Dopey Economics
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Economics is an ecosystem, and all humans are different species with money being their common food source. Like other ecosystems, the economy adjusts as pressures arise and species adapt to the changing environment.
This is why drugs are cheap and drug profits remain higher than drug users.
The United Kingdom’s Home Office (and organization with a name more pleasant that it’s collective personality) recently concluded that a line of Peruvian Marching Powder costs less than a pint of beer. Buzz heads can dust their noses for less money than a soccer hooligan’s breakfast.
This is one of many side effects of unregulated markets. Despite enormous gauntlets imposed by governments, dope demand rages onward. Volume-focused profit potential has streamlined and optimized the cocaine trade. Like corporations with heavy firepower, the drug lords have tweaked their internal operations to the point where they deliver product at barging basement prices and get rich by shipping the stuff by the metric ton.
Maybe their couriers snort the stuff first … gives them the energy to drag crates of Charlie across the border.
Seem people south of the border have had enough of the game and want to back out of the criminalization business. Growing international consensus based on data like £1 lines has called for de-escalation of dope interdiction. Three former heads of state (not to be confused with non-state heads) recently concluded “The available evidence indicates that the war on drugs is a failed war.”
You think?
At £1 a smack and with import volumes reaching Everest heights, there is no other conclusion. America’s “War on Drugs” is now in its forth decade and has sump-pumped the U.S. Treasury a few billion each year in direct interdiction costs (border patrol, Coast Guard, aid to states, etc.) with a few billion more in financing some shady South American governments in their coca field eradication efforts. Add the cost of warehousing petty possessors in prisons and America’s War on Dope is certifiably a war by dopes, by which I mean Congress.
Yet legalization scares soccer mom’s straight, and is thus decriminalization is doomed.
What many overly protective moms don’t realize is that their kids have an easier time buying heroin at their high school than buying a bottle of Yukon Jack at the corner liquor store. Where as illegal drugs by default are a deregulated industry, and booze is a regulated one, the path from producer to consumer and the means for optimizing production are completely different. Cocaine for kids is created by hut squatters in jungles while Jack is distilled by educated workers in government inspected facilities. Bolivian Blow is transported by a chain of underpaid human mules while whiskey is hauled for profit by trucking companies with union labor, annually inspected vehicles, licensed drivers and tax funded roads. The dealer who sold you child a little crank isn’t afraid of the law but the owner of the corner market fears losing his business license for selling a bottle of brandy to your baby.
We don’t need no stinking license!
Despite all, nothing will change. Drug ideology in America is pervasive to the point that every mom and dad who still toke a jay while the kids are out of the house absolutely want the current interdiction model. They would change their minds if they could be their kid for a day and were given the assignment to score some snort after science class and some schnapps after school.
The contrast would kill them, and then kill the war on drugs.
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