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Dec. 23, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:32
27 The Drug Wars Part 2
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Good afternoon, it's 1.30 on the 23rd of December 2005.
Well, it's been a long day at work.
Actually, it was a pretty good day.
I just closed a $95,000 deal.
So, it kind of came out of nowhere.
A little bit of negotiations this morning.
And I gotta tell you, I do love the free market.
It is such an exciting place to be.
And software in particular.
So, not a huge chunk of change, but not a bad little birthday present for the company.
Actually, a Christmas present.
So, let's continue our analysis or discussion about illicit drugs.
And, you know, the question which is, I think, really interesting to try and answer is why does the use of illicit drugs tend to increase when they become illegal?
Now, I'm certainly not going to claim to be somebody who has, you know, revolutionized this field, you know, because lots of libertarians have been talking about this sort of issue.
And so, you know, some of the stuff I've come up with, some of the stuff I've sort of collated from, you know, smarter people in the field, but I think that this is something that is well worth looking at.
And so I apologize if this is stuff that you've already Heard of or understood, but, you know, hopefully you'll be able to shake the sand and find some nuggets of gold in there that perhaps you haven't.
So, you know, the law of supply and demand, as everybody knows, means that as the price of something goes up, then the demand for it goes down and vice versa.
Now, what seems interesting, of course, is that The price of drugs goes up when they become illegal.
And so the question then becomes, well, if the price of drugs goes up when they're illegal, then why on earth should their usage increase?
Right?
It doesn't exactly stand to reason.
And so it's worth examining because this kind of sort of faulty economic reasoning is very common in, you know, people who just take a cursory view of the free market.
And particularly the areas where it's only semi-free.
Areas wherein you have, for instance, a government regulation that is pretty considerable.
Then, you know, it's fairly clear that, you know, you need to have a look at things in a little bit more detail in order to understand what's really going on.
So, you know, why would drug use increase when the price of drugs goes up?
Well, the price of drugs goes up And the question is why?
Well, the reason that the price of drugs goes up when they become illegal, first and foremost, is because the supply is withdrawn from the market by the companies that want to abide by the law.
So there's a natural and significant spike in the price of drugs when they become illegal, like the day after they become illegal, because there is a withdrawal of supply.
Of course, a withdrawal of supply limits whatever it is being supplied, and therefore the price is going to go up.
Now, of course, there's, you know, lots of organized criminal gangs in a particular geographical location, you know, only one of which is the state.
And they, of course, have a good deal of knowledge about legislation that affects them that is coming down the pipeline.
As a sort of minor aside, one of the things that makes government regulations so ineffective is that those they affect the most learn the most about those regulations and how to bypass them and so on.
So taxes on corporations generally exclude those sort of me and my dog and a van corporations.
generally exclude those sort of me and my dog in a van corporations.
And then they'll try and nail the corporations with the most money.
And, you know, then they'll try and nail the corporations with the most money.
But of course, the corporations with the most money hire lobbyists to get exclusions for themselves and their industries and also can hire expensive accountants to prepare the paperwork that will cause them to comply with these new regulations.
So what is designed to get money from large corporations ends up targeting middle corporations, sort of middle-sized corporations.
And legislation that is aimed at, say, restricting the supply of drugs causes those who supply drugs to become experts at its circumvention.
And that circumvention, of course, is not, you know, can we just get an exception for heroin in New Jersey?
But, you know, how you circumvent these drugs means that you learn a good deal about how to work the system so that, you know, either you can bribe people or, you know, you make sure that you isolate yourself from people who might get caught, you know, like the local drug runners or the people who are sort of watching on the street corners for the police to show up.
That there's no direct association between yourselves and these people so that they'll go to jail, but you won't.
You know, there's lots of how to launder the money so that it becomes legitimate.
So there's lots of ways that you circumvent these laws.
And of course, when drugs, and this legislation is in the public arena for years before it goes through, so of course the mafia, let's just say, I mean there's other types, but let's just say the mafia, because Organized crime is too much of a mouthful and sadly I had a salad for lunch in the sort of whimsical attempt to eat well before Christmas and now of course I'm starving so I don't even have the energy for polysyllables!
So, you know, the Mafia will take a close look at all of the legislation that's coming down the pipeline as far as illegal drugs because, you know, they want that legislation to be passed, right?
I mean, in the same way that, you know, the Mafia wants gambling to be, you know, legal but heavily controlled so that they can manipulate the control that the government has over gambling and keep other people out, they absolutely want Hard drugs to be illegal, because, you know, when hard drugs are illegal, the Mafia makes a fortune.
When hard drugs are legal, it's not like, you know, the Mafia, the Hell's Angels, can sort of rationally compete with Pfizer or Apotex or, you know, other sort of drug manufacturing companies.
So, you know, they have a huge stake in making this stuff illegal.
And I have no proof, but it certainly would not shock me if one day it came out that, you know, the organized crime, which, as everybody probably knows, came to America during the During prohibition in the 30s, that organized crime, you know, lobbied in some sort of subtle manner to get hard drug, anti-drug legislation passed.
Because, I mean, if you simply look at the effects, and, you know, people in the mafia aren't stupid, right?
If you look at the effects of anti-drug legislation, it's been the transfer of, like, hundreds of billions of dollars into the realm of organized crime.
So, I'm sure that they were aware that that was going to happen, because, you know, they're pretty good at organized crime.
And so, you know, they would Advocate, I would guess, the legislation, keep track of it and, you know, make sure that the legislation was passed with loopholes to protect them or, if it wasn't, to make sure that they understood all the loopholes and so on.
So, you know, the first thing that it does is when you make something illegal for drugs, the price of it will skyrocket because you've withdrawn the legitimate suppliers.
But the mafia will be there and ready with its own sort of supply chain and, you know, sort of ready to go, if not already pre-stockpiled.
And now, the reason that the price is high, I mean, there's a number of reasons.
The first is that when something becomes illegal, the transaction costs go up enormously.
And transaction costs are, you know, the costs of doing business.
Like, if you want to sell a company, you know, there's like 5% you pay to the guy who sells the company or 6%.
You know, there's hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and, you know, all of the costs of putting a contract together.
And executing on that contract and under the review and, you know, all of that, dotting the I's and crossing the T's.
So, transaction costs, when something becomes illegal, go up enormously because you can no longer offload the enforcement of contract onto the taxpayers as a whole.
So, you know, the whole court system and prison system and so on, which is funded by the taxpayers as a whole, is no longer available to you to protect yourself from contract.
So that's sort of one reason that you, you know, you have to now have your own quote sort of police force and court system and so on and so that's much more expensive so it becomes much more expensive to do deals.
Of course the second reason is that That the transaction costs go up is this the nature of the people that you're doing business deals with has changed, right?
I mean, if I do a deal with Pfizer, I mean, of course, I'm going to want to check over the contract and so on.
But I'm generally aware that Pfizer is a corporation that you know, pays its bills.
That, you know, is not about to go bankrupt, that is not about to sort of scorn the entire court system and shaft me and, you know, destroy their corporate reputation and, you know, that even if they did, I could write articles in the newspaper, I could get consumer watch advocacy groups, I could report them to the Better Business Bureau, I could phone up my local news desk and say, look, this company has screwed poor little old me, you know, let's go get our money back and, you know.
Even without using the court system, I have the capacity to retaliate against a company that's in the legal domain.
And so, I'm pretty sure, given all of that, that I don't have a lot to worry about when I sign a contract with Pfizer.
I mean, I have a lot more to worry about on my end than I do on their end, right?
Because they can afford a mistake if they're such a big company.
But I, as a small company, probably cannot.
So I'm not too concerned about them.
However, if I'm in the Mafia and I'm dealing with basically other criminals, then I have a problem.
Not only do I have to pay for my own enforcement, but I'm already dealing with people who have no respect for the law.
Now, I mean, I have no respect for the law either, but that's a little bit different in that I don't... I'm not willing to take the risks on of flaunting it, right?
I'm not going to not pay my taxes because, you know, me paying my taxes ain't exactly gonna bring the government down and, you know, I kind of enjoy having dinner with my wife every night and not with, you know, Bubba, the aggressively tattooed cellmate.
So, these people that you're dealing with, if you're in the underworld, there are other people in the underworld, right?
And they themselves have their own A system of enforcement, right?
So you have your police force.
They have their police force, so to speak.
You know, there's no formal contract resolution that you can deal with.
And everything is very much unknown.
And where there is unknown, there's risk.
And where there's risk, there's always increased, you know, prices, right?
So you pay more for life insurance if you're a smoker than if you're a non-smoker because there's an additional risk.
So the risks go up enormously in the underworld and therefore the transaction costs go up enormously too.
Now, if you are somebody who is making a profit off of a particular substance, right, let's just say that you're a milk producer, and the price of milk goes up like five times, Well, you kind of have a problem, right?
There's a couple of things that you can do, right?
I mean, you can sort of aggressively cut costs and that might get you down to like only a four times increase.
You can sort of stretch out your payables so that you're paying on sort of 90 to 120 days rather than sort of 60 to 90 days.
So, you know, the people who have given you goods and services get paid later.
And that's sort of a short run solution.
You know, you can borrow, you can do this or that.
But basically, what you need to do if you're going to survive with such a large cost increase in the long run, is you need to find new avenues for your market, right?
So you know for sure that if the cost of milk goes up four or five times, that you're going to get a decrease in the number of people who are buying milk.
I mean, It's just sort of an iron law, right?
Now, it's not going to go down to zero because, you know, pregnant women, nursing women need milk and children need milk and so on.
So, you know, unless it becomes like a thousand dollars an ounce, you are going to have some sort of continued demand for your product, but it's going to be cut back.
People are going to start looking for alternatives like soy milk with calcium supplements or something like that.
So, you know, what you really need to do is to increase the demand for your product to make up for the fact that fewer people Are buying it.
I know that sounds like a little bit of a paradox, but it sort of does work out.
So let's say for instance that, you know, you've four or five fold increase in the price of milk.
The first thing you're going to do, you know, well, if you're not a sleazy guy and you're going to lobby the government, the first thing you're going to do is you are going to try and find new markets.
So you're going to sort of subsidize research, which says, look, if you cut back on your children's milk intake, here's the damage they're going to face for life.
And, you know, here's the price of milk relative to the treatments for osteoporosis later in life.
Or, you know, you're going to try and find some ways to make sure that people understand that they need to do, even though the price has gone up, that they really have to continue using your product.
And you're also going to try and open new markets, right?
So, for instance, you might... Asian cultures don't use a lot of milk in their cooking, of course, because... for a variety of reasons.
The cow is holy and so on.
And so, you know, you have this sort of problem of lactose intolerance in a lot of the adult population.
You know, let's say that you could sort of open up your market and get people to buy stuff who weren't as price-sensitive before because they didn't know the original price of your milk product.
And, you know, you would then sort of say to these people, you know, here's all the benefits of drinking milk and I, by the way, I've made this lactose-free milk that you can include and I've got sample recipes on my website and here's a bake-off and a cook-off and, you know, all the things that you can, you know, I'm going to buy infomercials and, you know, have big contests about Who can come up with the best tasting milk based, you know, East Asian product or whatever.
So that's what you're going to do.
Lots of advertising.
You're going to buy the space on the supermarket shelves to keep stuff at eye level and so on.
So you really are going to have to try and expand your market because the people who are currently buying your product is going to decline and so you're going to have to find new people to buy a product and so on.
So that's how it would work in the free market, and it's really dicey.
I mean, frankly, it's really dicey.
You know, a four or five-fold increase in price is pretty rough for any business to deal with.
Now, I don't have the statistics on hand about how much the price of drugs increased when they were made illegal, but I do know that it was like, you know, 50 pence, as I mentioned earlier, for sort of three hits of heroin and then You know, a couple of years after it was illegal, it was like 50 pounds per hit, right?
So you have, you know, sort of a non-intuitive situation here where, you know, there are more addicts even though the good is that much more expensive.
Well, what you do, of course, which you can do in sort of hard drugs in a way that's sort of tougher to do with other areas.
I mean, I guess cigarettes could be one of them or caffeine-based products where there is an addiction that takes place.
But what you want to do is you want to get people involved in buying your product.
And, you know, it's very expensive, so what you have to do is you have to create a sort of chicness to it, and you also have to give away free samples of your addictive substance, right?
So you want it to be cool, and you also want it to be, you know, yeah, maybe expensive, but, you know, just try it once, you know, for free, you know, and it's the best thing ever, and, you know, you know.
Don't worry about it and all that.
So you want to try and ensnare as many people because the profits are so high, right?
The price of the drug has gone up.
And some of that is legitimate, like higher transaction costs and so on.
But some of it is simply because there are just fewer people who are willing to take the risk of imprisonment in order to deliver a particular good.
And therefore your supply has gone down.
So transaction costs have gone up, supply has gone down.
And because the supply of people providing this stuff has gone down, then the profits for those who remain are pretty high.
So you want to make sure that you get as many people addicted as you can to your drug.
And you also have to sort of create a kind of lifestyle that can work for these people, right?
So, you know, it's sort of well known that if you're a drug addict, you can pick up work in the underworld in exchange for drugs, right?
So, you get some of the dirty work is done.
I mean, if you want to get involved in pornography or you want to get involved in being a stripper, or I mean, I don't want to get involved, but, you know, if you want drugs, those are sort of legitimate areas to go to because they, you know, are either illegal or socially frowned upon or whatever.
So, you know, you want to make sure that you get as many people involved in taking your drug as possible, so you're going to sort of give free drugs.
You're also going to do whatever you can to facilitate a sort of drug addict lifestyle by offering goods for services and so on, or giving lists of places that you want things stolen from, or people that you want intimidated.
And so if somebody does that sort of work for you, you'll give them drugs.
So it becomes a sort of sustainable lifestyle.
And of course, I'm sure that the mafia, the Hells Angels, are fully aware of all of this sort of stuff.
I mean, they may be immoral, but they're not stupid.
And they know, as we all do at a sort of pretty intuitive level, that the best thing to do to keep money flowing from drugs is to get people addicted.
So one of the things that it's not worth your while to do if you're selling it for 50 pence for three hits of heroin is it's really not worth giving away free samples.
It's really not worth your while to get people addicted.
because the profit is like, it's stupid, right?
It's pennies, right?
So, you know, that's why, you know, nobody from drug companies bothers getting people addicted on heroin before it all became illegal and the price skyrocketed.
So, you know, you kind of have it on the shelf, you know, with that level of profit, It's not even worth creating a sort of lifestyle image, right?
Creating a sort of cool, chic image around it, right?
So, you're not going to hand out sort of free hits of heroin to like young, attractive movie stars and you're not going to, you know, get people addicted who are in the public figure or in the public eye.
So, you're not going to try and get any kind of cool thing going.
You're not going to sort of create these or try and have any sort of influence on these sort of heroin chic advertisements for, you know, clothing that sort of went on, I think, in the 90s.
You're not going to do any of that sort of stuff, right?
You're not going to give free drugs to riders so they can write about their drug use and so on and make it all kind of cool and dangerous and hip.
So, if you are the company that manufactures heroin, you're not going to do any of that.
You're going to stick it on a shelf and every time someone buys one, you know, you make 20 cents or something like that.
So, you know, that's not the basis of a big advertising dollar.
But, you know, if it costs you instead of, you know, 30 pence to make the heroin and sort of deliver it, it costs you, you know, 10 times that much, right?
So, I guess it'd be about 3 pounds or 4 or 5 dollars.
And yet you can sell it for £50, which I guess would be a little over $100, at least back then.
Then you have a lot of money to spend on expanding your market.
So you can then, you can subsidize and quite considerably you can subsidize drugs.
You know, you also have the additional benefit of those who get involved in your drug, who get dependent on your drugs, are also available for you as very cheap labor, right?
So if you pay them in kind then you get very cheap labor.
So you're getting labor for like three bucks, you know, a job or ten bucks a job because, you know, ten bucks a job is like It cost you three bucks to produce the heroin, so that's like three hits and change for a job, which keeps a junkie going for a couple of days, I guess.
So you get free labor, and you get an enormous amount of profit from these things, which you can then reinvest into expanding those who use the drug.
Of course, you absolutely want to be the first choice among drug users, right?
So, you know, you don't... because you're in the underworld, once somebody has established a relationship with you in terms of like you're their provider of drugs, it's going to take a lot for you to... for them to give that up, right?
I mean, so you're going to have to establish your delivery of drugs to someone and then you want to keep that, right?
Because the repeat businesses, as everybody knows, is like one-tenth the price of getting new business is getting repeat business.
So you of course, once somebody gets involved with a drug distributor, They don't generally tend to leave that drug distributor, I mean, unless something extraordinary occurs, simply because it's an embedded relationship, right?
And by that I mean that, you know, given that it's the underworld, there's no competition, you have to know where to meet, you have a relationship with someone, you trust that they're not going to cut up your, you know, your cocaine with baby powder or whatever, so you trust the quality of their drugs.
There's no independent way to verify the quality of some other drugs that somebody else might supply, so You know, you get embedded and, of course, the mafia will further embed that person into, you know, by lending the money to buy drugs of large interest and then, you know, either charging them or threatening them, you know, or, you know, offering them jobs that they should do in exchange for, you know, either paying off their existing debt or, you know, for new drugs.
So, you tend to get very embedded into this relationship.
It's not sort of like a, I'm tired of this pharmacy, I'm gonna go to the pharmacy across the street.
You know, it takes a lot to change the supplier of a drug.
And therefore, you know, and sorry, one last thing is that, you know, once you start getting addicted to drugs, you don't rationally evaluate things as much, so you don't really have the energy, time, or mental focus to change suppliers.
So that given that that's the case, you want to be the first person that gives these people their drugs, right?
Because you're then setting up a sort of multi-year, you know, insanely profitable relationship where you get even lots of money or lots of free labor or very cheap labor.
So, naturally, there's competition among the drug suppliers to be the first to offer someone a drug.
So, of course, you know, you're going to spread that horizontally at first, right?
So, everybody who goes to raves or, you know, everybody who, you know, has a particular kind of look, right?
Like, I mean, drugs are associated with emotional insecurity.
So, if you see somebody with 12 piercings and, you know, a tattoo, then you're going to start approaching them, you know, at the same time that you're giving away free samples to people in the media, so that it becomes kind of like a hip, cool thing.
But, of course, there's only, there's a certain limit to how much You can sort of spread horizontally before you have to start opening up new markets.
So, once you've sort of filled up your, you know, evil trough of drug production supply with, you know, the logical candidates, right?
I mean, the people who, you know, don't have jobs or are willing to sort of, sort of on the amoral side of things and, you know, have sort of very obvious markings of insecurity and are sort of willing to stay out all night and, you know, desperate desire for approval and desperate desire for belonging.
Then, you know, you sort of grab all of those people and get them addicted and that's a pretty good source of revenue.
But then what you have to do is start expanding your market.
And the way that you do that is you start selling down the age chain, right?
You start selling to younger and younger people.
Sorry, selling.
You start giving to younger and younger people.
And so that has two benefits.
One, it opens up a new market.
And the second is, you know, you can be sure that if you're offering free heroin to a 15-year-old that, you know, he doesn't already have a supplier of choice.
I mean, and once he does, you go to 14-year-olds and so on.
So that's a particularly important aspect of the drug trade, right?
That because it's so profitable and because people who use drugs rarely change their suppliers, there is an enormous incentive to start getting people hooked on drugs very, very young.
You know, which is really not the case if it's in a free market.
I mean, that's just not going to happen because you can just choose to switch from one supplier to another.
You have almost no brand loyalty when the quality of a brand can be verified through some independent agency.
And therefore, there's no point trying to get people hooked on it young because, you know, you might get them hooked and then they sort of switch to some other supplier.
And therefore, you've sort of spent all this money to get them hooked and then the profits all go to your rival.
Which is not what you want.
So that's another consequence of drugs becoming illegal.
Because the profit is so high, the Mafia will do almost anything.
Pay any price, bear any burden, hand it out like candy to get people addicted.
They'll sort of go trawling among the depressed and alienated segments of human society and attempt to get as many people hooked as they can.
to drag them into a life of crime and degradation and slavery and debt and so on so that you know they pretty much got them for life and you know free labor free money
And then they also, because you want to be the first person who supplies someone with drugs so that they'll stay with you forever, they also have a, you know, a very powerful incentive to sell it to people who are younger and younger and younger, which is of course why you get people who are, you know, very young being approached by drug dealers with, you know, free samples and so and so on.
Now there's one other thing that makes the illegalization of drugs so lucrative, and increases the supply of people who are willing to take drugs, is that as the power of the state grows to the point where the state can do things like make drugs illegal, then generally you have that sort of lockstep with other other aspects of state power which further a sort of drug consumption lifestyle.
And, you know, there are sort of three major categories of state activity which further the drug consumption lifestyle.
You know, the first, of course, is welfare, right?
I mean, so if you get addicted to drugs, you're gonna have a tough time holding down a job.
So the consequence of that is that you become You know, like a homeless bum who's got, you know, like five years to live.
And yet, if you are on welfare, you can be addicted to drugs, and you can still have a roof over your head, and you can still have, you know, groceries.
I mean, I'm not saying that you're rich, but, you know, as I've mentioned before, the difference between $0 a year and $10,000 a year is the difference between life and death, right?
The difference between $10,000 and $20,000 a year is just a difference of degree.
But the difference between zero and ten is life and death.
I mean, there's no larger difference anywhere further up the economic spectrum than between no money and some money.
And some money and a lot of money doesn't matter.
So, if you have state subsidies for people who don't work, then those people can, you know, afford to get addicted to drugs and they won't die.
I mean, I'm not saying they can have a great life, but they're not going to get fired from their job, get kicked out of their place and be dead in six months.
And, of course, I'm not suggesting that everybody who's on welfare is a drug addict, but I certainly am suggesting that one of the key things to subsidize drug use is to make sure that people escape the consequences of doing drugs from a sort of base material, I can live standpoint.
And, you know, the welfare state certainly does that, for sure.
Now, the second is, and sort of it's related to a larger sphere of activity, but the second is, you know, public school education.
Now, of course, public school education can make a lot of people want to take drugs because it's just so mindlessly dull and stupid and inert and ridiculous and insulting.
But I don't mean that in particular, otherwise I would be sort of the first to queue up at the heroin cafe.
But what I mean by that is that it does not require parents to pay for public school education and it also Takes the kids out of circulation for the parents for you know six or seven hours a day So if you're a drug addict and you have children Then, of course, you're gonna get more money the more children you have, and that's another incentive to, you know, have those children.
But, given that you... the more children you have, the cost of their education does not increase for you.
And therefore, you know, you have six or seven hours a day where they're taken care of for free.
And so, you know, you can devote that time to, you know, finding drugs and using drugs and so on.
Whereas if you had more children and your costs went up rather than your subsidies, then you simply wouldn't have, you know, you'd sort of be back to square one where you just don't have enough money to live and that's going to make you change your lifestyle pretty quickly.
So that's sort of another example of, you know, how it is that the government ends up, you know, really heavily subsidizing the drug lifestyle.
And the third one, of course, is subsidized housing.
You know, it's fairly common knowledge for people who have any sort of experience with urban sociological lifestyles that, and this is particularly true in the U.S., that, you know, the subsidized housing ghettos, they're called the projects sometimes, that, you know, they're basically just farms for girlfriends, for drug dealers, right?
I mean, that's, you know, the men in these sorts of situations are those who deal drugs and You know, that they're basically just these women that they have children with and kind of drift in and out of their lives.
They're part of these projects, right?
So, you have subsidized housing where, you know, it's very cheap to live.
You have welfare which gives you the money to pay your bills.
You have, you know, subsidized or free schooling, you know, which means that the more kids you have, you know, it doesn't matter in terms of the cost to educate them and also it sort of takes them out of your hands, off your hands for free for, you know, a fair amount of time during the day.
All of these, in conjunction with the illegalization of drugs, enormously increases the amount of people who get addicted to drugs and stay in the drug lifestyle.
Which is exactly what you'd expect, right?
People respond to incentives and the incentives that people respond to are, you know, for me at least, partly moral but, you know, fundamentally financial.
And I know that's the case with me because, you know, I'm willing to take money that is paid to my company in the form of a paycheck that my company pays me and I'm willing to take that money even though some of it comes from public institutions, right?
We have a contract with a particular government agency, and I'm sure part of that flows into my paycheck, but, you know, I certainly don't, you know, wake up in the morning and say, oh, I am stained with blood money, and I will never be pure, and so on.
Because, you know, me quitting my job isn't going to change the system, and it does give me access to things like a car, and a computer, and a microphone, so I can do these podcasts.
So, I have no problem, morally, because I'm a practical human being, and I don't believe in sort of useless gestures based on abstract integrity.
But rather that you build sensibly towards a better world without rejecting everything.
I mean, I'm driving on a public road.
Am I supposed to float?
I mean, it's impossible to escape those kinds of things, so I don't even bother with that as a standard.
But people do respond to incentives, so if you pay people to have children, if you subsidize through illegality, if you create enormous profits for the mafia for getting people addicted to drugs and keeping them addicted to drugs, and if you eliminate or at least largely alleviate the negative consequences
of taking drugs for people, then of course you will absolutely, without a doubt and for sure, end up with a situation where people are taking more and more drugs.
And of course the more you crack down on this, the worse it's going to get.
So, for instance, if you were to crack down on drug use, you would only be able to do it simultaneous to eliminating welfare and public education and subsidized housing, right?
So, if people actually faced the direct consequences of a life of addiction to drugs, which would be, you know, death and starvation within a couple of months, then, you know, people would not Take as many drugs.
I mean, it wouldn't eliminate it because some people are just suicidal, but, you know, it really wouldn't.
It would cause far fewer people to take it.
You know, also, you know, I think what's important to remember with these situations as well is that the alternatives really aren't that great for people who are in the projects and so on.
So, you know, the normal pleasures that I guess you and I mostly take for granted, right?
The pleasures of love and career and creativity and so on.
And, you know, the pleasures of having material goods that you can afford and so on.
All of these pleasures, you know, to some degree are much more of a struggle for people who come from that kind of background, right?
Who come from the sort of very poor welfare projects kind of background.
So what that means is that, you know, the alternative is I can get, you know, a crap job that pays me like five bucks an hour, which I might never, you know, I might never escape.
I might never get out of that job.
And, you know, I've got to get up every day and I've got to deal with stupid customers and I've got to, you know, deal with stupid bosses, you know, because it's not like these... the people who manage those who make five bucks an hour aren't exactly, you know, inspired graduates of the Wharton School of Business.
And so I've got to deal with all this crap, you know, and I'm making a pittance and so on.
Or, you know, I can, you know, have kids and get on welfare.
You know, whether you have kids or not, you can still get on welfare and so on.
And, you know, you can sort of survive and get by.
You don't have to deal with all that crap, you know, and that crap is not fun.
I mean, I've been working since I was 11 and I wouldn't say that my first, you know, six or seven years of working was full of, you know, a lot of, you know, personal improvement and, you know, the skills expansion.
That came much later in my life.
I would say that I didn't even have my first really satisfying professional career until I was in my late 20s.
Well, grad school was interfering with that to some degree, of course, but it's a little sooner for some.
But, you know, those early jobs, I mean, they really suck, right?
One of my first jobs was I put the New York Times together on Sundays for a bookstore.
And of course, you know, I got paid ridiculously little, but I did get all the free books that I wanted.
And that was great.
I mean, that more than made up for it.
You know, it's important to remember that, you know, another way that you increase the desire of people to use drugs is you decrease their capacity for or their motivation for enjoyment in other aspects of their life, right?
So if there was no such thing as sort of welfare and You know, child benefits and, you know, subsidized housing and free education for your children, then, you know, you would put up with the bad jobs in order to live because you really didn't have any other choice, right?
If you want to consume, you have to produce, or somebody else has to produce for you.
And so you would, you sort of get through those crap jobs and you'd spend the sort of five or six or seven years that it takes in crap jobs to actually start getting something better.
And, you know, so then you would have, you know, something to shoot for, you'd have a decent goal in life, you'd have, you know, and then, you know, as you accumulated, you know, wealth, experience and expertise, you would
find it to be the case that you know your satisfactions in life you had more to lose if you took drugs your satisfactions in life would increase and so you would end up with a much more as a much stronger incentive to sort of stay clean i guess you could say and that would uh... further reduce your desire to have anything to do with the drug world so there's lots of things that contribute to people's sort of growing addiction on drugs and and the fact that uh...
After you make something illegal, more people begin to use it, even though the price goes up enormously.
You know, there's a lot of complicated sort of socio-economic factors at play here.
But, I mean, it really is an iron and absolute law, because, you know, there is no escape from the laws of reality and the laws of human nature.
People do respond to incentives, and if you're stuck on welfare with a couple of kids, and, you know, you've got absolutely nowhere to go in life, and you're just sort of looking at You know, another 50 years of the same day over and over again, then you, of course, are going to be tempted to spark up your neurons a little bit with some drugs.
That having been said, I don't believe that all drug use is immoral.
I mean, I'm a bit of a music nut, and a lot of the music that I enjoy was heavily drug-induced.
You know, it wasn't like the Dark Side of the Moon or Bohemian Rhapsody came about from people pure of body and soul.
And so, I mean, I would be completely hypocritical to say that, you know, drug use is always bad.
I mean, Sgt.
Pepper's is a pretty fine album and, you know, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, I really don't think, refers to a painting on Paul McCartney's fridge that one of his kids did.
I think that the acronym is pretty clear.
So, you know, what I think is very important when we look at, you know, the horror and destruction of chronic drug use, that what we want to do is make sure Of a number of things.
I mean, this is sort of my minor prescription.
It's the carrot at the end of the stick for those who've made it through to the end.
That you really want to make sure that you reduce the positive incentives for taking drugs, right?
So you don't subsidize lifestyles through state funding at all.
Of course, it's completely immoral.
It's stolen money.
But you reduce the incentives for those who take drugs.
You reduce the incentives for those to get people addicted, which means you have to lower the profits of drugs, which means that you have to make them legal.
And, you know, last but not least, you know, I would certainly very strongly advocate that, you know, one of the causes of this kind of drug... of the pleasures of drug use taking precedence over the pleasures of a rational and productive life.
Is, you know, the fact that people are taught such nonsense in public school and through their churches that they never learn the pleasures of any sort of rational existence.
So, if you can hear this, this is my wife calling, which means that I'm now going off the air, and of course I will be on the air intermittently over Christmas, but now I go speak to my bride.
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