Professor Peter Reuter
Peter Reuter is a professor in the School of Public Affairs and in the Department of Criminology at the University of Maryland. Since July 1999, he has been the editor of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. He was a senior economist in the Washington office of the RAND Corporation (1981–93). He founded and directed RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center (1989–93). His early research focused on the organization of illegal markets and resulted in the publication of Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand (MIT Press, 1983), which won the Leslie Wilkins award for the most outstanding book of the year in criminology and criminal justice. He has served as a consultant to numerous government agencies (including the US General Accounting Office, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, the National Institute of Justice, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) and to foreign organizations including the United Nations Drug Control Program and the British Department of Health.
Reuter’s recent research has largely focused on drug markets and drug policy. How do different kinds and intensities of enforcement affect the demand and supply of illegal drugs and the ways in which such drugs are sold? Recent co-authored articles in Socio Economic Planning Sciences and Contributions to Economic Analysis and Policy, examine how drug markets may behave in counter-intuitive ways that deviate from the classic economic predictions.
His work also examines other interventions aimed at drug problems. A series of papers in Addiction have assessed a variety of drug policy issues, such as the likely consequences of treatment on the size of the drug addict population. In general, Reuter finds that while drug treatment lowers drug addiction at the individual level, and can be justified as a social program to promote health, it cannot be justified on a pure cost effectiveness basis. However, the only alternative policy, intensified policing or sanctions, appear to neither reduce drug prevalence nor drug-related harm. This suggests no inexpensive solution to reducing the current rate of drug addition.
In his 2006 American Journal of Public Health article with Harold Pollack, he examined whether the work requirements of welfare reform left a population of welfare recipients that had a higher propensity of drug abuse. A primary concern of welfare reform was that mothers with special needs, especially drug addition, would be insensitive to the work incentives put into place by welfare reform. The paper demonstrated that, contrary to predictions in 1996, when welfare reform was implemented, there has been a decrease in drug abuse in the welfare population. This decrease appears to reflecting a general decline in low income population so that there is no evidence of differential exit from welfare by a recipient’s degree of drug dependency.
