HUMOROUS COMMENTS ON THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE WAR ON DRUGS

Everyone talks about the Law of Unintended Consequences, but no one
actually says what the law contains. Here it is: There will always be
unintended consequences. First corollary: The more grandiose the
action, the greater the unintended consequences will be.

People are surprised by unintended consequences because they think
they have figured all the angles. It's the illusion of control.
Second corollary: It is impossible to figure all the angles because
new angles are created all the time.

Today's example comes from a New York Times story by Kate Zernike:
"In the seven months since Iowa passed a law restricting the sale of
cold medicines used to make methamphetamine, seizures of homemade
methamphetamine laboratories have dropped to just 20 a month from
120. People once terrified about the neighbor's house blowing up now
walk up to the state's drug policy director, Marvin Van Haaften, at
his local Wal-Mart to thank him for making them safer.

"But Mr. Van Haaften, like officials in other states with similar
restrictions, is now worried about a new problem: The drop in
home-cooked methamphetamine has been met by a new flood of crystal
methamphetamine coming largely from Mexico. Sometimes called ice,
crystal methamphetamine is far purer, and therefore even more highly
addictive, than powdered home-cooked methamphetamine, a change that
health officials say has led to greater risk of overdose."

So: fewer exploding suburban homes, more dead suburban teenagers.
That may not exactly be what the framers of the law had in mind. Or,
as a friend of mine (who ran screaming from the room when I asked if
I could use his name) said: "Gee, here I thought making it impossible
to get decongestant would get rid of the meth problem, just like
making it impossible to get effective cough syrup eliminated opiate addiction."

Drug laws are now so entirely governed by fear that no one stops to
consider the reason for the laws. It seems that everyone now has a
story about a dying relative who was denied pain medication because
the care providers were afraid that the person would become addicted.
The person is dying! Who cares if the patient goes to the grave with
a tiny opium habit? It's not as if you have to pee into a cup to get
into heaven.

(At least, there is no mention of afterlife drug testing in the
available literature. One cannot, of course, say for sure.)

Is it the position of our society that drug addiction is a
morality-sapping evil so great that it needs to be stopped at all
costs? Not hardly. Our society is essentially set up to encourage
alcohol addiction. Bars are glamorous, booze is heavily advertised,
treatment programs are largely ineffective. It's cheap and it's
everywhere. The ocean of alcohol is probably keeping some people off
heroin, but so what?

It might be better if heroin were cheap and legal. Heroin is a much
better pain-management drug than alcohol, it's much less hard on the
body, and legal heroin would mean clean needles, which would be a
huge public health benefit. But alcohol is an old drug with a
powerful corporate presence and deep roots in society; heroin is a
newer drug with neither. So it's history and money that are
determining our drug policy.

So it's not really a policy at all -- it's a set of superstitions.
The Drug Enforcement Administration policy boards are run by witch
doctors. Almost everyone in medicine and almost everyone in law
enforcement would agree with what I'm saying, but the penalties for
public dissent are swift and harsh. Say a few words, and then someone
in power accuses you of being soft on Sudafed, and the next thing you
know you're counting ice floes in Little America.

Also note in the meth lab story: There's no such thing as a closed
border. It's the logic of the free market -- demand here, supply
there, supply moves to meet demand. Sometimes it moves all the way
from Afghanistan; this time it's just coming across at Juarez. You
could, for instance, interdict anyone wearing a red shirt, so people
would stop wearing red shirts, and that would be good news for the
blue shirt manufacturers. See, there are factories in China right now
gearing up the cerulean and indigo dyeing vats. Of course, there is
no demonstrable harm in imported red shirts, while there is
demonstrable harm in imported meth, but law at the moment encourages
imported meth. Dizzy yet?

Basement meth labs were at least individually owned and operated --
mom-and-pop stores, as it were. The gleaming new meth maquiladoras,
by contrast, are owned by what are often known as international drug
cartels. So once again, government regulations squeeze out the little
guy. Funny how that happens. It is my understanding that marijuana
is a plant easily grown in most parts of the United States. It is
obvious, then, what we should do: ban plants.