Wednesday, February 9, 2011

The Cost of Meth Prohibition - The Atlantic

Must reading - another illustration of the costs of intervention by the state. Just like other wars fought by the state, the War on Drugs has provided a myriad of examples that confirm that, in the area of choice over consumer goods (pharmacuticals being a key consumer product) the costs of government intervention far outweight the benefits and this state action makes society worse off by any metric one would use to evaluate economic welfare.

The persistence of state action in this arena also confirms Ronald Reagan's observation that the closest thing to immortality is a government program.

I fear our great grandchildren will confront this same issue - with a far smaller and inferior set of pharmacuticals.

McArdle's example:


My husband is suffering from a pretty nasty cold. Last night he had to duck out before dinner with my family to purchase some Sudafed, because he was miserably congested. Alas, not being aware of the difference, he decided it wasn't worth waiting in line to buy cold medicine from behind the counter, and instead bought the stuff on the shelf. He took some, and then suffered through dinner until we could get home to my box of 24-hour Sudafed. This morning he came down and said, "It's amazing how much better you feel when you take medicine that actually does something." Then after a pause, he said, "So why do they sell you cold medicine that doesn't do anything?"

If you've been following drug laws at all, you'll know that you can no longer buy cold medicine with pseudoephedrine without getting a clerk to get it for you from behind the counter, and signing for it. That's because pseudoephedrine is an ingredient in the most popular amateur syntheses of methamphetamine. By making it hard to get, authorities hoped that they could fatally damage the meth trade.


The Cost of Meth Prohibition - The Atlantic

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