Drugs and Class, Then and Now

February 11, 2008
Posted by Jay LivingstonI mentioned the 100-1 rule in my previous post (“My Crack Dealer”): selling five grams of crack brings a mandatory sentence of five years. To get that same sentence for selling cocaine, you’d have to sell 500 grams. Get caught selling 499 grams of coke and you’re still better off than the guy who sold five grams of crack.

The most favorable explanation for the disparity is that at the time – i.e., during the drug hysteria of late 20th century America – legislators believed crack to be one hundred times more powerful and dangerous than coke. A less flattering, though equally believable, explanation is racism. Crack users and dealers were predominantly black, coke users and dealers white. Perhaps legislators felt that black drug sellers were one hundred times more powerful and dangerous than white drug sellers.

Or it could be a matter of social class. It’s happened before. First, there’s a drug so expensive as to be reserved for the upper classes. Then manufacturers develop a cheap version of the drug, and it now becomes widely available to the lower classes. The media are full of stories of the personal and public devastation the drug is wreaking. The “good” citizens react and pass legislation that falls heavily on the drug of the poor, less so on the preferred drug of the rich.

That’s what happened during the gin crisis the gripped England in the 1730s. Up until then, only the wealthy, propertied classes could afford distilled spirits, mostly brandy. It’s not that they didn’t drink to excess – the phrase “drunk as a lord” dates back to the mid-1600s – but their drinking wasn’t a social problem.

Then came cheap gin and the democratization of drunkenness. The lower classes had the tuppence to get drunk as a lord. But they lacked the means to keep the drunkenness from becoming a problem. I suppose it didn’t really matter if the lords were too drunk to work; their wealth insulated them, their families, and the society against the drawbacks of drunkenness. Not so the inhabitants of Hogarth’s Gin Lane.

What followed were the gin laws of 1736, so discriminatory that they provoked riots. That may be the main place where the parallels between gin and crack diverge. It’s hard to imagine people taking to the streets over the 100-1 law. But then, lower-class Londoners did not have the vote, and the streets may have been their only avenue for political action. The gin laws were not very effective (back to the parallels with crack), but after fifteen or twenty years, the crisis had run its course, and lower-class drinking was no longer a threat to the integrity of society.

My Crack Dealer

February 9, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

His name was James Brown (no not that James Brown), and I never actually met him. I was called as a potential juror at his trial. I was reminded of this because of the current proposals in Congress to reduce sentencing disparities in drug cases. Under the current law the same sentence that applies to 500 grams of cocaine applies to only 5 grams of crack.

The proposed change would allow some people convicted of crack offenses to have a chance for parole. Of course, the Bush administration’s attorney general, Michael Mukasey, is in favor of continuing the 100-1 rule. Under the new legislation, he said , “1,600 convicted crack dealers, many of them violent gang members, will be eligible for immediate release into communities nationwide.”

You’d think that on the fear thing, the Bushies had gone to the well once too often by now. But still Mr. Mukasey tells us that if sentencing is made rational, your “community,” no matter where you are in the nation, may be at risk of violent gang members.

My crack dealer James Brown might well have been the kind of person Attorney General Mukasey was talking about. He was a black man in his late twenties; maybe he was a member of a violent gang.

But he was charged with selling one vial for crack for $5 to an undercover cop.

Maybe he was in fact a real bad guy, a drug kingpin, and the only thing the cops could get him on was this small offense.

“He’s been sitting in jail for the last five months,” his Legal Aid lawyer told me. “He can’t make $750 bail.” Some kingpin.

As it turned out, Brown got lucky – one juror refused to go for the guilty verdict and hung the jury.

So that was my crack dealer. My state spent thousands of dollars keeping this guy in jail for several months and putting him on trial – a guy who was making $5 crack sales on a street corner. And then they wanted to spend another $200,000 or more to keep him in prison.

Would they try him again? I called the prosecutor to find out. “Probably,” he said, “Most of the cases we try are small ones like this.” Didn’t he think that was a waste of taxpayers’ money? His answer was, in so many words, “I don’t make the policy around here.”

Neither did Mr. Mukasey create the policy, but the policy he and his boss are advocating is equally wasteful and equally discriminatory. But then, George W. Bush never smoked crack, he just snorted cocaine.

The Wisdom of Crowds IV (Superbowl LXII)

February 5, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

1. The Statistical Wisdom of Oddsmakers.

Andrew Gelman writes:

if you look up "football" in the index of Bayesian Data Analysis, you'll see that football point spreads are accurate to within a standard deviation of 14 points, with the discrepancy being approximately normally distributed. So, a 14-point underdog has something like a 15% chance of winning. It's funny how people don't get this sort of thing.

The Giants were a 12-point underdog. The money line was about 9:2 – very close to the line Andrew would have set given the point-spread. Do bookies all have well-thumbed copies of Bayesian Data Analysis on their bookshelves?

2. The NonWisdom of Oddsmakers, the Wisdom of Crowds.

The oddsmakers set the opening line at 13 ½, but not because they thought that represented the strengths of the teams. They thought that the “true” line should be 12 or 12 ½. They reasoned that a lot of unwise bettors – people who bet on only the Superbowl and don’t know much about football – would be bet New England. The Patriots after all were undefeated, the Team of the Century, and all the rest of the hype. These bettors, so the logic went, would bet the Pats even at the inflated line.

But from the start, the supposedly naive money came in on the Giants. The line came down, and people still bet the Giants. The bookies took a bath. It happens.

3. Local Color.

David Tyree, the Giant who made The Catch, is a graduate of Montclair High School.

For other posts in this blog on football, betting, and the wisdom of crowds, go here.

Cultural Literacy

February 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

College students know about Lolita, at least at the high-SAT campuses. Apparently the same cannot be said for the folks at Woolworth's in the UK. Until the flak hit the fan, they had been offering a bed-desk-cupboard unit for girls age six or so. Nothing wrong with that. Except the name of the unit was the Lolita Midsleeper Combi.


British mums in an online chatroom didn’t think it was such a good idea to give girls’ bedroom furniture the name of a sexually precocious fictional twelve-year-old. The Internet makes it much easier to organize this kind of protest, and Woolworth’s discontinued the item.
But how had it slipped through in the first place? According to the Times,

"What seems to have happened is the staff who run the Web site had never heard of Lolita, and to be honest no one else here had either," a spokesman told newspapers.
"We had to look it up on (online encyclopaedia) Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."

The Sun (“Fury at Woolies Lolita Girls Bed”) added

Woolies confirmed the bed had now been axed. A spokesman said: “We will be talking to the supplier with regard to how the branding came about.”

I’ll have to ask Claude the brand consultant about this.

Meanwhile, it’s not the first time pedo-ignorance has caused embarrassment in the UK. In its Christmas marketing, the website for Tesco, a large British retailer, had a Toys and Games section which offered Legos and Barbies and other stuff you’d expect. It also included a stripper pole, with the message, “Unleash the sex kitten inside ... soon you'll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars.”

After complaints, they moved the item to the “fitness” section.