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AbstractDecisionmakers continue to search for new ways to deter criminal behavior that do not rely on increasing the severity of punishment. This paper evaluates South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety Program—a novel, large‐scale intervention requiring those arrested for or convicted of an alcohol‐related offense to abstain from alcohol and submit to alcohol tests multiple times daily. Those testing positive or missing a test receive a swift,certain, and moderate sanction; typically, a night or two in jail. To estimate the causal effect of the 24/7 program on the probability of rearrest or probation revocation for those arrested for a second or third driving under the influence (DUI) offense, we instrument an individual's 24/7 participation with program availability in the county of arrest. We estimate that the individual‐level probability of rearrest or probation revocation is 13.7 percentage points (49 percent; p = 0.002) lower for 24/7 participants than non‐participants 12 months after their DUI arrest. We detect substantive decreases at 24 and 36 months, but the precision of those estimates depends on model specification. These findings provide empricial support for applying "swift‐certain‐fair" sanctions to deter noncompliance in community supervision settings. This paper also provides policymakers with evidence for a new approach to reduce criminal activity among those whose alcohol use leads them to repeatedly threaten public health and safety.

Cannabis legalization is a serious topic of discussion in the Western Hemisphere. Since 2012, voters in eight U.S. states have passed laws to legalize large-scale cannabis production and allow profit-maximizing companies to grow and sell it for nonmedical purposes. Voters in Washington DC also approved legalization, but supply is limited to home production and gifting—retail sales are not allowed. In 2013, Uruguay's President José Mujica ratified a legalization bill that is noteworthy for at least three reasons. Most importantly, it made Uruguay the first country in the world to remove the prohibition on cannabis supply for nonmedical purposes. Second, Uruguay's middle-ground approach to cannabis supply falls in between the two options commonly discussed in the United States: prohibition versus the standard commercial model. Third, the law was approved by politicians, not the voters.

Public support for legalizing marijuana use increased from 25% in 1995 to 60% in 2016, rising in lockstep with support for same-sex marriage. Between November 2012 and November 2016, voters in eight states passed ballot initiatives to legalize marijuana sales for nonmedical purposes—covering one-fifth of the US population. These changes are unprecedented but are not independent of the changes in medical marijuana laws that have occurred over the past 20 years. This article suggests five ways in which the passage and implementation of medical marijuana laws smoothed the transition to nonmedical legalization in the United States: (a) They demonstrated the efficacy of using voter initiatives to change marijuana supply laws, (b) enabled the psychological changes needed to destabilize the "war on drugs" policy stasis, (c) generated an evidence base that could be used to downplay concerns about nonmedical legalization, (d) created a visible and active marijuana industry, and (e) revealed that the federal government would allow state and local jurisdictions to generate tax revenue from marijuana.

Discussions about reducing the harms associated with drug use and antidrug policies are often politicized, infused with questionable data, and unproductive. This paper provides a nonpartisan primer that should be of interest to those who are new to the field of drug policy, as well as those who have been working in the trenches. It begins with an overview of problems and policies related to illegal drugs in the United States, including the nonmedical use of prescription drugs. It then discusses the efficacy of U.S. drug policies and programs, including long-standing issues that deserve additional attention. Next, the paper lists the major funders of research and analysis in the area and describes their priorities. By highlighting the issues that receive most of the funding, this discussion identifies where gaps remain. Comparing these needs, old and new, to the current funding patterns suggests eight opportunities to improve understanding of drug problems and drug policies in the United States: (1) sponsor young scholars and strengthen the infrastructure of the field, (2) accelerate the diffusion of good ideas and reliable information to decision-makers, (3) replicate and evaluate cutting-edge programs in an expedited fashion, (4) support nonpartisan research on marijuana policy, (5) investigate ways to reduce drug-related violence in Mexico and Central America, (6) improve understanding of the markets for diverted pharmaceuticals, (7) help build and sustain comprehensive community prevention efforts, and (8) develop more sensible sentencing policies that reduce the excessive levels of incarceration for drug offenses and address the extreme racial disparities. The document offers some specific suggestions for researchers and potential research funders in each of the eight areas

"Should we legalize marijuana? If we legalize, what in particular should be legal? Just possessing marijuana and growing your own? Selling and advertising? If selling becomes legal, who gets to sell? Corporations? Co-ops? The government? What regulations should apply? How high should taxes be? Different forms of legalization could bring very different results. This second edition of Marijuana Legalization: What Everyone Needs to Know® discusses what is happening with marijuana policy, describing both the risks and the benefits of using marijuana, without taking sides in the legalization debate. The book details the potential gains and losses from legalization, explores the "middle ground" options between prohibition and commercialized production, and considers the likely impacts of legal marijuana on occasional users, daily users, patients, parents, and employers - and even on drug traffickers."--Publisher

Despite overall declines in cigarette smoking prevalence in the United States (U.S.) in the past several decades, smoking rates remain highly variable across geographic areas. Past work suggests that smoking norms and exposure to other smokers in one's social environment may correlate with smoking risk and cessation, but little is known about how exposure to other smokers in one's community is causally linked to smoking behavior – in part due to endogeneity and inability to randomly assign individuals to different 'smoking environments.' The goal of this study was to evaluate how exposure to localities with high population-level smoking prevalence affects individual-level cigarette smoking behaviors, including quitting. The study addresses key limitations in the literature by leveraging a unique natural experiment: the plausibly exogenous compulsory assignment of military personnel to installations. Logistic and multivariate regressions estimated cross-sectional associations between smoking/quitting behaviors and our proxy for social environments for smoking, county-level smoking prevalence (CSP). Across 563 U.S. counties, CSP ranged from 3.8 to 37.9%. Among the full sample, a 10 percentage point increase in CSP was associated with a 11% greater likelihood of smoking. In subgroup analyses, young adults, women, those without children in the household, and risk/sensation-seekers were more likely to smoke and less likely to quit when exposed to counties with higher CSP. Relocation to areas with high population-level smoking prevalence may increase likelihood of smoking and impede quitting, and may disparately affect population subgroups. Findings provide novel evidence that community smoking environments affect adult smoking risk and underscore a need for sustained, targeted efforts to reduce smoking in areas where prevalence remains high.

Abstract
Reducing substance use among individuals subject to community supervision is an important goal for many judges and community corrections officers. Some jurisdictions have had success by ordering justice-involved individuals to frequent substance use testing with swift, certain, and fair (SCF) sanctions for non-compliance. South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety program is one example of a SCF program that has also been adopted statewide in Montana, North Dakota, and other jurisdictions. As other entities outside the Great Plains attempt to adopt the 24/7 approach, there is a need to examine how the program is implemented. This paper examines a 24/7-inspired pilot program that was implemented in a southwestern county in the US in 2018. Data on participation rates and testing results for the 6-month pilot program were examined. Using a semi-structured interview protocol with questions that were adapted from the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR) interview guide, we interviewed nine individuals from six stakeholder groups: 1) Court, 2) District Attorney, 3) Public Defender, 4) Probation, 5) Sheriff, and 6) the non-profit organization that administered the testing. There were important differences in how the program was implemented in the county versus South Dakota's 24/7 program—namely, there was a different target population, participation was voluntary, and testing was conducted in a different setting which increased costs. While county stakeholders decided to discontinue the program after the pilot period, it was able to implement a SCF program and overcome many of the challenges it confronted. There is some interest in exploring implementation of the SCF with those arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in the county. For jurisdictions considering the implementation of an SCF program, it makes sense to start with a pilot program with pre-determined objectives and timeline for consistency. It is also crucial to hold regular meetings with all relevant stakeholders before and during the pilot to address context-specific challenges. Conducting an implementation analysis of this process based on the CFIR guide can be useful for understanding why the pilot was a success or failure, and how it may be improved.

Crime is an important outcome in many social policy evaluations. Benefits to society from preventing crime are based on avoiding victimization and freeing criminal justice system resources. For the latter, analysts need information about the marginal cost of policing for different types of crime across jurisdictions; however, this information is not readily available. This paper details key economic concepts relevant to law enforcement services, and then combines publicly available police expenditure data with insights from observational and time-diary studies to generate state-level, crime-specific, average variable cost estimates for crime-response services conducted by police by crime type. Since there is considerable uncertainty concerning various parameters underpinning these calculations, we use Monte Carlo simulation methods to incorporate the uncertainty into our estimates. This study finds that the U.S. population-weighted average variable cost of law enforcement response per police-reported Part 1 violent crime is $10,900, ranging from $6900 to $15,400 at the 10th and 90th percentiles, respectively. For a Part 1 property crime, the equivalent figure is $1300, with a range from $700 to $1700.