With the ‘war on drugs’ undeniably failing and the existing market of shady street dealers operating under overseeing barons causing misery for everyone involved, government regulation is the only real answer.
Why do people take drugs? It’s a straightforward enough question. If you ask a politician you will probably get a fairly lengthy answer which will meander around subjects like poverty, joblessness and educational underachievement. In so doing they are, of course, putting the cart before the horse (or the App before the ipad, if you will). People take drugs primarily because they make you feel terrific. Depending on the sort of drug, this feeling might last a few minutes or a few hours and it will range in intensity from a mild soothing of your furrowed brow to an atomic orgasm. You pays your money, you takes your choice.
But this story is not about drugs, it’s about markets; it just happens to be the market for drugs.
For years now I have been applying some of my limited cranial resources to the issue of illegal drug use. Like most people of my generation who grew up in a big city in the 1980′s, I knew all about drugs from an early age. If it wasn’t the government telling you every five minutes that the merest wiff of hash would cause you brain damage, your parents were on hand to remind you, adding, helpfully, that being caught ‘in possession’ would be a fate worse than death. So all in all you got the picture that these things must be pretty lethal. Yet, more or less every day your mates were popping pills, skinning up and generally acting like…well like their parents did in the 60′s and to the untrained eye they seemed to be avoiding death and the various fates worse than. So pretty soon you stopped believing everything you were told, which in the case of politicians turned out to be a reasonable shout but it wasn’t a terribly healthy state of affairs.
