Drug use… who to blame?
Drugs form a very complex worldwide marketplace, you have legal vs illegal, expensive vs cheap, effective vs placebo and the characteristics are almost infinite. As Drugskilled.com is geared towards “illegal” drugs, it is where my focus will lie.
The Major Players
I think looking at an economic model of drugs will help put into better focus the issues involved with the cycle of drug use that form a continuous cycle of abuse, profit and pleasure.
Drug User: at the top of the drug chain, this person may do whatever is necessary to get their next “hit”, they consume at varying levels depending on their state of their addiction. They are the best customers anybody could have, as they NEED your product to cure them temporarily from what ails them.
Drug Pusher: this person is tantamount to a sales person, they provide for and build up a clientele for their products. The range and quantity/quality can vary greatly depending on supply/demand ratios.
Mule: in its various forms acts like a shipper, they get the product from point A to point B, evading capture and may invest heavily into the development of new shipping methods and procedures.
Cartel: considered the big boss, they source product from their various suppliers and get it ready for market. They usually have the largest investments; influence and resources of any other level and are not afraid to protect their market.
Farmer: from grow-ops to subsistence farmers trying to make a living, these people are essentially the harvesters of products.
There are usually various levels of middlemen throughout the above drug chain, each time a product changes hand, a markup occurs. This is why for instance a kilogram of cocaine from Columbia is sold by the farmer at 600$US is worth a staggering 30 000$US when it reaches the United States. Like any other market - there is fierce competition to stay on top at every level.
So - whom do you blame for the drug problem?
Any way you look at it, you got to blame the people at the top of the drug chain. You have an entire market driven by the need of the user, without the user, the entire market collapses on itself relatively quickly. The farmers would move to another crop, cartels would go “bankrupt” along with mules and drug pushers, as there wasn’t anything to sell.
I hope you can see that by changing perspective, finding out the source of the issue at hand is far easier. We all know the cost of drugs to society is far more complex then the simple one I have outlined.
Drugs Users Have ALL the power!
What is interesting though is that the people who feel like they have the least power actually have ALL the power. We tend to think of cartels as huge organizations, with global reach and influence- that is only made possible by the individual contributions of the sole drug user. It is the drug user that is controlling everything from distribution to consumption. A mule wouldn’t send out a shipment of heroin to Vancouver if there where no consumers there.
What is the solution?
If you want to solve a problem, you must go straight to the source. Going after cartels is as futile as going after the drug pushers (and anybody else in between). The profits and most importantly, the markets are still there and if you cut any of these levels off, it will grow back even more resilient then before due to DEMAND. Destroy the demand and everything else will take care of itself.
I still think drugs are illegal for a good reason, what I would suggest is a little genetic manipulation both to the crop and the end user.
I don’t see people smoking HEMP products to get high (you can’t), so why not do the same thing for other products? If people are able to create glow in the dark fish, we can surely create a version of coca (etc) that does not produce harmful compounds when processed.
The other half of the equation is the user, I have read of some drugs being used to counter the effects of opiates, which render them far less effective. Instead of spending billions on the “war on drugs” that seems to go absolutely nowhere, spend that money in developing drugs that only need to be injected once. If the user tries the drugs again, nothing will happen and they will quickly “kick the habit”. If you cannot derive any pleasure from drug use, then you will no longer want to use it.
The Bottom Line
If you want to crash a market- simply make their products either unwanted or ineffective.
