A basic principle of marketing is that where a raw material can be readily turned into a product with a strong consumer appeal, then a chain of production, manufacture, distribution, and retail sales will quickly establish itself. Moreover, so long as demand remains high then any company falling out of this market will be quickly replaced by a new player. So if Fresco Hypermarkets were found to be a mafia front organisation, its directors hauled before the courts and jailed, their stores would be bought up by another company and reopened. Hypermarket shoppers would suffer very little inconvenience.
By the same token, so long as there are large crops of opium poppy, coca leaf, cannabis and the like, and so long as there are large numbers of users of drugs made from each of these, then the prosecution, conviction and jailing of dealers achieves no more than opening the door to the entry of new dealers to take over. The solution - if there is one - lies in how effectively we can squeeze production to thwart the manufacturing process, coupled with how we significantly reduce the consumer base*, so that dealing is no longer sufficiently profitable. These are areas in which we appear to be investing insufficient effort, and this is one of the reasons why I feel that we are ideologically fixated on a failed policy.
* Banging them up will not work. Drugs are as readily available inside prisons as outside.
Being the thoughts, rants, speculations and anecdotes of a JP on the supplemental list, commenting from his new home in Spain
1 comment:
If you really want to clobber the problem, then you have to compete directly with the dealers. Legalise the selling of a heroin substitute, for consumption only in licenced, supervised premises, under fairly controlled conditions.
Do this and all of a sudden all the local heroin addicts will be buying their daily drug from this government-licenced outlet, which of course will use very low cost materials and make its product available for mere pennies.
You could even branch out, and sell a drug which relieves heroin cravings (long half-life, not much high) without much other effect, and one which is much more a quick high and few after-effects; altering the administration system from smoke/injection to patches, nasal sprays and the like would also be a good idea.
What all this would do is massively reduce the size of the illegal market in heroin, which would stay a class A, highly illegal substance. Dealers aren't ever completely stupid; dealing in a worthless material which will get you locked up for possession is obviously a hiding to nothing, and that trade will die out fairly quickly.
To hit other drug markets, try similar tricks; tolerate the harmless ones or tolerate and poach their business. Treat cocaine addicts with the US-developed cocaine vaccine; that'll prevent them getting high, so cull the market that way.
The key to it is this: drugs are a marketplace like any other. Prohibition only makes the market more profitable. Competing with them on price clobbers this market by making it unprofitable, and should slowly kill the demand for heroin as the low-level drugs sellers go out of business.
The current system isn't working, indeed has never worked. Let's try something different.
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