The effect of federal drug law on the incidence of drug abuse

The Controlled Substances Act (CSA) is the prevailing "drug abuse" control statute in the United States. Its manifest objective is to prevent or reduce drug use's "substantial and detrimental effect on the health and general welfare of the American people." Evaluating CSA's effectiveness in 1975, a Domestic Council Task Force reported in a White Paper to President Gerald Ford that its control measures do "reduce abuse of dangerous drugs." The Task Force's evidence was based upon a before-and-after analysis of the frequency of "drug abuse episodes" reported to the nation's Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN). This research note challenges the conclusion of the Domestic Council Task Force, subjecting the DAWN evidence to more rigorous scrutiny, and concluding that we do not presently have adequate materials to assess whether CSA meets its health objectives. The context of this conclusion is that of drug control, but its implications apply to health policy and health policy evaluation in general.     

Employee and government access to personnel files: rights and requirements.

A maze of record-keeping, disclosure, and privacy statutes and regulations, with accompanying case law, have created a boom in privacy law. Employers find themselves caught in this rising tide, torn between the often conflicting requirements. The issue of access to employee files--by employees, government, and unions--is one of the most difficult issues in this complicated situation. This article discusses recent developments in the field and aims to help readers thread their way through the maze of contradictions and pitfalls confronting employers.     

C6-polymorphism of the sixth component of complement: application to paternity cases (author's transl)]

The results of a study of the polymorphism of the sixth component of human complement by means of isoelectric focusing in polyacrylamide gels with subsequent C-dependent lysis in an agarose overlay containing C6 deficient rabbit serum are reported. The allele frequencies obtained (C6A = 0.613, C6B = 0.379, C6R = 0.008) are in good agreement with those previously published. The mode of inheritance in 47 families with 173 offspring as well as 26 mother-child combinations is in agreement with a formal genetical model: "C6A, C6B, C6A1 and C6B1 at an autosomal locus". The inclusion of this system into a blood group expertise in Germany can be recommended.     

Social welfare functions when preferences are convex,strictly monotonic,and continuous

The paper shows that if the class of admissible preference orderings is restricted in a manner appropriate for economic and political models, then Arrow's impossibility theorem for social welfare functions continues to be valid. Specifically if the space of alternatives is R ₊ ⁿ , n ≥ 3, where each dimension represents a different public good and if each person's preferences are restricted to be convex, continuous, and strictly monotonic, then no social welfare function exists that satisfies unanimity, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and nondictatorship.     

Political variables in political socialization: Reply to “the dynamics of interpersonal attitudinal influence”

In this paper two arguments are advanced with regard to parental influence on adolescent political attitudes. First, variables like parental affect, which are of considerable theoretical interest to social psychologists, are of relatively little interest to the system-level concerns of political scientists because of their lack of variance. Second, the additive issue salience/perceptual accuracy model I proposed (1974) is a better fit to the data than a multiplicative cue-giving/parental affect model proposed in this journal by Cundy (1979). The fit of the two models is tested with the Jennings (1965) socialization data.Cundy, D. T. The dynamics of interpersonal attitudinal influence.Political Behavior, 1979,1, 269–284.     

Assessing the results of public expenditure: program evaluation in the Canadian federal government

Abstract. In an attempt to tighten up its financial systems and improve control of expenditures, the Canadian federal government has set up a new office, that of the Comptroller General. One of this Office's responsibilities is to administer the Treasury Board's policy on program evaluation, which says that all government programs should be periodically reviewed for their effectiveness in meeting goals and for the efficiency with which they are managed. The paper describes the Office's approach to program evaluation, reviews program evaluation policy in three other countries and discusses the principles and practical problems which limit the application of evaluation research. Evaluation activity in Canada is endangered in its cradle by two threats: the tendency of proponents to over-exuberance; and the cynics' view that the activity is of such limited applicability that potential savings are negligible. A third problem is a tendency to fuse together policy-related and management-related assessment activity. Evaluation activity conducted from the operational management point of view which takes program goals for granted will surely result in sequences of small victories and economies. This is worth doing well. But the dramatic import of effectiveness evaluation as a ‘bottom line’ for judging the worth of whole programs — that is, as a policy tool — should not be allowed to generate false expectations about the scope for improvement in routine management of the public service. Sommaire. En vue de fortifier ses systèmes financiers et d'améliorer le contrôle exercé sur ses dépenses, le gouvemement fédéral canadien a créé un nouveau poste, celui du Contrôleur général. Une des responsabilités de cette function est d'administrer la politique du Conseil du trésor en matière d'évaluation de programmes. Cette politique exige que les programmes gouvernementaux soient évalués périodiquement afin de déterminer leur efficacitéà rencontrer leurs objectifs ainsi que la capacité de rendement de leur gestion. Ce document décrit l'approche du Bureau du Contrôleur général en matière d'évaluation de programmes; examine les politiques correspondantes dans trois autres pays; et discute des principes et des problèmes pratiques qui limitent l'applicabilité de l'évaluation en recherche.