While doing research for yesterday's post on party-pill regulation, I came across an old post of mine on the government's "war on P", commenting on their October 2010 progress report. This sparked my curiosity, so I dug up their most up-to-date progress report [PDF], which was released quietly back in May. what does it show? The price of P is stable at $100 a point, and has even dropped according to one survey. Availability and purity are pretty much unchanged. So, all of that effort the police put into combating P, all those raids and arrests and prosecutions and convictions? They've made no fucking difference whatsoever.
We're spending millions of dollars a year on this. And on an empirical assessment, it seems to be pretty much a complete waste of money. Time to try something else.
