My point is not to denigrate you, as you have done to me, in fact, I honor your service as a first responder. I do not disparage your service nor do I disparage you personally, but I do say that your views faithfully mirror the old cliché of exalting hope over experience. How many more decades of failure must we endure in this hopeless war against drugs?
When will we count up the collateral damage and compare it to whatever good we can do when patriotic first responders such as you do your best -but your best amounts to shoveling flies.
10 years ago I wrote this note which looks at this plague from the top down rather from your perspective which is in the trenches, bottom-up. I think it weathers well the passage of time:
If you want to know why the war on drugs is lost start thinking about it the way Adam Smith and Warren Buffett would think about it. Adam Smith would talk about the law of supply and demand and he tells us that when the demand goes up so does the price; when supply goes down, the price goes up. When the demand is inelastic, that is, when it is the product of addiction, the price curve is even more radical in its upward thrust when supply is reduced. Therefore, the more the government succeeds in interdicting the supply of addictive drugs, the more it increases the price and thereby increases the incentive to increase supply. The more the government succeeds, the more it must fail.
That is why drug smugglers and dealers are so wonderfully inventive in evading the law and will ever continue to be so.
Without putting words in Warren Buffett's mouth, his criteria for investing in an enterprise are well-known. He wants a company with a unique product and a huge market potential. What better than an addictive drug? He wants a business with high barriers to entry against competition. What better barrier than the law and what better barriers than drug enforcement agencies raiding your competitor? And if competition becomes too serious, this business model says you simply eliminate it by murdering them.
Buffett would be very intrigued by the idea that costs are extremely low, markup extremely high, and the price is ever supported by the government! By making drugs illegal, the government in effect has enacted price supports. By selling into an inelastic demand of addicts, the market as well as the price are virtually guaranteed.
Because the cost is high, addicts are incentivized to push the drugs onto others in order to addict them, to create a mini market that funds their own addiction. What a wonderful business model! On the macro level it is a multilevel marketing scheme on steroids, or should I say, powered by addiction, and supported by the government.
Meanwhile, this wonderful marketing scheme generates so much money that corruption is inevitable. Worse, our enemies in China, in the Muslim world and elsewhere have exploited this market to our disadvantage and national security peril. Meanwhile, our only politically correct response is a full throated roar: "do more of the same."
