The drug war is so futile, so destructive, and so depressing at this point that it’s almost not even worth discussing. It’s a whole lot of senseless insanity as I see it, and nobody involved seems to have their wits about them. For example, how could anyone reconcile these 2 recent news items about prescription drugs:

A recent report shows that since oxycontin has been chemically altered so that it’s harder to get “high” from it, the users of the drug have simply switched to heroin. Or as the LA Times so eloquently summed it up: “In the record book of unintended consequences, this one’s sure to be a groan-worthy entry: A frightening rise in addiction to the drug OxyContin prompts a reformulation that makes the prescription pain medication harder to abuse. So addicts switch to heroin instead.”

A newly proposed New York State law will create an online database that alerts doctors to patients who may be pill-shopping. The legislators writing it modestly dubbed it “a model for the country”.

If the proposed law serves as a model for anything, it’s a model of how to look like you’re helping while simultaneously being completely clueless. As I previously commented on the reformulated oxycontin, anyone with half a brain could see the switch to heroin coming from a mile away – as well as the abscesses and other pitfalls that users of the drug would get into as they adjusted to the changes in the drug. Likewise, anyone can see that this new law will only push drug use further underground, and potentially create more violence as it becomes harder to get a supply of drugs prescribed by doctors, and dealers stoop to armed robberies of pharmacies. We can be sure that other unintended consequences will pop up, and what good will it do?

Do we get something for all of these trade-offs? Do anyone’s lives improve? Is “addiction” stopped?

The problem with this new proposed law, and the Oxycontin reformulation, and countless other policies and approaches to substance use problems is this: they are attempts to control human desire through supply.

Desire isn’t changed by blunt force, and in fact such force usually only entrenches desire. People change their desires only by surveying and weighing their range of potential life options. If people want to get high, they will find a way to do it – no matter what. If you take the natural options off the table, they’ll likely come up with unnatural options. Once you eliminate those chemicals from the market, they’ll do strange stuff like choking themselves, or otherwise harming themselves. There are infinite as-yet-unimagined cheap thrills which people can chase. These lawmakers wrongly believe that supply creates demand. The reformulated Oxycontin fiasco should prove this approach to be 100% wrong. Demand doesn’t go away because supply is decreased – demand only gets more desperate.

The last thing we should be doing is engaging in cat and mouse with people over there desire for cheap thrills. How about we just let people get high, so they can get sick of it and move on to bigger better things? Instead we engage in a battle of wills, rather than letting people naturally evolve and change their will.

SOURCES:

Reformulated Oxycontin – Time Magazine or Los Angeles Times

I-STOP – Wall St Journal