April 2, 2020 - 11:38am
One of the interesting side effects of the huge coronavirus economic shock is the impact it will have on drugs.
Recreational drug use in western countries has steadily been rising since the 1960s, driven by a combination of lifestyle changes, cultural shifts (changing attitudes to drug use) but also supply — in particular the opening up of heroin markets from Asia and cocaine from Latin America.
With the acceleration of globalisation in 2001 so came an acceleration in drug use, especially in the United States, and in the sophistication of those selling it. Now that supply is going to receive a jolt; dark net dealers are being put out of business but “traditional” drug traffickers will also struggle as international trade declines.
One of the arguments made by the more prohibitionist side of the drugs debate was that, while thousands of US troops ended the Vietnam war addicted to opiates, the lack of supply back home solved their addiction problem pretty quickly. We may be about to see if that’s repeated, because even for those drugs manufactured or grown in the UK, distribution is going to be a lot more difficult if Britain follows Italy into a hard lockdown.
I suppose that’s a good thing, except maybe not. I wonder, what if the drugs trade actually helped put a lid on social unrest? Just as a bit of corruption can be quite beneficial for a healthy economy, maybe a certain black and grey economy has some beneficial effects, providing a less-harmful financial route for people who might otherwise have nothing? In other words, illegal drugs gives people who don’t have many job prospects the chance to make money selling to recreational middle-class drug users.
Of course that’s just one aspect of it; a lot of the people they sell to are addicts who wreck the lives of those around them and steal to feed their habit, and the social cost is terrible, but in any situation where you abruptly break off long-established trading networks there are negative and often violent consequences.
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SubscribePerhaps an opportunity to decriminalise drug use and sale using the alcohol and tobacco model. I have never used drugs, but feel that prohibition is never an answer, and arguably American prohibition promoted organised crime.
There are uncomfortable parallels between prohibition and decriminalization that may cause similar reactions: in both cases, criminals are being told they can’t make bank selling their sh*t anymore. They will react by finding new, worse sh*t to sell and engaging in violent turf wars. Pretending that this won’t happen in the case of decriminalization as well as in prohibition is Pollyanna-style wishful thinking.
There was always money involved, a lesson to rent seeking landlords ( are there any other types, why I think that is the definition of landlord ) don’t count on/spend the money before it is yours ( count your chickens before they hatch ), until the service is provided you have no claim. In crisis of course everyone is looking for someone else to be the sucker ( in poker if you don’t know who the sucker is, it is you ). If one is looking to run the Airbnbers out of the cities to free up the housing, Wuhan has come to your rescue.
“This is especially true when the economy is about to crash, and those people who now can’t make a living selling drugs are going to find it very hard to find legitimate work. The only comparison I can think of is the disarming of the Iraqi army in 2003; lots of guys all of a sudden with no money and nothing to do.”
Glad to see someone else saying this out loud — I thought the same thing when people began to describe the decriminalization of marijuana in ridiculously glowing, hippy-trippy optimistic terms. All I could think was that those delivery pipelines were not going to just vanish once mary jane wasn’t flowing through them anymore. The people who made bank moving weed around under the surface weren’t going to go, “Welp, better go sling burgers at McDonalds!” They were just going to go find harder drugs — or weapons, or human beings — to push down those pipes. (Anyone who thinks that slavery is a thing of the past is kidding themselves.) It’s a race to the bottom. But the hippy-trippies didn’t want to hear that.
Massive unintended consequencies face us on the social front. Quite likely murder victims will be found at the end of our confinement especially if it goes on beyond the initial 3 weeks. Huge rise in at home violence and even child abuse are surely inevitable as well as suicide of course. This is a massive social experiment and the damage in the social and for certain economic arenas will be seen as worse than the amelioration of the current policy to slow the rate of infection so that the deadly doses can be dealt with in an orderly way. Everyone will be exposed to infection eventually and those that react to infection in a deadly way will do so however long it is deferred. The advantage of the current policy of ‘confinement until infected’ is to give more time to deal with the dying except there is no effective medicine and only a tiny percentage seem to survive assisted breathing. The vast majority (99.9%?) have mild symptoms as per the Prime Minister and Prince Charles?
My favorite word these days is “teleological”.
It didn’t really happen did it though? Here in Somerset and Wiltshire life has pretty much gone back to normal without ever changing very much. Apart from wearing masks in supermarkets life seems pretty easy going and sane. Pubs are busy and shops are open, car boots and local markets have started up again and are well attended.
And still I do not know anybody who knows anybody who has knowingly had the virus. Certainly no-one who has been hospitalized or died. Perhaps keeping away from the inhabitants of big cities wasn’t such a bad idea.