Thinking about Dope

Folks,

Just read a rehash of the argument for legalizing dope, which is one of those
arguments that
never goes anywhere. I think the reason the arguments are stillborn is they do
not get the
premise right.

http://www.strike-the-root.com/61/victor/victor1.html

All substance abuse is self-medication for pain control. Whether some kid on
the res is
sniffing glue or some 40 year old lawyer is tooting coke, or some college
professor has gone
slothful over a monster marijuana habit, it all starts with some sort of pain.

Yes, some people do dope for kicks, but even then, isn’t there a fundamental
problem, some
sort of pain in the way of happiness that dope helps overcome?

In these instances it is a psychological pain, but sometimes that can be the
worst kind. In the
measure the fraudulent Freudian psychological theories crowded out any
advancement in
treating psychological problems, indeed, smothered traditional help, in that
measure
psychological pain goes untreated.

Of course, there is also the problem of people with a chronic pain from a knee
injury or
something that comes and goes, which mystifies the doctors and thus causes some
doubt as
to the patient’s motivations.

And yes, there are wicked dope dealers trading in illegal drugs, but why is
that? Well, of
course, some people will do anything for money.

In USA we strictly limit how many professors can teach medicine, we strictly
limit how many
people get into medical school. This naturally raises the cost of medicine, by
limiting access,
lowers quality overall, and stifles innovation.

In USA the specialities of palliative care and pain management are so harshly
regulated,
doctors err on the side of letting pain fester, or using less than ideal drugs
to manage pain in
“legal” settings.

Since many who experience pain cannot get access to preventative care, or cannot
afford pain
care, self-medication becomes an option. Like everything else, we pay the most
in USA for
medicines, and it is relatively easier and cheaper to buy illegal drugs than
legal drugs.

As any high school kid can tell you, any dope you want is fairly easy to get.

Those who choose to self-medicate do so without the care of doctors and
pharmacists, which
are in short supply due to subsidies and regulations. Self-medicators people
tend to be
completely ignorant of chemistry and medicine, and tend to overdose themselves.
All
Americans believe if a little bit is good, then a whole bunch is better.
Crackheads are
Americans too.

The fellow with the argument above compares dope prohibition to alcohol
prohibition. They
are too simiilar to compare (indeed, although I consider beer and wine food, I
consider hard
liquor medicine).

It is better to compare dope to salt. In the history of mankind, there has
almost never been
prohibition on dope, but almost always on salt. Why salt? Well, controlling
salt means
controlling people. By controlling who gets salt, you can fine tune control of
certain groups
as well. You can pick and choose who you want to control, and how you want to
control them.
Job #1 of every empire was to nail down the salt trade.

Mahatma Gandhi’s big crime, the one that sent the British over the edge, was to
march to the
sea and pick up a piece of salt. Such a crime!

Every bit of criminality, savagery and butchery we see in illegal drug trade has
been true
historically of the illegal salt trade too. Of course, "salt" or "dope' is
irrelevent, the issue is
control, libido dominandi.

“Decriminalizing” the drug trade is a misnomer. How about “uncriminalizing”,
since
alleviating pain is not a crime in natural law. But uncriminilizing would not
be enough. We’d
have to break the monopoly on medicine and deregulate medicine in usa so that,
like salt, it
would become cheaper, safer, more choices and more universally available.

Salt was controlled to control everyone. Drugs are controlled to control just
some people,
necessarily the more poor you are in USA, the more likley you are going to run
afoul of the
war on people in pain, aka the war on drugs.

The argument that we need government intervention in medicine for safety does
not hold
water, since at least three people have won nobel prizes demonstrating how the
regulated
always capture the regulators (think big drug and the FDA). I have myself, my
doctor, my
pharmacist, the drug companies, each of us also backed up by insurance companies
to
assure safety. We need an FDA too? I think not. They lower quality, restrict
access, raise
prices and stymie innovation.

Remember when we all believed that unless we had an optometrist handle our
glasses we’d
all go blind, and what a tragedy it was when someone lost his glasses? This too
changed
circa 1980, my hero Jimmy Carter at it again. As he freed the beer, so too he
freed reading
glasses. Now you can pick up a pair of glasses while waiting in the check out
line at Walmart,
with a vision-check chart built into the display, 1.25, 1.5, 1.75 etc, $4 the
pair!

The other argument is access, the theory the government assures everyone gets
access to
medicine. Well, two problems with that. The government cannot achieve the more
better
cheaper faster that free markets offer, and when government defines ‘health
care’ they
usually get the definition wrong, since the definition is hammered out by a few
hundred
government workers, not billions of daily transactions in the free market. The
free market
creates the best definitions.

There is no point in uncriminalizing drug trade unless you uncriminalize the
free market in
medicine and pharmacy. That is not going to happen, so working around it,
getting the ill to
the medicine instead of the medicine to the ill will the the norm, at least in
USA.

John

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