This project is a technical proposal for implementing drug rationing in a world where recreational drugs are treated as a health concern and not a criminal charge.
Note: This the transcribed version of my late night thoughts while drifting asleep. Drug policy is a complex area, so please excuse any lack of foresight shown here. I present it as something to prompt discussion, rather than a finished product!
The code herein consists (or will consist) of a system to track drug provisioning without risking the privacy of individuals who choose to consume them. The core functionality of this research is to limit the frequency of drug purchase, and avoid dangerous over consumption.
Take the following example. In this hypothetical world where all drugs are regulated, it might be fine to buy a pill of MDMA every week, and more than that could be deemed overuse. With alcohol, most countries have the law that bars are not allowed to serve intoxicated persons in order to limit binge drinking. However, pills and other substances are harder to control in this way as one could simply buy many at once and consume them before the effects are noticable to a salesperson. One proposal is to have drugs rationed so that every individual would be allowed a predefined maximum frequency of use.
In order to prevent individuals running from one store to the next to buy more of a rationed substance, some kind of tracking is needed. Ration cards and stamps were an approach used in war and other emergency situations, however these are prone to being traded amongst individuals creating another black market which is what we wish to avoid.
Since this is the 21st century, another alternative is an online system that validates whether a buyer is allowed to complete a transaction. A store would enter the customer's details (e.g a driver's license) and the system would return a simple yes/no. A major issue with this approach is that there would then exist a repository of people's drug habits. Given that social change generally takes a long time, it is unlikely that the general publics prejudices against drug use will disappear even if legislation changes to regulate it. Thus the database of drug habits would likely be of interest to insurance companies and employers. While best-practices in security could be put in place to try to avoid this data falling in the wrong hands, it'd be better to have a system that is built to keep the details somewhat anonymous but still functional.
To summarise, the envisioned process would look like:
- Consumer wishes to purchase drug A.
- Retailer enters consumer's ID and drug type.
- If the system returns "yes" the transaction can proceed, if "no" the user can be told whether they have personally had their right removed (due to criminal convictions while intoxicated) or due to having used said drug too recently.
Imagine if you will, a world where recreational substances are regulated and no longer contribute to a global war between violent gangs, overfunded government organisations, and increased risk to recreational substance users. I prefer to use "recreational substances" as opposed to the colloqual "drugs", since many things are drugs. Coffee, alcohol, prescription medicine are drugs, but this fact is conveniently forgotten by media, the general public, and policy makers. Indeed, many foods have psychoactive substances in them too (chocolate, turkey, chilli, etc.). The dividing line between what you can legally consume and that which you will be punished for is often arbitary.
"But some drugs are bad!" I hear you say. Well, comparatively, alcohol is one of the worst drugs for society and the individual and the relative standing of various drugs is summarised in the following graph (note that this is already normalised for the number of drug users):
A bit different to what the media, your government or drug enforcement agencies would have you believe.
Since this project suggests a rationing approach, an acceptable usage level for each substance would be defined. Overuse could be based on health evidence, rather than puritanical presumption that drugs cause health risks that are greater than other substances or recreational activities (horse riding anyone?).
Recently in New Zealand, legislation has moved to block various "legal highs" from being sold, and due the speed at which new psychoactive substances are being discovered and produced (indeed, the number of chemical variations that will produce a recreational effect is very large if not infinite) an analogues act was passed. I'm not right up with the latest in the legislation, but one interesting comment from people that are is that there was a move to put the onus of proof, for safety of consumption, on the sellers. However this opens up the question of what happens when drugs that are currently illegal pass these safety standards, and other drugs that are legal, don't. (TODO: expand and link to relevent legislation).
Disclosure: while I'm reasonably technically savvy, I am not a crytogeek, and I'm very aware that getting cryptography processes right is hard. Thus I present it as a prototype for comment rather than a functional system that's ready for production.
There are several questions we need to answer:
- Identification of individuals. In the simplest case, everyone would use a driver's license, but not everyone has one of these and an exclusionary system is not ideal. The problem with allowing multiple identification techniques is resolving these identities to one individual, especially if we wish to avoid explicit profiles of each user.
- Allowed frequency - for a given substance, what is the allowable frequency of use and dosage size. The actual values should be backed by available evidence for adverse health and societal impacts, but the system needs to account for multiple timeframes/quantities. Ideally it should also allow these values to be changed as new evidence becomes available.
- Blacklisted individuals - how do we determine whether an individual is allowed to be using recreational substances.
- Retailer accountability - If the supply of a substance is rationed, then retailers need to be accountable for the substances they sell. Thus distributed batches of goods need to match with the number of a transactions to legitimate buyers. Without this, the retailer becomes the weakest link and potential for the black market over supplying individuals.
- Transaction authorisation - When an individual attempts to purchase through a retailer, the retailer gets told whether they are allowed to complete the purchase.
- Protection of historical use - a history of transactions per individual is needed in order to restrict frequency of use, however, this history could be harmful if linked to an individual.
For each transaction, we have:
user_id- In order to resolve identities (to avoid people using different IDs to avoid rationing), the simplest approach would be to have people need to sign up and get a unique ID for the programme... in order to get this they need to present some form of government recognised identification.transaction_date,transaction_time- the date and time of the purchase.substance- a string identifier of the substance (must be validated)
The rough idea is to use a key value store, where:
- The key is the hashed combination of
user_idanddate_salt. Thedate_saltis a random value generated daily by the system. Another table keeps track of thedate->date_saltmapping, and expires entries after the maximum "allowed frequency" across all rationed substances. This means past information is no longer accessable. If necessary, the obsoletedate_salts could be archived for historical analysis, but would not be accessable in a live system. Historical analysis would be useful to get a better understanding of drug use across a population, but the suggested solution would need to be augmented to be useful and anonymiseuser_id. - The value is a dictionary/hash of substances purchased on that day with the amount purchased (each substance would have a defined unit of measure used consistently through out the system).
To check whether the transaction is allowed to proceed:
- Get the substance's "allowed frequency", this is the number of past days to check (and the number of keys we need to lookup).
- For each day work out the key to check (combine
user_idanddate_salt), find the amount of substance in question that was purchased. sthis to
TODO: Need to add the process of retailer accountability.
Please feel free to submit issues or contact me about this.
There are probably many shortcomings in my approach, so I'd love feedback.