Unintended Consequences

This week I have been thinking about the unintended consequences of our actions. Sometimes these consequences are positive - I go to a concert to listen to some good blues and end up meeting the man that I marry. And sometimes they are negative - we build a wall to retain the hill in the back yard and it creates a creek running through the back of the house. When we are looking at systems larger than individuals and families, the consequences - positive and negative, intended and unintended - can effect many more people.

A recent policy brief from the Substance Abuse Policy Research Program supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provides us with some food for thought about intended and unintended consequences of public policy. This policy brief looks at the results of California's Proposition 36 and Arizona's Proposition 200. Both of these propositions were passed by over 60% of the voters and mandated treatment in lieu of incarceration for drug offenders. The authors of the brief suggest that those who draft such propositions in the future "pay close attention to the population that will actually be affected by the law." Since the vast majority of first-time drug possession offenders are not sentenced to jail or prison, a mandate for treatment with no teeth in it for a "carrot and stick" approach has the unintended consequence of filling treatment centers with people who have no desire to be involved and no consequences for dropping out of treatment. Also neither of these propositions took into account the programs that some communities had in place, such as drug courts. At times the mandates of the propositions were in direct conflict with the rules of existing programs, making the new laws difficult to implement.

What are the things that we need to do to be smarter about our public policy? Here is the link so that you can begin to think about unintended consequences - both small and large.

http://www.saprp.org/KnowledgeAssets/knowledge_brief.cfm?KAID=17