Monday, August 8, 2011

Draft Five

Well, it is done. Not seriously late, and I managed to get it under the 10,000 word limit, too. Enjoyed the Five Drafts process so much that I intend to co-opt it for future projects. But for now, it just feels good to have Draft Five in the books. The title: Toward Drug Control: Exclusion and Buyer Licensing.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

One More Slight Delay?

Well, all is ready for Draft Five, beleaguered Five Drafts reader, but there's a bit of a problem with the pdf conversion. Tomorrow a different computer will be brought into the fray, and all should be well. Apologies.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Update on Draft 4.4

Today is the deadline to post Draft Five and submit it to ssrn. I suppose I will not meet those commitments, but, well, I could. Really!

No updates in quite a while. My main excuse is that I moved house in the last two weeks, a process which is ongoing. But I have done some work on the Five Drafts project. Specifically, I have added the promised sub-sections on (1) why drugs qualify for special regulations and (2) providing the basics of exclusion and buyer licensing. I also have crafted an appendix, though it only concerns heroin licensing, and so far, it does not offer a comparison with Transform's recommendations.

I finally finished reading Last Call, by Daniel Okrent! The moving means that I do not have the book in front of me right now, but I hope to eventually record a few of my reactions. I first mentioned Last Call on March 6, and hoped to finish reading it by April 20. The saga of reading Last Call is sort of a mini version of the overall Five Drafts project -- but I guess there is some solace there, as I eventually did complete Last Call.

OK, on the immediate horizon: read over the current "final" draft, make a few revisions, and post it here and to ssrn. I'll try to have this done by the end of the weekend. But what to commit to reading next?

Update, August 17, 2011:

OK, I now have Last Call at hand, and want to note three points that jumped out at me. My interest lies chiefly in the parallels with our current prohibition:

(1) page 252 -- for many drys, arrest rates became success indicators: more arrests, the better Prohibition was working. "As long as bartenders and bootleggers were harassed and punished, it almost didn't matter if they stopped their bartending and their bootlegging [p. 252]."

(2) Wayne Wheeler, the Anti-Saloon League's general counsel and effective leader, also employs some "cost as benefit" logic: "'The very fact that the law is difficult to enforce,' said Wayne B. Wheeler, 'is the clearest proof of the need of its existence [page 270].'"

(3) The drys revised their rhetoric as Prohibition proceeded, eventually sublimating their anti-alcohol stance to a pro-law enforcement platform. "From the dry perspective, the power of the enforcement trope lay in its incontrovertibility: who could be against law enforcement [page 271]?"