Youths will be youths

As an addendum to the previous post, I suspected an age skew. Younger guys who buy cheap cigars are more likely to use them as blunts than older men are. The percentages of men aged 18-25 and aged 26+ who buy cigars and are active marijuana users, again defined as having smoked weed sometime in the last year:

Cigar	18-25yo	26+yo
Black and Milds	21.3%	12.4%
Swishers	17.2%	7.4%

Even among 'youths', though, it's more the exception than the rule.

2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health variables used: CGR30BR2(404, 423), IRSEX(1), CIG30MLN(2-3), MRDAYPYR, CATAGE(2)(3-4)

Lemme get a black and put the rest of this $5 on pump three

Reporting on what Justitia would surely regard as a hopeless and deeply unethical persecution prosecution, Jack Cashill writes:

Of note, Curly walked into the store with a couple of bills visible in his hand, likely the bills Martin exited with. Curly took the bills to the counter and bought two cheap cigars, or “blunts” as they are known on the street. The Urban Dictionary defines a “blunt” as a “cigar hollowed out and filled with marijuana.” Its virtue is that it can be smoked in public “somewhat inconspicuously.”

I've known people who smoke cigars as they are, but from personal experience I get the sense that much--if not most--of the time, they are purchased to be hollowed and used to smoke weed. Fortunately, the 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health allows me to see beyond the information my own lying eyes provide to me. The percentages of cigar buyers whose most purchased cigar brand is Black and Mild and Swisher Sweet, respectively (these being by far the two most popular cigar brands in the US), who are active marijuana users (defined here as someone who has smoked weed in the last year):

Cigar	Weed
Black and Milds	15.5%
Swishers	12.3%

I might be able to hang on to the "much", but "most" has to go. A significant minority of cheap cigar buyers are doing so to facilitate their marijuana usage, but most of them merely appreciate the love of a man for a fine Pennsylvanian cigar.

Tangentially, it's my impression that if you're a man and you smoke 100s, there's a good chance you're gay, since 100s are for women (and also that you're a prole, since smoking is for proles). I suspect this tendency is ratcheted up ten-fold if you smoke 120s. Unfortunately, the survey doesn't inquire about sexual orientation or 120s, however, so we'll have to settle with just considering regulars (or kings) and 100s, by sex. The gender breakdown among Marlboro* smokers by cigarette size (rows, not columns, sum to 100%):

	Male	Female
Kings	59.9%	40.1%
100s	43.3%	56.7%

Survey variables used: CGR30BR2(404, 423), IRSEX, CIG30MLN(2-3), MRDAYPYR

* The survey only poses this question to respondents who smoke Marlboros. Because it is a relatively masculine brand, the true overall tendencies towards smoking and thus size prefrences are probably shifted towards women in both cases, but by presumably similar degrees. The takeaway here is that indeed women prefer longs more than men do. Beyond image, it's putatively because 100s last longer and are less intense, both of which are qualities more descriptive of female pleasure than they are of male pleasure [/innuendo].

Stabbing through the shroud at welfare and drug usage

I recall a couple years back reading about the state of Florida's implementation of a plan requiring aspiring recipients of welfare cash assistance (TANF, specifically) to take and pass a drug test to become eligible for said benefits. If successful, the state reimburses the welfare recipients for the cost of the drug test. If they fail, benefits are withheld and the test-takers are on the hook for the cost of having it administered.

Media coverage insinuated that drug usage among welfare recipients was, contrary to Florida governor Rick Scott's claim that welfare recipients have higher rates of drug use than non-recipients do, quite low--perhaps lower than that of the broader population--as less than 3% of those who went ahead and had a test administered on themselves failed to pass it clean. The hole in this implication, of course, is that many of those who qualify for welfare but have recently used drugs aren't going to drop the cash to take a drug test they know they're going to fail. One could make the argument that the more surprising result is that 1 in 40 willingly paid to have a drug test administered on themselves for no reason. Maybe they thought the test would fail, or perhaps these are people on the bottom rungs of the societal ladder and are consequently not well known for high conscientiousness or foresight.

There's a little bankshot in Scott's plan, as it disincentivizes drug usage among the poor while simultaneously reducing the number of people who are eligible to receive benefits by putting another hurdle in their way.

Since then, I stumbled across the 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, with free online access available through the SDA interface. Unfortunately, the closest the study gets to querying respondents on welfare recipiency is whether or not they (or their families, for minors) are eligible for Medicaid (20% of participants said they were, 80% said they were not--I suspect those potentially eligible but who've never actually used Medicaid are mostly unaware of their eligibility or unwilling to take advantage of it for whatever reason, so I'd guess we're doing more than just proxying for low income here), and that question can only be cross referenced with "have you ever used X?" inquiries, not "have you used X in the last month?" questions.

Thus the following attempt to get a feel for whether welfare recipients are more or less likely to use illicit drugs than non-recipients are is a pretty rough approximation, but we work with what we have. To give participants a chance to have used the various stuff if so inclined to do so, I excluded respondents under the age of 20.

The percentages who have ever smoked marijuana by whether they are eligible or ineligible for Medicaid:

Weed	%Used
Eligible	41.5
Ineligible	44.9

Crack:

Crack	%Used
Eligible	36.7
Ineligible	21.1

Cocaine (powdered):

Coke	%Used
Eligible	17.9
Ineligible	16.2

Heroin:

Heroin	%Used
Eligible	3.7
Ineligible	1.7

LSD:

LSD	%Used
Eligible	60.6
Ineligible	65.6

Methamphetamine:

Meth	%Used
Eligible	61.8
Ineligible	52.5

Negligible differences between those eligible for Medicaid and those ineligible when it comes to weed and powdered cocaine, higher rates of having used crack, heroin, and meth among the eligible, and higher rates among the ineligible when it comes to having ever tripped on acid.

Crack is a black drug and meth is a white trash drug. Powdered cocaine and heroin are a little, uh, classier, acid is for the college-aged children of the middle class and the affluent who are on existential missions to find themselves, and weed is something people from all walks of life have used sometime in their adolescent and early adult years.

Parenthetically, if I'm able to use the data at hand to validate some of the stereotypes I'm asserting in the body of a post, I better do so. The percentages of respondents, by race, who've ever smoked crack:

Race	%Used
White	20.0
Black	51.0
Hispanic	17.1
Asian	28.0

And used meth:

Race	%Used
White	52.3
Black	47.8
Hispanic	55.9
Asian	63.6

GSS variables used: NEWRACE2, AGE2(9-17), MJEVER, COCEVER (fag!), CRKEVER, HEREVER (...better), LSD, METHDES

* I realize the usage figures for meth and LSD strain credulity, apparently being more experimented with than even marijuana. I'm unsure of why this is the case, but I doubled-checked the figures and that's what the results show, so take the meth data with a grain of your favorite substance. It's probably still worth noting the disparity between those eligible and ineligible for Medicaid, though.

++Addition++Dan shows how wildly off the meth (and by extension LSD) numbers are. The LSD and meth questions are grouped in under larger categories for hallucinogens and amphetamines, respectively, so it's probably "if you have ever used a hallucinogen, have you used LSD?", etc. Consequently, the racial distribution for meth use likely only applies to those who've used amphetamines of some kind. I'm fairly confident about the figures for the other drugs, though.

On the 2012 ballot initiatives

As an addendum to the previous post, a few remarks about the various ballot initiatives up for electoral consideration yesterday:

- If Hispanics are naturally traditionally-oriented, family-values conservatives, why did they back Colorado's Amendment 64 to legalize recreational marijuana usage 70%-30%, while Coloradan whites--a fairly liberal bunch--split 50%-50% on the issue?

- Younger Americans are more skeptical about a further socialization of health care in the US than older generations are, a notable departure from the general trend in which youth and affinity for socialism tend to go hand-in-hand. In Florida, voters under 30 voted in favor of Amendment 1, which would've prohibited individuals and businesses from being mandated to participate in any health care system, 55%-45%. All other age groups shot it down, with those 65 and older doing so 41%-59%. Spare me the nonsense about the elderly wanting to ensure the nation they've left to the rest of us is fiscally sound--everybody wants to stick their noses in the public trough, ancients included.

- The rapidity with which public opinion has shifted on same-sex marriage is remarkable. When the GSS asked respondents if those of the same sex should be allowed to marry one another, only 11% answered in the affirmative. Today, that is the majority position. No longer are besieged traditionalists on the losing side of history even able to claim that whenever it's put to the public, the public rejects same-sex marriage, and it's only through judicial fiat or by way of furtive legislative action that it is allowed. Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota all voted in favor of it. Results from Washington are still being processed, but at the moment it looks like it'll be legalized there as well.

Parenthetically, in all four states, men voted against and women voted for legalizing same-sex marriage. I wonder if running on a platform to repeal the 19th Amendment would be viable? Keep the 15th, though--blacks rejected same-sex marriage in Maryland (and likely the other three as well, though sample sizes were too small to be included in exit polls from those states).

- While the presidential exit polls broke out the voting behaviors of those married with children from the rest of the electorate, polling on the ballot measures over marijuana legalization did not. As education and income rise, support for legalization does as well, even as personal use of it declines. It's always easier to approve of self-destructive behaviors in the abstract than it is when one feels their consequences firsthand. I suspect those with kids are less supportive of legalization than singles and the childless married are.

GSS variables used: MARHOMO, YEAR(1988)

Hunting for institutional racism

M.G., author of Those Who Can See, has yet another tremendously data-packed post, this time on institutional racism (including a fun yeti metaphor). Like the terrifying shambling strider, it wreaks havoc and destruction wherever it treads, yet no one is ever able to pinpoint any hard evidence of its actual existence.

That doesn't stop us from writing about it, though. Using Ngram viewer, the percentage of published books in the US containing the phrase, from the sixties--1962 being the year of its inception--through 2008:

During the high crime crack war years, we began to forget about the renegade ronso, as making excuses for dangerous behavior that was suddenly hitting too close to home presumably fell out of favor. But once that straightened itself out, we set our sights back on the sasquatch, and we haven't taken them off him since.

GSS on drug use and IQ

Inductivist points to a new article in the journal Intelligence that finds that recreational drug use and alcohol consumption correlate positively with intelligence up to a certain point before trending in opposite directions again at the right end of bell curve, the thought being that openness to experience is a personality trait that tends to be associated with higher IQ, and drug use is a way to open oneself up to more novel experiences.

I'm not sure how strong the correlations are or if the relationship holds for some type of alcohol consumption or recreational drug use versus abstention from all of them, or if the correlation holds in varying degrees for alcohol and each drug considered separately (only the abstract is freely accessible). Based on GSS responses and a United Health Foundation report, alcohol consumption and IQ appear to be positively correlated.

Recreational drug usage is a topic for which the GSS contains a relevant question as well, so why not see if it supports what the journal article found? The percentage of respondents who have ever injected illicit drugs by intelligence grouping*. To allow ample time for experimentation to have occurred, only those aged 30 or older are included. For contemporary relevance, all responses are from 2002 or later (n = 9,892):

Intelligence	Injected
Real Dumbs	4.0%
Pretty Dumbs	3.9%
Normals	3.5%
Pretty Smarts	3.2%
Really Smarts	2.3%

This doesn't include smoking weed, the most easily attainable and frequent form of recreational drug use in the US. That said, the modest relationship is, in contrast to the article's finding, inversely correlated with intelligence.

I wonder how important the specific drug in question is to detecting a relationship between usage and intelligence. Presumably crack cocaine users tend to be less intelligent than powdered users are (although as crack is a predominately black drug and powdered cocaine a predominately Hispanic one, neither may correlate positively with intelligence). I'd guess that meth use and intelligence, if anything, trend in opposite directions, as the stereotypical methhead is a rustic white prole of the lowest order. PCP, shrooms, LSD, and ecstasy, on the other hand, are fairly prevalent on college campuses. I know people who use or have used all of them, and they're mostly well-adjusted and intelligent folks. I don't have much of an impression one way or the other when it comes to heroin. The Chinese liked it and it seems pretty popular in Europe, but I'm aware of heroin users who are of cut from the same cloth as methheads, too.

Parenthetically, I've never had even the slightest desire to engage in illicit drug use of any kind. I've associated it with being sickly and desperate for as long as I can remember, and always avoided it without issue even during my formative years. On personality tests, I come up around the 40th percentile on openness, so that bit of built-in protection might help a little, too!

GSS variables used: EVIDU, WORDSUM, AGE(30-89)

* Respondents are broken up into five categories that come to roughly resemble a normal distribution; Really Smarts (wordsum score of 9-10, comprising 13% of the population), Pretty Smarts (7-8, 26%), Normals (6, 22%), Pretty Dumbs (4-5, 27%), and Real Dumbs (0-3, 12%)

Where white conservatives and NAMs find common ground

There are those on the right who, attuned to the (liberal) zeitgeist, attempt to bring NAMs into their political ranks by emphasizing the putative social conservatism of blacks and Hispanics. Rick Santorum recently illustrated this, and the late Richard Nadler epitomized it.

As the US becomes increasingly multiracial and multicultural, our democratic system will increasingly turn into a spoils system, where votes are determined by the demographic characteristics of the candidates in question, who, once elected, will use their power to redistribute wealth away from out-group members to the in-group members who elected them. Even at the federal level, where this is less of an issue than it is at more local levels of government, it is certainly detectable.

While that is related to this post's purpose, the focus should be on the data. The following table shows the percentages of SWPLS (liberal and very liberal whites), white conservatives (conservative and very conservative whites), and NAMs (blacks and Hispanics) who agree with a host of political and social statements. The 20 items are broken up into four categories; those in which SWPLs and NAMs are on the same page, those in which NAMs fall midway between SWPLs and white conservatives, those in which whites of all political persuasions are lined up against NAMs, and those in which white conservatives and NAMs are aligned against SWPLs. For contemporary relevancy, all responses are from 2000 onward:

SWPLs and NAMs agree	SWPLs	WhtCons	NAMs
The death penalty should be given to those who commit murder	50.4	84.8	48.2
Pornography should be made illegal	19.8	52.2	33.1
Expresses a great deal of confidence in the US military	36.3	67.8	42.9
Favors increases nuclear power generation in the US	66.4	86.6	50.0
The government should spend more on health care	85.5	59.5	87.7
Immigration into the US should be increased	14.9	6.7	11.9
The government should raise taxes to reduce income inequality	67.5	24.0	55.6
NAMs fall in between SWPLs and white conservatives
The government should spend more to protect the environment	79.7	26.6	55.9
The government should spend more on the military	15.2	55.7	38.4
The government should spend more on culture and the arts	48.1	6.2	31.0
Background checks should be required for gun ownership	87.0	70.5	79.9
Environmental threats are exaggerated	14.9	67.5	32.5
Whites band together against NAMs
Special preferences should be given to minorities in hiring decisions	22.8	6.1	37.9
The government should spend more on unemployment benefits	34.3	20.1	54.5
White conservatives and NAMs agree
A woman should be able to have an abortion for any reason	69.7	21.8	35.3
Marijuana should be legalized	66.4	22.6	31.7
Same sex marriage should be allowed	81.5	14.5	28.7
Prayer should be permissible in public schools	35.3	68.9	68.2
It is okay to spank a child for disciplinary purposes	52.3	81.0	77.4
Terminal patients should be allowed to die if they choose to do so	86.3	50.4	53.4

Even though white conservatives and NAMs are more closely aligned with one another than either is with SWPLs on multiple social issues, pocketbook concerns trump moral values, especially among those who are not affluent, and of course NAMs disproportionately are not. SWPLs want to take from whites and give to NAMs to achieve social justice and NAMs want to take from whites and give to themselves to realize a higher material standard of living. Even on issues that are not of great interest to NAMs, like the arts (a liberal cause) and the military (a conservative cause), NAMs tend to favor more spending than the opposing white group does. Politically, the best strategy for Republicans is probably to highlight Democratic attitudes on things like religion, drug legalization*, and abortion and hope that reduces NAM voters' enthusiasm for going out and voting.

GSS variables used: RACECEN(1)(2, 15-16), POLVIEWS(1-2)(6-7), YEAR(2000-2010), ABANY, GRASS, MARHOMO, PRAYER, SPANKING, LETDIE1, SPENVIRO, SPARMS, GUNSALES, GRNEXAGG, AFFACT, SPUNEMP, CAPPUN, EQWLTH, PORNLAW, SPARTS, SPHLTH, CONARMY, LETIN, NUKEELEC

* Because of its pervasiveness among the (largely NAM) underclass, lots of whites presume that non-whites are amenable to the idea of decriminalizing drug use. I've spent enough time around blacks to know that among those who aren't users, the stuff is not smiled upon. Blacks living in the hood see its consequences firsthand and they don't like it anymore than you or I do.