“These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same. We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them”.
Strong words, eh?
But people don't tend to think through what is actually being said, as long as it feels like it is the right thing to do, to people who they believe are the enemy. Don't get me wrong though, because I am no fan of drug traffickers and especially their methods, but the problem is that in order for them to have their business, they need one thing.
In the US there were about 105,000 drug overdose deaths in the US in 2023 and in 2024, it actually dropped significantly to 80,500. The significance of the drop isn't due to less drug addicts or disruption to the supply chain - it is because of expanded access to Naloxone, an opioid reversal medication they spray up the nose of someone who has overdosed. That means that a potential drug death has been avoided.
Great.
But the problem of demand still exists. It is just the law of economics, that if someone wants something and are willing to pay for it, no matter what it is, there is someone who will supply it. This is why paedophiles are able to buy children. And what this means is that no matter what happens to the supply chain of drugs, as long as there is demand, someone will supply the product, or a substitute. And while the prices might go up, pricing some out of the market, the supply will continue. For instance in Australia, some people sniff petrol for their high, because it is cheaper than drinking alcohol. It also causes severe side-effects, but that doesn't stop them.
Stop the supply of fuel?
Oh no.... we can't have that!
The biggest challenge isn't disrupting the supply of drugs, even though that is a game of whack-a-mole that is endless, for as said, there will always be new channels and chemicals created. And if solved, the drug problem stops dead in its tracks.
I know... Fucking crazy talk!
Are you a drug addict? I am not. I could be though, because there is a supply of drugs available in Finland too, just as there is in Australia and obviously in the US. I am not a drug addict because of lack of supply, I am not a drug addict because despite the many challenges I face, I haven't yet collapsed my life and emotional self to the point where all I want to do is escape at any cost. I haven't become the type of person who looks for an easy way to avoid dealing with my problems.
80,500 people in the US didn't die at the hands of "narco-terrorists", they died at the hands of a society that has degraded so far, that they were unable to cope with the life they had, the emotions they felt, and had very little of the right support to turn their life around.
They failed, and society failed them.
And it is because of this, that there was one more, two more, one million more people demanding a quick-fix to their problem, and then kept patching the fix more and more often. For the majority of them, they weren't forced into being a drug addict, they just went through the actions of a drug addict, and became one. They made themselves.
This doesn't mean that it is all their fault though, because just like a kid who was fed poorly by the parents to grow up into a fat adult struggling with weight issues, society is raising drug addicts. And because quality of life is degrading, wellbeing is degrading, mental health is degrading, and instant gratification of desires is increasing, there are going to be more demand on escapes in the future too. Most probably won't become drug addicts, many will just doom scroll Instagram and TikTok instead, but it is the same mechanism in play, it is leveraging the same parts of the brain, and many will look to increase their dosage of whatever "drug of choice" they demand, and the supply will continue.
The normal distribution shifts.
Cutting off some supply of drugs might make headlines for a government, but people should really question motives and effectiveness. Because it isn't the supply that is the issue, it is the demand. Cut the supply of demand and the business model collapses. There is no point creating and trafficking drugs, if there are no buyers of it. If everyone started demanding carrots and celery, the same drug traffickers would become farmers.
The incentive comes from the demand side, not the supply side of the equation.
And this is why people should question government motives, because the majority of the drug addict deaths are attributable not to the supply of the drugs themselves, but to the condition of the people involved in *taking the drugs. For a visualisation of this, have a look at the jump in overdose deaths between 2019 - 2020.
As you might remember, 2020 was the start of corona lockdowns and disruption.
Decreasing intergenerational income mobility was the strongest predictor of overdose rates each year of the study, according to multilevel regression models.
And while that last quote talks about "intergenerational income mobility" as the indicator, that in turn bundles a lot of other aspects together.
The other consistently statistically significant predictors were opioid prescription rates, social capital, and unemployment rates. Together these predictors, plus pupil teacher ratios, single parent families, and attending college accounted for approximately 47 % of the variance in overdose death rates each year.
So, the way to win the "war on drugs" is not to stop the supply, but create a society and culture that doesn't create drug addicts. It is about building a society that supports social cohesion, employment opportunity, education, and an environment and community that facilitates healthy minds, bodies and emotional states. If this isn't done, then the supply will just keep on increasing in an endless war, because the demand keeps increasing.
The US government keeps on hyping their "kill the terrorists" rhetoric, but they are not the cause of the problem. To get to the cause, we have to look at the source of the demand, and what is driving those people to demand in the first place. And if you go digging in there, what you will discover is that it is the very policies the governments have enacted over the last several decades in the name of increasing shareholder wealth and lining the pockets of the few, that has led to this continuous breakdown in society to the point that more and more people are failing in conditions that are counterproductive to building wellbeing, safety, family, community, friendships, and health.
Killing terrorists might be fun, but it changes nothing.
You want the drug trade to stop?
What are the governments doing about that?
Taraz
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