FIND OUT WHAT CAUSES “YOUR” DRUG PROBLEM

(“My Drug Problem”)

Looking through the harms listed below, ask yourself: “If drugs had been legal (in your way, had you been forced to legalize them), how would that have affected this particular harm?” If your answer is “this harm would have gotten worse,” then illegality, as long as it is also cost-effective, is good because according to you it reduces the problem. If instead, you answer “it would have decreased” or “gone away,” then illegality is bad; a forteriori so if there is a cost of keeping drugs illegal that would have gone away/gotten reduced with legalization.

The cost factor needs to be taken into account because illegality is an expensive policy. By deciding that something should be illegal, one takes upon ‘oneself’ to monitor the activity by a very costly instrument: the criminal justice system. If instead one chooses legality, supervision gets much less expensive, and also, income will be generated. This is something that you must (at least logic suggests that you ought to) consider in addition to everything else. You can choose to add the cost factor either for each harm or afterward for your final “cause-allocation number.” This is an important “on-top-of-everything-else-aspect” – an aspect that some would argue all by itself is enough to counter any pro-illegality argument – so please give it your attention.

If you want to do this exercise, the minimum requirement is that for every harm you mark what you figure is the main cause; maybe U for “use” and I for “illegality,” remembering to add up “supply illegality” and “demand illegality” before deciding, and taking the cost-versus-revenue aspect into account. Then, as you finish, you simply sum up your Is and Us, and if there are more Is, you ought to be pro-legalization, otherwise pro-legalality.

However, this would be a very rough way of going about the issue. Different harms have different weights, and if you opt to do the exercise as described above you will have given equal importance to, for instance, “Health Care Costs” as to “Restriction on Medicinal Use of Drugs.” If you want to get the most out of this exercise, you must be a little more precise, and if so, I recommend that you follow the instructions below.

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1. ∂% (change in harm) For each harm you must answer: “In what direction and how much would the ‘strength’ of this particular harm change if drugs got legalized (again, legalized in the way that you would have chosen to legalize them, assuming you had to)?” If you answer that the harmfulness (the strength) of the harm would decrease (-), then your estimate of how much it would decrease (%) must be between 0.01 (1%) and 1 (100%). If you answer that the harmfulness/strength of the harm would increase (+), then your estimate of how much it would increase (%) can be between 0.01(1%) and 1(100%) or any, as 100(10,000%).

2. H% (harm importance) Also, you must remember that different harms in themselves carry different weights – they contribute differently to whatever it is that you see as “the drug problem” – so simply adding up the percentages, to find out whether you ought to prefer legalization or not will not suffice. Instead, “weights” must be attached to each harm, and be multiplied by the %-changes you figure would result from legalization, so you will have to make sure that the sum of all your H% is 1, i.e. 100%.

If you want to find out what you ought to think (if rational) about how legalization (the way you would have done it) would affect what you think of as “the drug problem,” you can do this either by 1) hand, 2) constructing your spreadsheet or 3) downloading the Excell spreadsheet on my homepage.

Independent of what way you choose, you should start by 1) removing and adding the harms you want to remove or add (or accept the spreadsheet as it is) and then 2) make sure that your ∑H% comes to 1, i.e. 100%, before you finally 3) decide on how the strengths of the individual harms would be affected by your legalization.

3. MDP% (My Drug Problem) The spreadsheet will multiply your estimated + or – change for each harm (∂%) with the overall weight you have assigned each harm (H%) to find out how much (and in what direction) legalization in regards to each particular harm would change the harmfulness of your overall drug problem as a consequence of your legalization: “My Drug Problem” (MDP%). The summing up of all these values (∑MDP%) will now answer the question; “What ought I think about drug illegality if I want to be rational?”

Here is the first line of the matrix that you will have to fill out for each harm to find your rational opinion regarding whether your legalization would be a good idea or not. Having filled in this information, the spreadsheet will do the rest.

 

Column 1: Your every harm (so remove/add whatever you like).

Column 2: Your estimate of harm x’s %-change with legalization (∂%).

Column 3: Your estimate of harm x’s % of total harm (H%).

 

Using your writer’s estimates regarding the first harm below – that harm is health care costs – would give the following first row:

            Fig. 1: How to enter (your) harms

In plain text, my first line reads:

I believe that if drugs got legalized the way I would legalize them, then healthcare costs would fall by 40% (- 0.40). I further think that health-care-costs makes up 5% (0.05) of what I think of as “the drug problem” This means that in regards to the particular harm of healthcare costs, drug legalization would cause a 2% (-0.40 x 0.05 = -0.02) reduction of my overall drug problem before taking ‘and it would cost less’ into account (which I prefer to add in the end, and in this case would be 0).

So, if you have found the “My Drug Problem” article on www.andreslaszlo.com, to find out whether you ought to figure that your legalization would be a good thing or not, all you have to do is to enter your estimates, let Excel do the multiplications and sum up the MPD∂%-column.

When you are finished, if the ∑MPD% number is positive, then you ought to be against legalization; if it is negative, then you ought to be pro-legalization; if the number is positive but not all that far from zero before you have taken into account the cost of keeping drugs illegal, then you ought to think that illegality is bad unless you do not care about the cost issue.

If choosing to do this exercise, there are a few other things you ought to keep in mind:

Drugs are illegal, and if they became legal, then other and quite different harms and benefits could come into play. As these are not always discussed here, or even acknowledged; you will have to find and assess them in your matrix, and either disregard them or declare them negligible. For instance, as legalization would make drug use a much more rewarding activity there could well be a migration away from the main killer drugs (tobacco and alcohol) to the non-killing drug cannabis; if alcohol and tobacco deaths fell (say by 1%) because of such an effect, then people dying from other narcotic drugs (than cannabis) would have to grow a whole lot in order not to make legalization a good thing from a life-cost point of view.

It could be argued that the key question is not whether use or illegality causes the most harm because reality is so complex that we cannot hope to fathom it by any matrix. If so, what is called for is a holistic answer, and the exercise suggested here could not possibly hope to come up with anything better than an analytic.

Let me repeat; this is not simply about whether illegality or use per se is the cause of harm because many times legalization is found to be a bad thing, “yet it would cost less” should be added to its consequences, and when legalization is found to be a good thing “and also it costs less” should be added. Thus, unless you have considered this economic aspect for each harm, you must compensate by adjusting your ∑MPD%.

Allocating percentages to some harms will force you to put a price on human life; welcome to the not-so-pleasant part of drug policy. You might want to try to do this by weighing life against life or life-years against life-years when possible, rather than, for instance, life against money. Also, you could choose to value different lives differently.

Whereas this exercise pits illegality against use, you might think the causes of your drug problem are different. If so, the suggested matrix could be of no or little value to you.

Finally, do not forget to add up supply illegality and demand illegality into one cause/illegality (I) before comparing it to use (U).

As to attempts at estimating total costs in money, here are some from America:

A 2008 study by Jeffrey A., Miron suggested that legalizing drugs would inject $76.8 billion into the US economy: 41 billion from law enforcement savings and 33 billion in increased tax revenue.

Drug Policy and the Public Good, (2010) suggests that the total cost of drug abuse to American society is $160 billion/y: health care $14.9 billion, workplace productivity losses $110.5 billion, and crime-related losses $35 billion.

A 2018 1-man study by “Buddy T,” “The Cost of Drug Use to Society,” suggests that the total US cost of all drug abuse is about $900 billion/y: tobacco 300, alcohol 249, illegal drugs 193 and legal drugs 78.5.

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Before looking at the different harms, a warning: Einstein might have been right both when arguing that nationalism is the measles of the human race, and in that the unleashing of the power of the atom is dragging us towards unparalleled catastrophe. However, as a contender, “the drug problem” has no or little reason to feel second to either, and maybe it somehow influenced Einstein when he wrote: Modern man’s tragedy is that she has made for herself life conditions that she is not yet capable of handling.

Now, especially as we have left out virtually all benefits of drug use, do not expect to be uplifted by the rest of this chapter. What lies ahead of you is little more than a tragic A to Z of human misery, and though your writer has done his best to “jazz it up” such a description does not make for pleasant reading.

Yet, if you can keep your head and remember enough of these harms so that the next time you find somebody atop a soapbox losing theirs – proclaiming “Illegality or legality is good or bad because of X!” – you can recall that there is more to “the drug problem” than simply this X. Then, if you opt to play the devil’s advocate and remind the enthusiastic orator of this, you will have contributed to pushing the drug policy discourse away from its present all-to-often realm of “uninformed,” “ax-grinding,” “emotional,” etc. and towards that of “scientific,” “impartial,” “rational,” etc. and you will indeed have done something pretty close to a good deed.

Before reading the harms list, it might be a good idea to take a look at the spreadsheet (Appendix III) that you later will be asked to fill in. 

Download the "My Drug Problem" test

• FICTION

   

  

  With The Seal Castle, Andres Laszlo introduces himself as a humorist of fertile imagination and abundant resources. The castle - that is really the famous Turkish Baths of Budapest, that sleeps an odd collection of characters that for different reasons have opted out of traditional accommodation - is seen from the point-of-view of the protagonist, whose real identity is never in doubt. Our protagonist sleeps in the baths as a way of being able to survive on the unbecomingly modest remuneration he receives from working as an actor. Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  The Crab's Rhapsody. "Rhapsody" here refers to how the main character, in Paris during the time leading up to the German invasion of France, is dealing with his pacifism. This, just like The Seal Castle, appears to be a mainly autobiographic work, seen from the point-of-view of the protagonist, whose real identity is not in doubt. The book is set in the bohemian Paris; the monumental Paris, the tourist Paris, and a Paris that swiftly managed to forget about the traumas of the war. This novel makes the City of Light look as if almost exclusively composed of night cabarets, dangerous clubs, night performers, and quaint attics where more or less authentic artists heroically try not to die from starvation.  Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  Doña Juana. Malaga, in the mid-1940s, on the coast, always within the reach of the lighthouse’s beam, we find an old manner house. Let us enter: a band is playing, we find our way to the library where myopic Juanita tries to locate Don Juan Tenario in the hope of finding a way out of her predicament. Juanita – who, when we come to the end of the story, will have metamorphosed into Doña Juana – is the devastated daughter of the house: devastated because she has found out that her fiancé is about to elope. To make things worse, she gets to overhear the enamored couple planning their escape. Tears fall into the book in her lap – into the book she had come to read in the hope of finding a solution – as she realized that all is lost. “Oh Don Juan, if you only were here to advise me…” “But I am here.” “Who are you?” “I am Don Juan.” “Don Juan who?” “Just Don Juan.” Yes, that Don Juan, has traveled through space and time, to give the poor girl some assistance: to show her how to get out of her dilemma by teaching her the art of manipulating men, much as he once manipulated women. However, the girl turns out to be better at this thing called love than expected, and Don Juan soon finds himself enamored with the girl, who turns out to be a great puppet master and ruler of men's destinies. The foundation for a great musical is in place, and a script is available. Beware males of the species; Doña Juana has arrived!   Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  Only the Landscape Changes is an adaptation of Andres Laszlo Sr.’s collection of short stories, first published as Solo el Paisaje Cambia in 1952 and later as Tout Passe in French. You will find that he has led quite an adventurous and entertaining life, at least when he did not appear to be on his way to be accused of being a vampire or getting bamboozled by a prophet. Many of these stories read like treatments/scenarios, something that stems from a desire to make them interesting to producers. This text is available: 1. As part one of The Tale(s) of Two Knaves, and 2. In The Complete Works of Andres Laszlo Sr. 

   

   

   

   

  

  

   

   

  

  Mother Unknown. Kurt, our protagonist, escapes the war and goes to live in Tangier, just across from Gibraltar, less than five minutes as the rocket flies. One night, an anonymous hand leaves a letter together with a three- or four-year-old boy at our protagonist’s door. “Lieber Kurt, I’ve sent you your son…” says the letter. Where there should have been a signature, there’s nothing but emptiness, and it’s the silence of this emptiness that prompts this great drama in our protagonist’s life. Kurt – a man who has sworn off all memories, all scraps of love and affection – finds himself forced to retrieve a long-forgotten fragment of his past – only he doesn’t know which. He narrows it down to three possibilities: Naples, Paris, and Avila, and as the war comes to an end, he goes in search of his son’s mother. Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  My Uncle Jacinto was not only a bestselling book but also a blockbuster movie, featuring Pablito Calvo and Antonio Sica in the leading roles. It is a book for children of all ages and depicts a special day in the lives of down-and-nearly-out ex-bullfighter Jacinto and Pepote, his streetwise nephew. Honor is one antagonist, crime is another, booze a third, and separation a fourth (and sort of the common denominator). For long, things look pretty bleak for Jacinto. He is down and out, he is broke, he has been ridiculed in front of what he feels is the better part of Madrid, and he has lost his main reason to live, his honor, in front of the boy who is the only important person in his life, and who is about to be taken away from him. Don’t be silly, of course, it has a happy ending, sort of…, maybe…, if you choose to read it that way.  Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  Paco Never Fails is set in Madrid – a place Andres Laszlo Sr. knows and paints well – in the early 1940s i.e, during World War II, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Here we meet Paco Garcia who makes his living by mating with young girls from the countryside: girls who after unplanned pregnancies have come to Madrid to make better lives for themselves as wet-nurses and therefore need the milk to keep on flowing. Though this impregnation was an occupation that seldom gets talked about, at the time this was a very real profession, and the ‘impregnator’ most likely to succeed i.e. ‘never fails’ became the one highest in demand. However, Paco has failed one time, so when his wife finally does become pregnant, this father of thousands is forced to ask himself… Oh yes, there’s a murder mystery in there, if you can spot it.  Read More

   

   

   

  

  

  

   

   

   

   

  

  The Complete Works of Andres Laszlo Sr. Andres Laszlo Senior was a successful script-writer with one blockbuster and two other movies - in addition to seven fictional titles, all in Spanish translated into 10 languages by now - to his name. All published in the 1940s and 50s by Plaza Janes, and later by many other publishers in various languages. These seven titles have now all been digitalized while adapted, while they were translated into English. Much of the translation and all of the adaptation was done by the writer’s son, a writer himself, Andres Laszlo Jr. Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  The Tales of Two Knaves is a collection of short stories emanating from two sources. First, from Andres Laszlo Senior’s collection of short stories, Solo el Paisaje Cambia, published in 1952. Second, stories coming out of Junior’s life, many taken from/inspired by either his adventure series The Caspian Connection or from his book on drug policy: The Drug Problem. This collection is of 49 stories. Readers will find that both, Senior and Junior, have led adventurous and quite entertaining lives. At least when they did not appear to be on their way to be thrown to the wolves, get accused of vampirism, or getting executed by General Noriega’s drug-trafficking police. The stories are structured to provide 110 years of continuity and each story is prefaced by an introductory biographic paragraph, so eventually, you will get to know these two knaves quite well. And, yes, there is a tiger in here, who likes humans a bit too much. Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  The Tale(s) of Two Knaves II is collected/adapted from three sources. 1. Some are taken from Junior's yet-to-be-published adventure series The Caspian Connection, 2. A few are taken from his book on drug policy: The Drug Problem & 3. Some are new creations. You will find that Junior has led an adventurous and - at least when he did not appear to be on his way to becoming tiger-snack, or executed by General Noriega's narco-traffickers - quite entertaining life. Some of these stories read like treatments/scenarios, something that reflects his wish to make them interesting to producers.  Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  The Challenge is inspired by my father’s (Andres Laszlo Sr.) bestselling My Uncle Jacinto/Mi Tio Jacinto which was also a blockbuster movie (starring Pablito Calvo & Antonio Sica and directed by Ladislao Vajda). About the original story, a prominent Paris newspaper wrote; "Nothing like this has been written since The Little Prince." In my hands: Madrid becomes Cape Town; La Quinta, Mandela Park; 1940s, 2010s; bullfighting, boxing, and 17,000 words, 75,000. However, it very much remains a book for children of all ages. The text also is available as a film script. Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  The Caspian Connection. In these two books (The Seventh Lot and A Question of Honour) we follow Karli - Odin's son, though Karli does not know that - in his adventures. This is simply too big a project to present in its entirety. It is not until now (mid-June 2021) that the books have been made presentable in English (and Swedish).

  This adventure series (as they borrow from Norse mythology and Islam) has back- and hidden- stories with the potentiality to become of a volume and complexity comparable to those of The Lord of the Rings.

  Tolkien solved this exposition problem through two “big bookends”: The Hobbit as a soft intro, and Silmarillion as caviar for the generals. As I have yet not created that much back/hidden story, I believe that I so far have gotten away with taking a different approach: I shook, stirred, and poured it into two books (excuse my unbecoming comparison). My two first books - The Seventh Lot and A Question of Honour - thus (in my mind) correspond to Tolkien’s bookends, plus the first book in his trilogy. Read More

  

  

  

   

  

   

   

  

  

  
   

• DRUG POLICY

   

  

  Andres Laszlo Jr. has long been a proponent of two main arguments i.e. ‘Illegalization of narcotic drugs causes a lot of bad things and very few good’ and ‘Money is becoming the measure of what it shouldn’t be allowed to become the measure of.’ Yet, he always felt that there are people better suited than him to get onto their soapboxes to deplore and explain this bad stuff, or ‘dysfunctionalities,’ as he thinks of them. Not until the early 2010s, did he realize that the fact that money is becoming the measure of what it should not be, could be the important reason why drug illegality is not repealed. Realizing this, that his two pet bugbears could be seen as if riding in tandem, he gathered his notes, put pen to paper, and wrote a book on the only example of dysfunctional discourses on which, he figured, he had something interesting to say. Read More

  

  

  

   

   

  

  Drug illegality is bad, drug illegality is a scam, drug illegality is an example of a dysfunctional discourse, and drug illegality is the main cause of what you think of as “the drug problem”. And, at the end of this book/short-stories-collection, I will assist you in coming to the conclusion that it is so, whether you believe it right now, or not. Drug supply illegality does result in higher prices and thus less use, true, but not in the way you thought but at a terrible cost. Read book part. 

  

  

  

   

   

  

  APPENDIX II: DRUG HARMS LITERATURE

   

   

  

• ART

   

   

  

  In 1991 I wrote Svenskt Konstglas. It was an exorbitantly expensive coffee table book, designed to make: 1. Myself rich (enough to embark on my all-those-things-a-man-should-have-done project), and 2. My fellow Swedes aware that Orrefors art glass 1925 – 1950 (apart from the Vikings’ wood and silver artifacts) is the only thing we Swedes have ever, at least indisputably, been best at, when it comes to arts and crafts. Read More

  

  

  

   

   

• SUNDRY

   

  My research has long centered on drug policy, a subject on which I have a liberal view; not because I like drugs, but because I think illegalization causes a lot more bad stuff than a more liberal approach would. Also, have some rather strong views on my fellow Swedes’ lack of interest in their cultural heritage in general, and about their neglect of their art glass/Orrefors in particular. The talks outlined below - whether in the shape of seminars, lectures or something more informal - I am ready to give in English, Swedish or Spanish. Read More

  

   

   

   

  

  I started playing bridge late in life (as Andres Cid), but I soon had the luck to pick up as a partner what I think of as possibly the best bridge player in the world when it comes to analysis (Magnus Lindquist). We played for half a year or so, and we might have been on our way into the Swedish National Team (he got there with Bjorn Fallenius shortly after we split up), and I won ten coronas from Hans Olof Hallén as I betted that at least one of us would get there within a year. I was at the time thinking about making a career out of bridge – as I liked the game, and as I had found myself a world-class partner - but as there are some pretty disgusting sine qua non, I figured I’d go to Spain to think about it for a week. Read More