Given the differences in prevalence, user base composition, toxicological effects and distribution networks between marijuana and cocaine, depenalization or legalization would impact the magnitude and distribution of social costs in meaningfully different ways for these two drugs. Yet if reform’s risks and likely impacts upon the distribution of social costs differ from drug to drug, our analysis nevertheless concludes that for both cocaine and marijuana, there is considerable potential for reducing the overall social costs. Our review of theory and empiricism suggests that carefully tailored versions of depenalization or legalization might provide these cost-reductions, and additional analytic scrutiny could further clarify their likely impacts. In light of the admitted uncertainty in empirical predictions of use rates under hypothetical new regimes, and considering the many important values that a cost-minimization approach fails to entertain, we are not surprised that many observers fear or dismiss alternatives to criminalization.Distributional issues, although under-theorized in the illegal drug policy context, arguably underlie much concern about reform. While we follow standard economic analysis and treat a dollar in costs equally across contexts, politicians and voters are attentive to who bears the costs of alternative policies. Particularly troublesome to opponents of legalization—and to a lesser extent depenalization—may be that such reform would redistribute many costs away from current drug users, sellers, and the government and on to a new set of victims: the new drug users and victims of accidents, a group whose ranks could include one’s neighbors, relatives,grow rack or even one’s own children. Upper middle class voters with influence over policy may believe that marijuana prohibition protects their children by placing costs on lower class drug sellers and other countries .

The supporters of prohibition will point to the lower rates of marijuana use by high school seniors today than in the late 1970s as evidence for the success of the prohibitionist approach. But, as Figure 11 illustrates, substantial historical drops in tobacco and alcohol consumption by high school seniors show that consumption declines by the young can be engineered even for legal substances. Moreover, events from Kabul to Mexico City show that policies of drug prohibition enrich violent forces internationally in ways that can impose large indirect costs on the United States. While we refrain from analyzing distributional consequences in depth, we are keenly aware of the concern they engender. Our relative optimism about the potential of depenalization or legalization to reduce the costs of certain illegal drugs does not come from a sense that such drugs are not socially harmful. We believe any serious analysis of reform must be especially sensitive to policies for tailoring depenalization or legalization to mitigate costs from increases in use.98 Counter-advertising, treatment, age-restrictions, and policies against driving while under the influence—to list just a few such ideas—would together not just alter at the margin but integrally affect a new regime for any currently illegal drug. In thinking about various options for reforming policy toward marijuana or cocaine, it is helpful to bear in mind that a choice among criminalization, depenalization, and legalization could be made with the aim of minimizing social costs, rather than simply curtailing use—the socially costly goal toward which our current policy of criminalization seems oriented. Maintaining a focus on the social harms of a drug, not just less subtle measures of the prevalence of use, helps to clarify the effects of policies that rely predominantly on tough criminal penalties. However, even those who would design drug policy principally to minimize use prevalence should not discount the potential of a carefully tailored version of depenalization or legalization to serve that goal. Consider Becker’s suggestion that if the goal of reduced consumption is largely derived via maintaining high prices, this goal could be achieved at lower social cost by legalizing and taxing up to the level of current price .99 While the merits of this argument will depend upon the specifics of the legalization policy and the drugs to which it is applied, some general theoretical considerations are worth stressing.

The socializing impact of legalization and possible attendant product advertising could increase individuals’ preference for a socially harmful substance, increasing demand for the drug at any given price even if an excise tax were designed to simultaneously keep the price from falling too greatly.Moreover, the greater the excise tax, the less effective legalization would be at shrinking the black market as illegal dealers would find a higher legal price easier to undercut. There is yet another basic tension in Becker’s view: while it assumes consumers are responsive predominantly to price rather than the moral command of illegality , it also presumes that consumers will largely turn away from the lower priced illegal drugs that skirt the excise tax.Yet although legalization with significant taxation would not eliminate the black market for a drug entirely, it would be expected to shrink substantially the size of the illegal market, with the attendant cost reductions from less crime. The remaining black market would also have diminished risk and profit margins, thus providing less economic incentive for participants to engage in costly crime and violence to maintain their stakes. Moreover, the additional tax revenues could be used to fund greater enforcement to protect the under-aged , while providing greater vehicles for treatment for those who succumb to the burdens of addiction and abuse. Finally, it is not insignificant that legalization is the only regime that does not contemplate untold numbers of illegal transactions by otherwise law-abiding individuals, and an attendant diminished respect for, and faith in, the rule of law.Similarly, a well-crafted form of depenalization is not necessarily antithetical to the goal of discouraging drug use. Like legalization, depenalization could also significantly reduce the enforcement costs and productivity losses from the arrest and legal processing of hundreds of thousands of marijuana possession cases—and some of the costs from analogous proceedings, plus incarceration, in the context of cocaine. Although one might worry that depenalization would expand consumption without contracting the black market, and that full decriminalization of possession would appear hypocritical when combined with the retention of criminal penalties for sale, it is not clear that these concerns would be borne out in practice. Particularly if sanctions were reduced for sale as well as possession, depenalization could, like legalization, reduce the risk and reward for illegal market participants, thus diminishing the likelihood of violence used to protect their market positions.

Depenalization of possession alone could not only reduce enforcement costs but also—as the insights of Kleiman help show—increase the potential swiftness, certainty, and deterrence value per sanction unit, for situations where punishments were applied. It might also help usher in a policy shift toward harm reduction—a new orientation toward helping, rather than punishing, the victims of drug abuse. Rather than being an example of hypocritical or morally ambiguous policy, depenalization could be framed as a new understanding of which activities are sufficiently harm-producing to merit criminalization and which aren’t . Indeed, the experience of a number of European countries suggests that depenalization could reduce the costs of enforcement, redirect efforts toward helping problem users, and perhaps even reduce the violence of illegal markets, without these gains being outweighed by increased costs from use.Although our inquiry into illegal drug policy has been a self-conscious search for a costminimizing regime, our evaluation of various policy options can also provide a basis for analysis by those who would prefer simply to minimize use cost-effectively or who would conduct a full welfare analysis including the benefits of use for the many casual or moderate users who do not fall victim to costly abuse or dependence.These liquids come in a variety of flavors that are linked with greater perceived enjoyment ,greenhouse grow tables and lower harm perceptions compared to combustible cigarettes , and ecigarettes initiation in youth . They also have varied nicotine concentrations , with implications for abuse liability wherein higher concentrations are associated with higher yields of nicotine, an addictive substance . These products and corresponding devices are constantly evolving, which could affect user experiences associated with these products, and have public health consequences. One rapid method to identify evolving products, and salient topics, is to analyze Twitter conversations that capture these user experiences in addition to social, and communicative cues associated with e-liquid use. Posts to Twitter provide an opportunity for public health researchers to understand public sentiment, attitudes, and behaviors by examining how people naturally discuss different topics of import in their own words. In this way, aggregated posts to Twitter can serve as a large focus group. Prior research on e-cigarette-related posts to Twitter through the year 2018 provide insight into e-cigarette use, including the occurrence of dual tobacco product use , the appeal of flavors and other design features , and clandestine use in places where tobacco is prohibited .

In the present study, we used Twitter data to describe e-liquid conversations in 2018. Twitter is used by 22% of U.S. adults with 42% of users on the platform at least once a day . Additionally, Twitter is used by 32% of adolescents in the U.S. . Our goal is to determine the public’s recent experiences with e-liquids.Twitter posts containing e-liquid-related terms ,” “e-juice,”were obtained from 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2018. These terms were informed by prior research on e-liquids utilizing data from social media . There was a total of n = 85,803 posts containing these terms during this time from 21,598 users. To prepare the data for analyses, we excluded non-English tweets, retweets, and tweets from accounts identified as social bots , resulting in a final analytic sample of n = 15,927 tweets, from 4590 unique users. Tweets in the analytic sample were normalized through lemmatization,converted to lower case, and processed by removing English language stopwords , numbers, punctuation, special characters, hyperlinks and hashtags . Usernames mentioned in tweets were labelled “@person” to protect the identity of the individuals. All analyses relied on public, anonymized data, adhered to the terms and conditions, terms of use, and privacy policies of Twitter, and were performed under Institutional Review Board approval from the authors’ university. To protect privacy, no tweets were reported verbatim in this report. As part of exploratory analyses, we analyzed the tweets using word frequencies , and visualized the data through word clouds to identify common topics . From this assessment, the authors arrived at consensus on six commonly occurring topics including, Promotional , Flavors , Person Tagging , Cannabis , Juice Composition , and Nicotine Health Risks . Although not a prominent topic but consistent with our prior research , we looked for words and phrases that suggested e-liquids were used to Quit Smoking . Table 1 provides a list of common words found in posts along with the e-liquid-related terms. These words are meant to provide further context for each theme, are not exhaustive, and are listed in alphabetical order. Each tweet was classified to one or more topics based on the presence of at least one topic-related unigram and/or bigram. We used a rule-based classification script written in Python where each tweet was checked for the presence of a specified set of n-grams representing a topic e.g., Promotional. For each analysis, we present findings in a confusion matrix where the diagonal line indicates the prevalence of a topic and the off-diagonal lines indicate topic overlap. The topics identified in this study of e-liquid-related posts to Twitter in 2018 provide several insights about the public’s recent experience with e-liquids. In line with previous research , promotions were a predominant theme. In the absence of regulations controlling online promotions, post on platforms like Twitter can reach and potentially influence both current e-liquid users and non-users, adult and youth with few restrictions on content, or formal gateways restricting access to the content. Recent analyses of Instagram posts containing e-liquid-related hashtags have shown that e-liquid manufacturers and vendors use marketing strategies like cartoons to appeal to customers and potential customers . The social media landscape provides ample opportunity to influence the uptake of e-cigarette-related products among non-smokers, and youth, and may warrant regulatory restrictions, and counter messaging campaigns. Similar to prior research , posts often discussed flavors. Compared to non-flavored tobacco products, flavored products are perceived to be more attractive and appealing .