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The final part of this report examines the research now available to inform drug control policy, identifies important gaps in knowledge, and makes commensurate recommendations. Current policy instruments include an array of activities related to enforcement—domestic enforcement, interdiction, crop eradication, and administrative and informal sanctions—and a wide range of prevention and treatment programs being implemented throughout the country.
It is inevitably difficult to assess the effects of the diverse activities that, taken together, comprise the nation's effort to diminish illegal drug trafficking and use. The present state of knowledge varies considerably across the different policy instruments, with a considerable amount known about some instruments and little at all about others. In part, the state of knowledge reflects the differential investments that the nation has made in research and data collection. Research on enforcement has received very little support; as a consequence, we know very little about the effectiveness of the many dimensions of enforcement policy. Drug treatment research has been supported in a sustained, serious manner; as a consequence, a significant body of work exists. Prevention research has focused almost entirely on school-based programs, virtually ignoring the many other community-based efforts under way. The specificity of the committee's recommendations varies across areas, reflecting variation in the state of knowledge.
We begin our review in Chapter 5 with supply-reduction policy. This chapter and Chapter 6 contain the recommendations regarding the agenda
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Part III
Research for Drug Policy
The final part of this report examines the research now available to inform drug control policy, identifies important gaps in knowledge, and makes commensurate recommendations. Current policy instruments include an array of activities related to enforcement—domestic enforcement, interdiction, crop eradication, and administrative and informal sanctions—and a wide range of prevention and treatment programs being implemented throughout the country.
It is inevitably difficult to assess the effects of the diverse activities that, taken together, comprise the nation's effort to diminish illegal drug trafficking and use. The present state of knowledge varies considerably across the different policy instruments, with a considerable amount known about some instruments and little at all about others. In part, the state of knowledge reflects the differential investments that the nation has made in research and data collection. Research on enforcement has received very little support; as a consequence, we know very little about the effectiveness of the many dimensions of enforcement policy. Drug treatment research has been supported in a sustained, serious manner; as a consequence, a significant body of work exists. Prevention research has focused almost entirely on school-based programs, virtually ignoring the many other community-based efforts under way. The specificity of the committee's recommendations varies across areas, reflecting variation in the state of knowledge.
We begin our review in Chapter 5 with supply-reduction policy. This chapter and Chapter 6 contain the recommendations regarding the agenda
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of principal concern to this committee: strengthening research and data on enforcement strategies. The discussion in Chapter 5 stresses the need for research on how drug suppliers respond to enforcement policy and, more broadly, the need for research on the operation of drug markets. The discussion in Chapter 6 pays particular attention to both tine declarative and deterrent effects of sanctions against use of illegal drugs. Given the high rate of incarceration under current drug sentencing and its financial and human costs, such research is imperative.
In Chapter 7 the discussion turns to research on programs aimed at preventing or delaying drug use among children and youth. The widespread adoption of many prevention programs whose effects—beneficial or harmful—are unknown requires urgent research attention. Chapter 8 examines the use of randomized clinical trials to test the effectiveness of new treatment protocols in different settings, with diverse clients and for different types of drugs. Special attention is paid to the potential benefits and ethical problems of including no-treatment control groups in clinical trials.
Choosing the right mix of instruments to control the sale of illegal drugs and reduce their use presents complex policy problems: there are many different lines of attack. The committee believes that sustained and systematic research efforts such as those recommended here are essential if the nation is to have any hope of improving the quality of its decision making.
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Supply-Reduction Policy
To many, it seems obvious that reducing the supply of drugs offers an important way to control the drug problem. If there were no drugs to use, there would be no problem. If lesser quantities of drugs reached consumers in the United States, the problem would be diminished. If drugs were harder to find, or riskier to obtain, or simply more expensive, some potential users might be discouraged from starting, and some current users might seek treatment or abandon their use.
In this chapter, we concentrate on enforcement and other policy instruments that aim to reduce drug supply. We discuss the problems of measuring or otherwise estimating the effectiveness of supply-reduction efforts, assess current knowledge of retail drug markets, explain why an understanding of these markets is important for supply-reduction policy, and assess knowledge of the extent to which arrested drug dealers may be replaced by others. Enforcement efforts directed at drug users are examined in Chapter 6.
Efficacy and Justice as Evaluative Criteria
The belief that reducing the supply of drugs can help to control the drug problem is but one concern that drives the public commitment to enforcing the drug laws. In addition, the public enthusiasm for enforcement, including imprisonment of offenders, is supported by the view that
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it is morally wrong to produce and sell drugs, and that those who do so despite laws prohibiting this activity ought to be punished. In short, many people believe not only that enforcement of drug laws helps to solve the problem of drug use, but also that enforcement advances the cause of justice. Of course, a countervailing libertarian view argues that government enforcement of drug laws intrudes on individual freedoms and hence should be minimized to the extent possible.
For a committee of the National Research Council, the fact that some of the enthusiasm for enforcement derives from a moral view of what is right and wrong, as well as from a practical, empirical claim that such policies will succeed in controlling the drug problem creates a difficulty. Scientists know how to measure things and how to reach conclusions about whether a particular intervention works to solve a particular problem or achieve a specified goal. With respect to the question of what sorts of acts are good or bad, and what constitutes a good versus a bad effect, scientists have no special expertise to offer. In a democratic society, that is a job for all citizens, and their representatives, not for scientists alone. What scientists can do is to help citizens judge whether the practical reasoning that links drug enforcement and supply-reduction efforts to the severity of the drug problem is sound, and what the available empirical evidence seems to say about the efficacy of these efforts. That is what we aim to do in this chapter and the next.
We note, however, that findings of either efficacy or inefficacy cannot determine whether the nation should enhance, reduce, or abandon efforts to reduce drug supply and to enforce drug laws. Such efforts could be supported even if ineffective if they were considered a just response to people who produce or sell drugs. And they could be abandoned even if considered effective if they came to be regarded as sufficiently unjust. The worst of all worlds would be one in which the nation supported drug enforcement efforts that were both ineffective and unjust. The best of all worlds would be one in which the policies used were both just and effective. The point is that supply-reduction and drug law enforcement efforts have to be evaluated in terms of their justice as well as their practical effect. It is important to think about whether it is bad to produce and sell prohibited drugs as well as whether it is effective in discouraging people from doing so by threatening to punish them. It is important to think about whether the laws that are enforced are fair, and whether they can be enforced fairly as well as whether the laws can help protect children from having early experiences with drug use that bode poorly for their future. In this discussion, we on occasion note issues of justice as well as efficacy, but it is important to emphasize that the committee's expertise
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lies in judgments about impact and efficacy against agreed-on objectives, not in our views of justice or social value.
Supply-Reduction Policy and Drug Law Enforcement
Supply-reduction policy is often treated as identical with drug law enforcement. While there is a substantial overlap among the interventions that belong in each category, there is an important conceptual difference between these ideas, and there are some policy interventions that belong in one category but not the other. Supply-reduction efforts include all those interventions that are made to reduce the availability of drugs to unauthorized users. This category includes many things that are not ordinarily thought of as drug law enforcement. For example, it includes efforts to persuade farmers in foreign countries to substitute legitimate crops for illegal drugs. It also includes efforts to police the regulatory boundary between drugs prescribed for legitimate users and those who would like to abuse them. Some activities, such as crop replacement, are supply-reduction efforts but are not law enforcement efforts.
By the same token, drug law enforcement includes many interventions that do not aim to reduce the supply of drugs. For example, it is a crime in all states to possess and use certain drugs as well as to sell them. Nearly 1 million people a year are arrested for personal possession or use of small amounts of drugs (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 1999a).1 Enforcement of laws prohibiting personal possession or use is properly seen as operating on the demand side rather than the supply side of the drug problem. Such enforcement adds the threat of arrest to all the other reasons that already exist to avoid using illegal drugs and brings current drug users into the criminal justice system, where they can be sent to jail or sent to drug treatment alternatives to jail.
Plausible Efficacy: Reasoning About Supply-Reduction Efforts
To begin our analysis of supply-reduction instruments, it is useful to lay out the logic that links supply-reduction policy to drug use. Many common errors of reasoning show up in policy debates about supply-reduction policy.
Some drug policy analysts appear to believe that supply-reduction efforts fail to deter drug use because most drug users are addicted and
It was sale of alcohol, not possession for home use, that was prohibited during Prohibition. Except in a few states, individuals were always allowed to manufacture and use alcohol for their own use, yet the policy was viewed as prohibition. It is clear that the nation's drug policy is much more prohibitive than Prohibition was (Bonnie and Whitebread, 1974).
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compulsive in their use; they will "do anything" and "pay anything" to consume drugs.2 If this is true, then supply-reduction efforts can have very little effect on the quantity of drugs consumed. Rather, such efforts simply act to increase the profits of illegal dealers by enabling them to raise the prices of drugs. This argument ignores the possibility that users and potential users who are not yet addicted to drugs could be dissuaded from experimenting with them by high prices or by the inconvenience and danger of buying drugs. It also ignores the possibility that increases in the price and inconvenience of buying drugs may cause older users who are tired of "the life" to make serious efforts to quit their use. Effects such as these appear to occur with changes in price for legal addictive commodities, such as alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. Why shouldn't they occur for heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and amphetamines? Indeed, the best current estimates of the elasticity of cocaine consumption with respect to price is that it lies between –0.59 and –2.5: if accurate, this means that a 10 percent increase in the price of the illegal drugs will lead to at least a 5.9 percent reduction in overall levels of use. Apparently it is not true that all drug users will do anything or pay any price (although some of them will do a lot and pay a lot) for drugs. If drug users can be discouraged from using drugs by high prices, unavailability, or risks associated with buying and using drugs, and if enforcement and supply-reduction efforts can raise the price and risks, then these efforts may succeed in dissuading new users from starting, experimental users from advancing to higher levels of use, and advanced users from continuing to use drugs even when treatment is available to them.
Other researchers suggest that drug enforcement and supply-reduction efforts will fail because they cannot succeed in meaningfully raising the price or reducing the availability of drugs. In this view, there is a plentiful supply of people willing to run the moral, economic, and physical risks of dealing drugs for the profit that can be earned. One can agree that there are many people in sufficiently desperate circumstances that dealing in drugs represents a relatively attractive income earning opportunity. But there are many things about dealing in drugs that are unattractive and are made unattractive by its illegal status. In thinking about how drug enforcement affects opportunities for drug dealing, one begins with the idea that each dealer is threatened with the prospect of arrest and
Researchers have debated the effect of price increases in light of drug addiction; see Barthold and Hochman (1988), Chaloupka (1991), Warner (1991), Pollak (1976, 1970), and Winston (1980). Research that reports findings of low sensitivity to price in the short run includes Becker, Grossman, and Murphy (1991), Becker and Murphy (1988), and Chaloupka (1991).
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imprisonment. But the greater risk may come not from the police, but from other dealers and criminals. Indeed, from the point of view of a drug dealer, one of the worst consequences of the illegality of drugs is that the police and courts do not assist in enforcing contracts and providing security. A drug dealer must absorb all the costs of contract enforcement and security, possibly to the point of being willing to use violence.
Dealing drugs is an economically and physically risky business. That fact dissuades some people from entering the business. It also motivates those people who enter to demand compensation for their risks by increasing the price. In addition, dealers must manage their inventories and transactions so as to minimize the risks of theft and arrest. This means that drugs flow through the supply system less openly and more expensively than would be true if drugs were legal. Indeed, current estimates indicate that the price of illegal drugs is much above the price that would obtain if they were sold in legitimate markets (discussed below). This is a combined effect of both the illegal status of the drugs (which expose drug dealers to attacks from other criminals even if the police do nothing) and of enforcement efforts (which expose drug dealers to the specific threat of arrest by government agents). It is difficult to know what portion of that price increase should be attributed to what effect, but it does suggest that making drugs illegal does increase their price.
Economic theory is unequivocal about the direction of the effect of drug law enforcement on total supply. Enforcement tends to reduce the supply of drugs because it makes drug dealing more risky, demanding, and unpleasant than it would be if drugs were legal. Therefore, at any given price, smaller quantities of drugs come into the market than would be the case in the absence of antidrug laws and law enforcement. How big this effect is and how much it matters in reducing drug use and the adverse consequences of drug use are empirical questions. As we discuss in the remainder of this chapter, the answers to these questions are unknown at present.
A main concern of this chapter is the quality of available empirical evidence on the effectiveness of supply-reduction efforts. Economic or other theory does not provide a basis for making confident or quantitative judgments about the effectiveness of these efforts. Empirical evidence of efficacy is needed to evaluate the benefits and costs of the substantial investments that the nation has made in supply reduction. The required evidence is largely nonexistent. The problem is not just that the relevant studies have not been done. Systems for acquiring the needed data are inadequate or nonexistent. Moreover, the analytic problems of inferring efficacy would be highly complex even if good data were available. The committee makes several recommendations about what can be done to improve evidence on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of supply-reduc-
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tion efforts. Developing this evidence is an urgent matter, for the nation's investment in supply reduction, in terms of both money and the exercise of state authority, is very large.
The next two sections introduce the two main modes of research that have been used to evaluate supply-reduction policy. Impulse-response analysis seeks to draw causal inferences directly from temporal sequences of events without specifying the mechanism leading from the hypothesized cause (the impulse) to the suspected effect (the response).3 Systems research refers to the development of formal models of the behavior of agents who interact in a social system and the use of such models to predict system outcomes as policy varies.
The principle of impulse response analysis is remarkably simple: interventions take place and one observes the consequences. Impulse-response analysis has much appeal when an intervention of interest is the only notable event occurring in a time period under study. Laboratory experiments conducted in tightly controlled environments aim to achieve this ideal. When it is not possible to ensure that the intervention of interest is the only notable event, researchers often recommend performance of multiple independent experiments with randomized assignment of interventions. Randomized assignment enables a probabilistic form of impulse-response analysis from which one may learn the distribution of responses following an intervention of interest. On occasion, natural experiments in uncontrolled environments may approximate the conditions of laboratory or randomized experiments.
Supply-reduction interventions are neither performed in the controlled environments of laboratories nor randomized in the field. Measurements of the response variable of most direct interest, namely the supply of drugs, are not readily available. For these reasons, impulse-response analysis of supply-reduction policy poses a formidable challenge.
In the absence of data on drug supply, impulse-response analysis of supply-reduction policy has mainly sought to connect policy to domestic drug prices. Standard economic analysis predicts that if interdiction and domestic enforcement succeed in reducing the supply of drugs, then the price of drugs will rise, and consumption of drugs will fall, everything
Macro economists studying how an outcome (e.g., gross domestic product) responds to some factor (e.g., a percentage change in interest rate) coined the term "impulse response" analysis (see Frisch, 1933). Another term commonly used to describe the same basic methodology is "stimulus-response analysis."
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else being equal. This motivates analysis that attempts to relate enforcement activities to domestic drug prices.4
Figure 5.1 portrays the standard economic reasoning. The curve labeled "Demand" shows the quantity of a drug that consumers wish to purchase at any given price, and the curve labeled "Supply0" shows the quantity that producers are willing to sell at any given price. The intersection of the supply and demand curves is the market equilibrium: the price P0 at which the quantities demanded and supply are equal, so that the market is in balance. If the government were to intensify interdiction, domestic enforcement, and other supply-reduction activities, the cost of production would rise and thus shift the supply curve up. The result, everything else being equal, would be a new equilibrium with a higher price (P1) and lower consumption (Q1). This is the classic view of the effect of supply-reduction policy on the market.
A formal impulse-response analysis of supply reduction policy was performed in the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) study (Crane et al., 1997) assessed by the committee in its Phase I report. This research sought to connect specific interdiction activities (what we refer to as the impulse) to particular subsequent domestic drug price fluctuations (what we refer to as the response). It also sought to connect aggregate spending on interdiction (the impulse) to long-term trends in domestic drug prices (the response). Informal use of impulse-response analysis is common in public discussions of supply-reduction policy. Time-series data describing spending on enforcement are often juxtaposed with data on drug prices, the idea being that the effects of enforcement should be seen in the price data.
We first examine issues that arise in impulse-response analysis relating specific enforcement activities to particular fluctuations in domestic drug prices. We then consider in some depth the use of long-term trends in domestic drug prices to assess the effectiveness of supply-reduction policy writ large.
Public officials sometimes call attention to the magnitude of drug seizures and suggest that seizures show the success of enforcement. However, there is no clear way to relate seizures to drug supply. Seizures may induce traffickers to initiate new shipments to replace goods captured in transit, in which case the quantities of drugs entering the United States and reaching local markets may fall by much less than the amount seized, perhaps not at all. Or seizures may increase traffickers' perceptions of the riskiness of the drug trade, and so deter them from initiating new shipments. If so, drug quantities may fall by more than the amount seized. We do not know the extent to which replacement occurs or the magnitude of the deterrent effects of enforcement. Hence data on seizures alone should not be used to judge the effectiveness of enforcement.
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FIGURE 5.1 Supply and demand for illicit drugs
As noted earlier, measurement of the time-series variation in drug prices is problematic at present. There are also difficulties in characterizing the timing and character of enforcement activities. The discussion below focuses on issues that would arise even if satisfactory data were available.
Enforcement Activities and Domestic Drug Price Fluctuations
Efforts to connect specific enforcement activities to particular price fluctuations must inevitably confront the basic fact that enforcement activities are not the only notable events that may affect drug prices. It is unreasonable to suppose that, except for enforcement activities, the supply and demand forces that determine drug prices are stable over time. One obvious source of price fluctuations is time-series variation in drug demand. For example, the demand for cocaine may fluctuate as a result of changing attitudes toward cocaine consumption, a changing mix of light and heavy users, and changing patterns of enforcement and penalties for cocaine possession. Another source of price fluctuations may be variation
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in the supply of drugs due to changing source country conditions, from weather to political stability.
Even if all determinants of drug prices except enforcement were time-invariant, the dynamics that connect enforcement to domestic drug prices would be complex. An enforcement activity undertaken in a specific place and time presumably does not generate an instant response in drug prices. Does the response in drug prices begin to appear a week, month, or year following the enforcement activity? Does the response persist for a week, month, year, or longer before dissipating? The time path of the response in drug prices presumably depends on the nature of the enforcement activity, on the inventories of drugs held by traffickers in domestic and foreign locations, on the speed with which new drug production can replace seizures, and on the deterrent effect of the enforcement activity on trafficking. Moreover, the time path of the response may vary geographically, depending on the nature of the drug distribution networks and enforcement activities in different locales.
If a single enforcement activity could be undertaken in isolation, as in a laboratory experiment, it would be relatively straightforward to track the time path of the response in drug prices. However, what we actually observe results from the conjunction of numerous enforcement activities undertaken in different times and places, as well as of the many other forces operating on the demand and supply of drugs. This considerably complicates analysis.
The difficulty of carrying out impulse-response analysis is well illustrated by the large upward fluctuation in cocaine prices that the STRIDE data (described in Chapter 3) show to have occurred in 1990. Accepting the STRIDE data as valid, for purposes of the present discussion, the price of domestic cocaine increased sharply between mid-1989 and mid-1990. It returned to its early 1989 level between mid-1990 and late 1991. The price increase occurred shortly after the Bush administration's war on drugs began, suggesting that the war may have contributed to the increase. The war on drugs included a variety of enforcement activities. It is not possible to determine through impulse-response analysis the separate effects of these actions. Moreover, the war on drugs and the 1990 price increase also roughly coincided with the dismantling of the Medellin cartel in Colombia, which may have caused a temporary increase in the price of cocaine by temporarily disrupting production and distribution operations. If one had independent evidence on the magnitude of the response to the collapse of the Medellin cartel, then it might be possible to infer the combined effects of the various actions undertaken during the war on drugs, but no such evidence is available. Thus, considerable uncertainty exists as to the cause of the largest upward fluctuation in domestic cocaine prices in the past 15 to 20 years.
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local market may be substantially diminished if an entire crew is arrested, although in the longer run there is likely to be some degree of adaptation and replacement. Even in the short run, access to drugs may change little if buyers purchase drugs from several local crews simultaneously.
Focusing on the replacement of local crews provides an incomplete picture of whether recent increases in the incapacitation of drug dealers have resulted in significant reductions in local drug markets. The capacity to disrupt illegal drug markets will also depend on whether large numbers of the drug market's most powerful operatives have been incapacitated. Traffickers, who typically transport drugs from the source countries and arrange to have them smuggled into the United States, handle large volumes of drugs and operate within wide geographic ranges—at the international and interstate level (U.S. Sentencing Commission, 1995; Cooper, 1990; Wisotsky, 1986; Natarajan and Belanger, 1998). Similarly, wholesalers, who supply mid-level dealers, who in turn supply retail sellers, likewise buy and sell drugs in volume. By contrast, local crews such as those described above operate within the limited scope of a single neighborhood and handle much smaller volumes of drugs.
Incapacitating these high-level participants in the drug trade could have a substantial impact on shrinking drug markets, because in many ways they are likely to be the most difficult to replace. High-level traffickers and importers require contacts in both producer and transport nations or in different states in order to operate. They also require large sums of money to funnel into bribes, transport equipment (planes, boats, etc.) and personnel (e.g., couriers). Because these resources are required for high-level distribution, there is a limit on the size of the labor pool with the necessary contacts and capital to operate at this level (Moore, 1990; Covington, 2000b). There are likely to be fewer substitutes for persons at the top of the pyramid.
Certainly, the effects of incarceration on the retail drug market depend on whether the incapacitated offender can be replaced. They also depend, of course, on how long the replacement process takes. Even if there eventually is full replacement, supply may be driven down temporarily if the replacement process takes time. With some dealers being incarcerated and new ones taking their place, the key question is whether enforcement removes people at a faster rate than the market adapts to their absence.
The effect of incarceration may also vary by the type of drug. Covington (2000b) highlights two features of the market for crack cocaine. First, since crack is often "manufactured" using powder cocaine, the retail supply of crack depends on the amount of powder cocaine imported and sold at wholesale. Thus, incarcerating powder cocaine dealers may affect the market for both crack and powder cocaine.
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Second, current law focuses much more on incapacitating dealers of crack than of powder cocaine. Sale of 5 gm of crack cocaine triggers a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years in a federal prison, whereas it takes 500 gm of powder cocaine to trigger the same minimum 5-year sentence. This 100:1 ratio in the amount of powder cocaine required to trigger the same penalties as crack suggests that local crack dealers are receiving the same penalties as powder cocaine wholesalers and importers. The current penalty for sale of small amounts of crack cocaine has certainly imposed large costs of incarceration on society, as well as obvious costs on the individuals imprisoned (see Covington, 2000b). The value of the law depends on the degree to which it disrupts drug markets and on the extent to which incarcerated street level dealers are replaced.
How much have the recent increases in incarceration thinned the ranks of major traffickers, importers, and local distributors? To what extent is there replacement and how rapidly does it occur? Do the social costs of current rates of incarceration outweigh the benefits? In particular, with the growth of the population incarcerated for drug offenses, a critical question that must be addressed is the impact of imprisonment and sentence length on post-release consequences. Does the prison experience inhibit (through individual deterrence) or promote (through criminalization), further drug offending or other criminal activity, particularly by ex-offenders who participate in the drug markets as an economic activity? The committee would like to be able to answer these pressing questions, but the answers are elusive.
Blumstein (1993) has argued that replacement of dealers largely negates any incapacitative effects of incarceration. He highlights the large growth in the drug arrests of non-white juveniles after 1985, well after the growth in arrest of non-white adults began in 1980. Their arrest rate for drug offenses almost tripled between 1985 and 1989, a time when the nation's incarceration rate for drug offenses also almost tripled (Blumstein and Beck, 1999). He associates the recruitment of juveniles as a supply-side response to the growth in demand and as replacements for the incarcerated adults (Blumstein, 1995).
Conclusions and Recommendations
The committee concludes that little is known about the effectiveness of law enforcement operations against retail drug markets. In particular, the consequences of increasing or decreasing current levels of enforcement are not known. It is not known whether a significant decrease in law enforcement activity would lead to a significant increase in drug dealing and use. Nor is it known whether a significant increase in law enforcement would have the opposite effect.
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There is little likelihood of learning more about the effectiveness of law enforcement in the near future. Answering important questions about the effectiveness of law enforcement requires reliable data on drug consumption, drug prices, the numbers of drug dealers that operate in cities, and the responses of dealers to law enforcement operations and opportunities in the legitimate labor market. As discussed in Chapter 3 and this chapter, such data are nonexistent at present. The committee has made recommendations about how this situation might be remedied. Carrying out these recommendations is a prerequisite to acquiring a better understanding of the effectiveness of law enforcement actions against retail drug markets.
In addition, it is necessary to explore alternative approaches to law enforcement. This should include investigating the effects of decreases as well as increases in law enforcement activity. Changes in drug enforcement policy should be designed so that their consequences can be measured and separated from the effects of other factors that influence drug markets. Arrangements must be made to acquire the data needed to evaluate the consequences of the actions that are taken. Such data is best acquired from state and local governments, supported with funding from the federal government. Agencies responsible for providing assistance to state and local jurisdictions should provide financial incentives for collecting data and for creating partnerships with researchers to evaluate outcomes.
The committee recommends that state and local governments be encouraged to explore and assess alternative approaches to law enforcement, including decreases as well as increases in the intensity of enforcement. Organizational arrangements should be made to ensure that the resulting changes in law enforcement measures and policy are well designed and that the data needed to evaluate their consequences are acquired and analyzed.
Under some circumstances, it may be ethical and appropriate to carry out randomized-design experiments in which different neighborhoods in a city are assigned randomly to increased or decreased enforcement regimes. For example, if the police do not have the resources needed to maintain equally high levels of enforcement in all drug-dealing neighborhoods, then some neighborhoods necessarily will receive less enforcement than others. It may then be appropriate to randomly assign varying levels of enforcement among neighborhoods.
Regardless of the designs of alternative approaches to enforcement, evaluation criteria should include levels of crime, violence, and community disruption as well as levels of drug consumption and numbers of drug dealers. Evaluation criteria may also include measures of the fair-
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ness with which different population segments are treated by law enforcement agents. The committee emphasizes that an improved understanding of the effectiveness of local law enforcement can be achieved only through such exploration combined with acquisition of data on drug consumption, prices, and labor market variables.
The nation has long maintained the expectation that law enforcement should be fair as well as effective. In particular, Americans expect that enforcement efforts will not target members of specific socioeconomic or demographic groups. As the Supreme Court stated in Yick Wo v. Hopkins in 1886, law enforcement officials violate the Constitution if they apply an otherwise valid law "with an evil eye and an unequal hand so as practically to make unjust discriminations between persons in similar circumstances." While society's concern for evenhandedness in enforcement is a normative matter, this concern generates empirical questions on which data and research can shed light: How evenhanded is enforcement policy today? What would alternative policies achieve?
A flash point of recent public discussions of evenhandedness in drug law enforcement has been the striking disparities between the racial or ethnic composition of the U.S. population and the racial or ethnic distribution of persons arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for drug offenses. In the year 1997, the U.S. population was estimated to be 82.7 percent white, 10.9 percent Hispanic, and 12.7 percent black. In the same year, those arrested for state drug offenses were estimated to be 62 percent white (the FBI's arrest data do not differentiate between non-Hispanic and Hispanic whites) and 36.8 percent black (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999:342). Among persons convicted for felony drug offenses in state courts in 1996, 45 percent were white and 53 percent were black (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999:432; note that there are no comparable data for 1997). Among state prisoners serving time for drug offenses in 1997, 41.5 percent were white (22.5 percent Hispanic and 19 percent non-Hispanic white) and 56.1 percent were black (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1999— Prisoners in 1998, page 10, table 16).
While the existence of these disparities is widely acknowledged, there is no consensus about their interpretation. Some argue that the large disparity in arrest (37 percent black compared to 12 percent black in the population, or an arrest rate of blacks that is three times that of whites) is an indication of disproportionate surveillance in black neighborhoods and/or bias in arresting black users and sellers. They argue that NHSDA data show little difference between the races in their use of drugs (see
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below). Others argue that most drug arrests are not only in response to drug use, per se, but also to other types of illegal drug-related activity and that these arrests generate a large proportion of drug possession arrests. They also argue that blacks selling drugs tend more often to operate in street markets, whereas whites tend to operate more surreptitiously; hence the difference in arrest rates may be attributable to different vulnerability to arrest rather than to racial bias in the arrest process.
A similar argument arises over the difference between the black arrest percentage (37 percent) and the black prison percentage (56 percent). Some argue that these data show that the post-arrest operation of the criminal justice system is biased against blacks. They cite the 100:1 disparity in the federal sentencing rules for crack (predominantly sold by blacks) compared to powder cocaine (much more often sold by whites) as an indication of that bias. A counter-argument is that crack use and crack markets are much more often accompanied by violence, which warrants more severe treatment in the criminal justice system. In addition, it has been argued that the race of convicted drug offenders may be correlated with other factors, such as prior record, that can account for the differences in sentence severity.
These polar views, as well as intermediate hypotheses, can co-exist because we lack the data and research necessary to resolve the controversy. Perhaps the most basic problem is that we lack data on offense rates by racial/ethnic groups. It is clear that use prevalence rates do not vary substantially among racial and ethnic groups. Based on the 1998 NHSDA data, it has been estimated that 74.3 percent of all current (past 30 day) illegal drug users are white, 15.4 percent are black, and 10.3 percent are Hispanic, substantially equivalent to their proportions of the adult population. For cocaine, in particular, 64.8 percent of 30-day users were white, 18 percent were black and 16.9 percent were Hispanic. However, these basic prevalence figures do not tell the whole story because frequency of use (and therefore the real rate of offending) among various population groups is unknown. Most importantly, household surveys miss the heaviest users. Finally, rates of trafficking are unknown. In the absence of data about rates of offending, the available information on contacts with the criminal justice systems is consistent with multiple interpretations.
These issues are clearly complicated, and a simple comparison of race-specific ratios at different parts of the criminal justice system cannot prove bias, although they do prompt a search for a clearer explanation of the reasons for the difference. Until those explanations arrive, it is likely that concern about the possibility of bias will continue. Thus, it is important that research be directed at tine factors that can explain the significant
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shift in the prevalence of blacks from use to arrest to conviction to imprisonment.
The committee has recommended better data on frequency and amount of consumption, as well as initiation of survey research on the labor supply of illegal drug dealers. These data are needed to better understand the impact of interventions on intensity of consumption and the operation of retail drug markets. The same survey research would enable the nation to make progress in determining how well enforcement meets the normative expectation of evenhandedness.
Research is also needed to determine the degree to which demonstrated racial differences in contact with the criminal justice system reflect enforcement policies that are racially neutral in intent but nevertheless yield disparate outcomes. For example, most drug arrests are produced by so-called street enforcement in urban areas, rather than by searches of private residences, bars, or clubs. To some, this may be an adequate explanation of the racial composition of arrests; to others, it may suggest that law enforcement agencies should change their priorities in order to erase the appearance of unfairness (Stuntz, 1998; Covington, forthcoming). What it suggests to the committee is the urgent need for research on drug law enforcement practices, such as street sweeps and vehicle stops, that have been shown to produce racially and ethnically disparate outcomes.
Arrow, K.J. 1962 The economic implications of learning by doing. Review of Economic Studies 29(3):155–173.
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Becker, G.S., M.Grossman, and K.M.Murphy 1994 An empirical analysis of cigarette addiction. American Economic Review 84:396– 418.
1991 Rational addiction and the effect of price on consumption. American Economic Review 81:237–241.
Becker, G.S., and K.M.Murphy 1988 A theory of rational addiction. Journal of Political Economy 96:675–700.
Blumstein, A. 2000 The Replacement of Drug Offenders to Diminish the Effects of Incarceration. Unpublished paper prepared for the Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs.
1995 Youth violence, guns, and the illicit-drug industry. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86(4):10–36.
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1993 Making rationality relevant—The American Society of Criminology presidential address. Criminology 31(1):1–16.
Blumstein, Alfred, and Allen J.Beck 1999 Population growth in U.S. prisons. 1980–1996. In Prisons, Michael Tonry and Joan Petersilia, eds. In Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Vol. 26, Michael Tonry, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bonnie, R., and C.Whitebread 1974 The Marihuana Conviction: A History of Marihuana Prohibition in the United States. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Braga, A., D.Weisburd, E.Waring, L.G.Mazerolle, W.Spelman, and F.Gajewski 1999 Problem-oriented policing in violent crime places: A randomized controlled experiment. Criminology 37:541–580.
Bureau of Justice Statistics 2000 Drugs and Crime Facts, report 165148. Available at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/dcf.pdf.
1999 Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics—1998. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.
Caulkins, J., and P.Reuter 1998 What price data tell us about drug markets. Journal of Drug Issues 28(3):593–612.
Caulkins, J.P. 1995 Estimating Elasticities of Demand for Cocaine and Heroin with Data from the Drug Use Forecasting System. Unpublished manuscript, H.John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, Carnegie Mellon University.
1994 Developing Price Series for Cocaine. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
Caulkins, J., G.Crawford, and P.Reuter 1993 Simulation of adaptive response: A model of drug interdiction. Mathematical and Computer Modeling 17:37–52.
Cave, J., and P.Reuter 1988 The Interdictor's Lot. Department of Justice: Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), [Docket No. 95–47], Roxane Laboratories, Inc.; Intent To Allow the Importation of a Schedule II Substance, Grant of Registration To Import a Schedule II Substance, Monday, October 19, 1998, Federal Register 63(201). Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
Chaloupka, F. 1991 Rational addictive behavior and cigarette smoking. Journal of Political Economy 99:722–742.
Chaloupka, F.J., M.Grossman, and J.A.Tauras 1998 The Demand for Cocaine and Marijuana by Youth. Working paper 6411. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Cooper, M.H. 1990 The Business of Drugs. Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly.
Covington, J. 2000a Drug Treatment in Captive Populations. Unpublished paper prepared for the Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs.
2000b Incapacitating Drug Offenders. Unpublished paper prepared for the Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs.
forthcoming Round up the usual suspects: Racial profiling and the war on drugs. In D. Milovanovic and K.Russell, eds., Petit Apartheid in Criminal Justice.
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Crane, B.D., A.R.Rivolo, and G.C.Comfort 1997 An Empirical Examination of Counterdrug Interdiction Program Effectiveness, IDA paper P-3219. Alexandria, VA: Institute for Defense Analyses.
Curtis, R., and T.Wendel 2000 Lockin' Niggas Up Like It's Goin' Out of Style: The Differing Consequences of Police Interventions in Three Brooklyn, New York, Drug Markets. Paper presented to the Conference on Drug Markets and Law Enforcement Strategies. Arlington, VA: National Institute of Justice.
1999 Toward the Development of a Typology of Illegal Drug Markets. Unpublished paper presented to the Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs, National Research Council, Washington, D.C., May 1999.
Davis, R.C., and A.Lurigio 1996 Fighting Back: Neighborhood Antidrug Strategies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
DeSimone, J. 1998 Is marijuana a gateway drug? Eastern Economic Journal 24:149–164.
Everingham, S.S., and C.P.Rydell 1993 Modeling the Demand for Cocaine. Report prepared for the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the U.S. Army. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
Everingham, S.M.S., C.P.Rydell, and J.P.Caulkins 1995 Cocaine consumption in the United States: Estimating past trends and future scenarios. Socio-Economic Planning Sciences 29:305–314.
Fagan, J. 1992 Drug selling and licit income in distressed neighborhoods: The economic lives of street-level drug users and dealers. In A.V.Harrell and G.E.Peterson, eds., Drugs, Crime, and Social Isolation. Washington, DC: Urban Institute Press.
Frisch, Ragnar 1933 Propagation and impulse problems in dynamic economics. Economic Essays in Honor of Gustav Cassel.
Ghemawat, P. 1985 Building strategy on the experience curve. Harvard Business Review 63(2):143–149.
Green, L. 1996 Policing Places with Drug Problems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Grossman, M., F.J.Chaloupka, and C.C.Brown 1996 The Demand for Cocaine by Young Adults: A Rational Addiction Approach. Working paper 5713. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Kennedy, M., P.Reuter, and K.Riley 1993 A simple economic model of cocaine production. Mathematical and Computer Modeling 17.
Kleiman, M.A.R. 1992 Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results. New York: Basic Books.
Koper, C.S., and P.Reuter 1996 Suppressing illegal gun markets: Lessons from drug enforcement. Law and Contemporary Problems 59(1):119–146.
Levitt, S.D., and S.A.Venkatesh 1998 An Economic Analysis of a Drug-Selling Gang's Finances. Working paper 6592. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
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MacCoun, R.J., and P.Reuter 1992 Are the wages of sin $30 an hour? Economic aspects of street-level drug dealing. Crime and Delinquency 38:477–491.
Miron, J.A. 1999 Do Prohibitions Raise Prices? Evidence from the Market for Cocaine. Working paper, Boston University.
Moore, M. 1990 Supply Reduction and Drug Law Enforcement. In M.Tonry and J.Q.Wilson, eds., Drugs and Crime. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morgan, J.P. 1991 Prohibition is perverse policy: What was true in 1922 is true now. In M.P.Krauss and E.P.Lazear, Searching for Alternatives. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.
Nadelmann, E.A. 1991 Drug prohibition in the United States: Costs, consequences, and alternatives. Science 245:939–47.
Nagin, D.S. 1998 Criminal deterrence research at the outset of the twenty-first century. Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 23:1–42. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Natarajan, M., and M.Belanger 1998 Varieties of drug trafficking organization: A typology of cases prosecuted in New York City. Journal of Drug Issues 28(4).
National Development and Research Institutes 1998 Natural History of Crack Distribution/Abuse. Report prepared for the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
National Research Council 1999 Assessment of Two Cost-Effectiveness Studies on Cocaine Control Policy. Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs. C.F.Manski, J.V.Pepper, and Y.F.Thomas, eds. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
1978 Deterrence and Incapacitation: Estimating the Effects of Criminal Sanctions on Crime Rates. Committee on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. Blumstein, A., J.Cohen, and D.Nagin, eds. Washington, DC: National Academy Press .
Office of National Drug Control Policy, Executive Office of the President 2000 The National Drug Control Strategy: 2000 Annual Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
1999a Drug Data Summary. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
1999b The Price of Illicit Drugs: 1981 Through the Second Quarter of 1998. Washington DC: Abt Associates.
1998 FY 1999 Budget Highlights: Federal Drug Control Programs. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
1997a The National Drug Control Strategy. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
1997b What America's Users Spend on Illegal Drugs, 1988–1995. Washington DC: Abt Associates.
Pollak, R.A. 1970 Habit formation and dynamic demand functions. Journal of Political Economy 78:745–763.
1976 Habit formation and long-run utility functions. Journal of Economic Theory 13: 272–297.
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Reuter, P. 1988 Quantity illusions and paradoxes of drug interdiction: Federal intervention into vice policy. Law and Contemporary Problems 51:233–252.
Reuter, P., and M.Kleiman 1986 Risks and prices: An economic analysis of drug enforcement. In M.Tonry and M. Norris, eds., Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, Vol. 7. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Reuter, P., R.MacCoun, and P.Murphy 1990 Money from Crime: A Study of the Economics of Drug Dealing in Washington, DC. Report R-3894-RF. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
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1993 Snow Job? The Efficacy of Source Country Cocaine Policies. RAND Graduate School dissertation. Santa Monica, CA: RAND.
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Saffer, H., and F.Chaloupka 1995 The Demand for Illicit Drugs. Working paper 5238. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
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Stares, P.B. 1996 Global Habit: The Drug Problem in a Borderless World. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.
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Stuntz, W. 1998 Race, class, drugs. Columbia Law Review 98:1795–1842.
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1991 Legalizing drugs: Lesson from (and about) economics. The Milbank Quarterly 4(69):641–661.
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1989 The Cocaine Kids. New York: Addison-Wesley.
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Child Development 133 Research Methods in Human Development
Sections 04, 68, & 69 Hembree Spring, 2011
External/Ecological Validity
I. External Validity
A. Introduction
= ability to generalize your experimental results
B. Three types of generalization:
1. to the population of interest
2. to the environment of interest
3. to the time of interest
C. Threats to External Validity
1) threats based on methods
2) threats based on participants
D. Replication 1. Exact replication
D. Replication
1. Exact replication
2. Conceptual replication
E. Ecological Validity
F. What can we do to improve external and ecological validity? Why should we bother?
II. Discussion Questions
Send problems, comments or suggestions to: email@example.com
California State University, Sacramento College of Education Department of Child Development
Updated: January, 2011

subset: commoncrawl


text:
These captains operate their ships by radio - Florida Times-Union

T hese captains operate their ships by radio
Florida Times-Union, FL - <nobr>8 hours ago</nobr>
... Now he captains a sleek Megatech Nirvana II model sailboat that stands almost 5.5-feet tall from keel to mast top. "I sailed a real ...

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This is my attempt to document the primary differences between FTP and HTTP, as this is commonly asked and also a lot of misconceptions (and outright lies) are flying around. If you find any errors, or have additional stuff to add, please mail me!
Both protocols are used for uploads and downloads on the internet, for text and for binary, both over TCP/IP. But there are a lot of differences in the details:
Possibly the most common question: which is faster for transfers?
Given all details on this page. What makes FTP faster:
What makes HTTP faster:
Ultimately the net outcome of course differ depending on specific details, but I would say that for single-shot static files, you won't be able to measure a difference. For a single shot small file, you might get it faster with FTP (unless the server is at a long round-trip distance). When getting multiple files, HTTP should be the faster one.
FTP (RFC 959) appeared roughly ten years before HTTP was invented. FTP was the one and only protocol back then. The initial traces of what become RFC 959 can be found already as early as 1971 (RFC 114)
Both protocols offer uploads. FTP has an "append" command, where HTTP is more of a "here's data coming now you deal with it" approach.
It could be worth noticing that WebDAV is a protocol on top of HTTP that provides "filesystem-like" abilities
FTP has a notion of file format so it can transfer data as ASCII or binary (and more) where HTTP always sends things binary. FTP thus also allows text conversions when files are sent between systems of different sorts:
If the destination uses a different scheme for encoding End-Of-Line characters ftp will correct it for the destination. For example unix uses only a NL (newLine x'0A') character and MS windows uses CR and LF (CarriageReturn and LineFeed x'0D0A'). MS windows includes a CTRL-Z (x'1A') as an end of file character, unix does not. EBCDIC specifies that a translation be performed from ASCII to EBCDIC (used on old mainframes).
HTTP provides meta-data with files, Content-Type, which clients use but FTP has no such thing. The meta data can thus be used by clients to interpret the contents accordingly.
Transfers with HTTP always also include a set of headers that send meta data. FTP does not send such headers. When sending small files, the headers can be a significant part of the amount of actual data transfered. HTTP headers contain info about things such as last modified date, character encoding, server name and version and more.
HTTP supports pipelining. It means that a client can ask for the next transfer already before the previous one has ended, which thus allows multiple documents to get sent without a round-trip delay between the documents, and TCP packets are thus optimized for transfer speed.
Something related, although not similar, is FTP's support for requesting multiple files to get transferred in parallel using the same control connection. That's of course using new TCP connections for each transfer so it'll get different performance metrics.
FTP involves the client sending commands to which the server responds. A single transfer can involve quite a series of commands. This of course has a negative impact since there's a round-trip delay for each command. HTTP transfers are primarily just one request and one response (for each document). Retrieving a single FTP file can easily get up to 10 round-trips.
One of the biggest hurdles about FTP in real life is its use of two connections. It uses a first primary connection to send control commands on, and when it sends or receives data, it opens a second TCP stream for that purpose.
FTP's use of two connections, where the second one use dynamic port numbers and can go in either direction, gives the firewall admins grief and firewalls really have to "understand" FTP at the application protocol layer to work really well.
This also means that if both parties are behind NATs, you cannot use FTP!
Additionally, as NATs often are setup to kill idle connections and the nature of FTP makes the control channel remain quiet during long and slow FTP transfers, we often end up with the control channel getting cut off by the NAT due to idleness.
FTP opens the second connection in an active or passive mode, which basically says which end that initiates it. It's a client decision to try either way.
Since firewalls need to understand FTP to be able to open ports for the secondary connection etc, there's a huge problem with encrypted FTP (FTP-SSL or FTPS) since then the control connection is sent encrypted and the firewall(s) cannot interpret the commands that deal with creating the second connection. Also, the FTPS standard took a very long time to "hit it" so there exists a range of hybrid versions out in the wild.
FTP and HTTP have a different set of authentication methods documented. While both protocols offer basically plain-text user and password by default, there are several commonly used authentication methods for HTTP that isn't sending the password as plain text, but there aren't as many (non-kerberos) options available for FTP.
Both protocols offer support for download. Both protocols used to have problems with file sizes larger than 2GB but those are history for modern clients and servers on modern operating systems.
Both FTP and HTTP support resumed transfers in both directions, but HTTP supports more advanced byte ranges.
Resumed transfers for FTP that start beyond the 2GB position has been known to cause trouble in the past but should be better these days.
For HTTP communication, a client can maintain a single connection to a server and just keep using that for any amount of transfers. FTP must create a new one for each new data transfer. Repeatedly doing new connections are bad for performance due to having to do new handshakes/connections all the time and redoing the TCP slow start period and more.
To avoid having to close down the data connection in order to signal the end of a transfer - when the size of the transfer wasn't known when the transfer started, chunked encoding was introduced in HTTP.
During a "chunked encoding" transfer, the sending party sends a stream of [size-of-data][data] blocks over the wire until there is no more data to send and then it sends a zero-size chunk to signal the end of it.
Another obvious benefit (apart from having to re-open the connection again for next transfer) with chunked encoding compared to plain closing of the connection is the ability to detect premature connection shutdowns.
HTTP provides a way for the client and server to negotiate and choose among sevel compression algorithms. The gzip algorithm being the perhaps most compact one.
FTP offers an official "built-in" run length encoding that compresses the amount of data to send, but not by a great deal on ordinary binary data. It has also traditionally been done for FTP using various "hackish" approaches that were never in any FTP spec.
FTP supports "third party transfers", often called "FXP". It allows a client to ask a server to send data to a third host, a host that isn't the same as the client. This is often disabled in modern FTP servers though due to the security implications.
HTTP and FTP both support ipv6 fine, but the original FTP spec had no such support and still today many FTP servers don't have support for the necessary commands that would enable it. This also goes for the firewalls in between that need to understand FTP.
Using HTTP 1.1, you can easily host many sites on the same server and they are all differentiated by their names.
In FTP, you cannot do name based virtual hosting at all until the HOST command gets implemented in the server you talk to and in the ftp client you use... It is a recent spec without many implementations.
One area in which FTP stands out somewhat is that it is a protocol that is directly on file level. It means that FTP has for example commands for listing dir contents of the remote server, while HTTP has no such concept.
However, the FTP spec authors lived in a different age so the commands for listing directory contents (LIST and NLST) don't have a specified output format so it's a pain to write programs to parse the output. Latter specs (RFC3659) have addressed this with new commands like MLSD, but they are not widely implemented or supported by neither servers nor clients.
One of the biggest selling points for HTTP over FTP is its support for proxies, already built-in into the protocol from day 1. The support is so successful and well used that lots of other protocols can be sent over HTTP these days just for its ability to go through proxies.
FTP has always been used over proxies as well, but that was never standardized and was always done in lots of different ad-hoc approaches.
There are further differences, like the HTTP ability to do conditional requests, negotiate content language and much more but those are not big enough to be specified in this document.
Feedback and improvements by: Micah Cowan, Joe Touch, Austin Appel, Dennis German, Josh Hillman
Updated: March 13, 2015 12:59 (Central European, Stockholm Sweden)


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Poland/Germany: Whether a Polish citizen living in Poland whose mother was ethnic German has a right to German citizenship under the law on nationality that came into force on 1 January 2000; under what conditions; English language version of the Nationality Act
Publisher | Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada |
Author | Research Directorate, Immigration and Refugee Board, Canada |
Publication Date | 20 March 2003 |
Citation / Document Symbol | ZZZ40717.E |
Reference | 7 |
Cite as | Canada: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, Poland/Germany: Whether a Polish citizen living in Poland whose mother was ethnic German has a right to German citizenship under the law on nationality that came into force on 1 January 2000; under what conditions; English language version of the Nationality Act , 20 March 2003, ZZZ40717.E , available at: http://www.refworld.org/docid/3f7d4e4615.html [accessed 6 May 2015] |
Disclaimer | This is not a UNHCR publication. UNHCR is not responsible for, nor does it necessarily endorse, its content. Any views expressed are solely those of the author or publisher and do not necessarily reflect those of UNHCR, the United Nations or its Member States. |
According to the Open Society Institute, some 170,000 persons hold both German and Polish citizenship (2001, 217). German law provides three ways to become a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), which include "by birth" (jus soli and jus sanuinis), by naturalization and under the "right of return" provisions (FRG n.d.a.).
In addition to allowing children born to "foreign nationals" on German soil after 1 January 2000 the opportunity to acquire citizenship, the concept "by birth" refers to cases where children inherit German citizenship from their parents (ibid.). Individuals descended from a German parent may acquire citizenship upon the verification of their parent's German citizenship by national authorities (FRG n.d.b). In so doing, the descendant must provide documents including his/her birth certificate, marriage/divorce decrees, a passport, the address of last residence in Germany, father's/mother's old German passports if available, grandfather's (father's/mother's father) birth and marriage certificate and a complete list of all places where father/mother and grandfather lived from birth until present (ibid.).
"Right of return" is a concept based on Article 116 of the Basic Law which extends German citizenship rights (FRG n.d.c.). This concept provides ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union the opportunity to acquire citizenship upon arrival in Germany (CNN 3 Sept. 2001). According to comments published on a German diplomatic Website, "[t]he majority of those who are granted German citizenship each year are ... the descendants of German farmers and craftspeople who settled in Russia and Romania and other parts of Eastern Europe in the 18th century" (FRG n.d.c.). While German authorities claim that the government "does not specifically encourage the migration of ethnic Germans," they also note that these ethnic German communities are "entitled not only to German citizenship but also a broad array of services designed to aid in their integration into Germany" (ibid.).
In addition, "right of return" is applied to those who were "deprived of [citizenship] on political, racial or religious grounds between 1933 and 1945" (FRG n.d.c). Those who held German citizenship but were displaced before the First World War have the "right to have their German citizenship recognized" (OSI 2001, 216-217).
Please find attached an unofficial translation of the German Nationality Act, which came into effect on 1 January 2000 as published by the Comparative Law Society's German Law Archive.
This Response was prepared after researching publicly accessible information currently available to the Research Directorate within time constraints. This Response is not, and does not purport to be, conclusive as to the merit of any particular claim to refugee status or asylum. Please find below the list of additional sources consulted in researching this Information Request.
CNN.com. 3 September 2001. Joanne Mariner. "FindLaw Forum: Racism, Citizenship and Identity - A Challenge for the United Nations." Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). n.d.a. German Embassy, Ottawa. "Germany's New Citizenship Law." _____. n.d.b. German Embassy, London. "German Nationality for Descendents of a German." _____. n.d.c. German Embassy, Washington. "Background Papers: Citizenship Reform and Germany's Foreign Residents." Open Society Initiative. 2001. Piotr Bajda, Magdalena Syposz and Dariusz Wojakowski. "Equality in Law, Protection in Fact: Minority Law and Practice in Poland." In Diversity in Action: Local Public Management of Multi-ethnic Communities. Edited by Anna-Maria Biro and Petra Kovacs. Attachment
Federal Republic of Germany. 23 July 1999. Nationality Act (Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz, StAG). Unofficial translation by Goethe Institut, Inter Nationes. (Comparative Law Society, German Law Archive). 13pp. Additional Sources Consulted
Internet sites, including:
Asylum Law
Friends and Partners
German News (English Edition)
Germany-Poland-Volhynia News Group
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).


text:
26 search results for The Great White Hope
'Off the Map' - 'Saved by the Great White Hope': Paradise found?
Type: Post | Date: Wednesday, Jan 12, 2011
What did everybody think of the new medical drama? -
AMPAS announces film series to celebrate the work of this year's Honorary Oscar recipients
Type: Post | Date: Friday, Oct 28, 2011
'The Exorcist,' 'The Great White Hope' and 'The Color Purple' to be screened -
Interview: Daniel Gillies says 'Originals' season finale is 'non-stop'
Type: Post | Date: Tuesday, May 13, 2014
The star explains why the Original vampire will always be Team Klaus -
Oprah Winfrey and James Earl Jones to receive honorary Academy Awards
Type: Post | Date: Wednesday, Aug 3, 2011
Makeup artist Dick Smith also recognized -
Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones returning 'Driving Miss Daisy' to Broadway
Type: Article | Date: Tuesday, Jun 29, 2010
Performances will begin Oct. 7 -
James Earl Jones receives honorary Oscar in London and calls it 'an actor's wet dream'
Type: Article | Date: Sunday, Nov 13, 2011
Oprah Winfrey and Dick Smith were on hand for Governors Awards in Hollywood -
The Academy celebrates Smith, Jones and Winfrey at third annual Governors Awards
Type: Post | Date: Sunday, Nov 13, 2011
After tumultuous week, AMPAS takes a moment to toast Honorary Oscar recipients -
Green Day plans two documentaries to accompany three new studio sets
Type: Post | Date: Monday, Jul 9, 2012
How much Green Day is enough? -
From the Gotham Awards floor: Overheard and witnessed at the Oscar season kickoff
Type: Post | Date: Tuesday, Dec 2, 2014
The stars come out in New York City!... and it's all pretty chill


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In this month's issue, read about lawmakers who are authors, key cases affecting states before the U.S. Supreme Court, the state of civics knowledge, website ideas to steal and more.
Current Issue
NCSL Webinars allow attendees to participate in meetings taking place around the world from the comfort of their desk. They are collaborative, interactive and easy to use.
Most webinars will be recorded for those who are unable to attend the live meeting.
Friday, Jan. 31, 2014 | 2 p.m. ET/ 1 p.m. CT/ Noon MT/ 11 a.m. PT
Did voting laws change in 2013? Yes, indeed they did. Almost 300 new laws were enacted by state legislatures last year! In this brief 30-minute webinar, hear what topics were hot, what topics were not, and what states took actions unlike any others. A few hints: online voter registration, voter ID and election crimes were the top three categories. Legislators and legislative staff will be particularly interested in this wrap-up, because laws passed in one state are often introduced in other states soon thereafter. Be prepared with tales from your state—the chat box will be open.
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bring back the pug
Megellen has been banned. The post that got her booted contained no foul language nor any insults. It was a light hearted, funny blog entry.
Recent signatures
Victoria Salter, United Kingdom
4 years ago Comments: -
Hail Caille, United States
6 years ago -
Barry Conway, United States
6 years ago
Petition highlights
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Montebello Competitive Bidding Process for Solid Waste Hauling Services, Measure O (November 2011)
Measure O requires that all residential trash-hauling contracts be put out to a competitive bid process. The city could not enter into an "evergreen contract" for trash-hauling that rolls over from year-to-year, either.
The City of Montebello currently contracts with Arakelian Enterprises, Inc. (also known as "Athens Services") for its trash services. With the approval of Measure O, once the current contract with Athens expires, the city council will be required to "publish solicitations for residential solid waste franchises and then publicly open the applications submitted by interested waste haulers. The submitted applications would then be evaluated based upon certain criteria, including, but not limited to: the applicant waste hauler's experience, its technical ability to meet the obligations of the franchise, and its proposed monthly rates for residential solid waste service. With limited exceptions, the City Council could only award a residential solid waste franchise to the responsible bidder that proposed the lowest monthly rates to City customers."[1]
Election results
Measure O | ||||
Result | Votes | Percentage | ||
Yes | 3,039 | 71.09% | ||
No | 1,236 | 28.91% |
- Election results are from the Los Angeles County elections office.
The editors of Eastern Group Publications endorsed a "yes" vote on Measure O saying that it is "a good step toward ensuring fairness in the awarding of city contracts."[2]
Text of measure
The question on the ballot:
Measure O: "Shall an ordinance be approved which requires franchises for providing solid waste (trash) hauling services to be awarded through a competitive bidding process requiring a public hearing and other compliance requirements to ensure fairness and transparency?"[3] |
- ↑ Impartial analysis
- ↑ Eastern Group Publications, "Ballot Recommendations for Tuesday, Nov. 8 2011 Consolidate Municipal Election," November 3, 2011
- ↑ Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributed to the original source.
This local ballot measure article is a stub. You can help people learn by expanding it. |