot of faculty away from UCLA and the UC system.
Could you describe what is so special about Harvard that enables
its legacy to continue?
A. Governor (Pete) Wilson has given a lot of encouragement to
faculty to leave. It was as much the budget-cut situation (in
California) that has helped Harvard than anything. It would be
interesting to study the rate of departures over time.
Harvard has been around for a long time, and it’s pretty
relentlessly managed for excellence. And that’s important. Harvard
is a god that demands human sacrifice. People there are prepared to
sacrifice themselves and others on the altar. It would be wonderful
to build a place as dedicated to excellence and a little less
brutal about it. But if you want to make an economic model about
it, given that Harvard has a good reputation, people want to be
there  both students and faculty. Given that individuals want
to be there, it has a good reputation.
Q. Can a school like UCLA compete with that legacy, given that
we’re so much younger, so much less endowed with money and so far
removed from the Ivy League?
A. As I think about the practical problems of starting a school
of public policy, you have to make sure that you take only
extremely smart students, because the quality of the students we
take will establish the reputation of the place in the eyes of
employers, who are, after all, our customers.
FRED HE/Daily Bruin
If people don’t want to quit, we probably need to help them quit
as well.
Mark Kleiman
Harvard Professor