No Correlation Between Drug War and Use

According to an independent, well-regarded think tank, there is statistically no reason to think that we can reduce drug abuse by locking more people up.

The nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts spelled it out in a letter this summer to a federal commission that’s looking at ways to combat the widespread problem of opioid abuse.

Its study, which drew on data from the federal government and all fifty states, found no statistically-significant relationship between a state’s rate of incarceration and its rate of drug use, drug arrests, or overdose deaths.

Put another way, locking up more people didn’t correlate with lower rates of drug use, drug arrests, or overdose deaths. These findings held even when the study controlled for race, income, unemployment, and education. The arrest and incarceration rates came from state corrections departments and the U.S. Justice Department. The drug-usage rates came from an annual, national survey funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The overdose-death rates came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The demographic data came from the U.S. Census Bureau, and the income and unemployment data came from the U.S. Labor Department.

The more effective response to opioid abuse, says the letter, is a combination of law enforcement to curb drug trafficking; sentencing alternatives to divert nonviolent people from costly imprisonment; treatment to reduce addiction; and prevention efforts like prescription-drug monitoring programs, which we wrote about last week.