It's All About Demand

I’ve been thinking about the whole thing about having to provide my driver’s license to buy Sudafed. The more I think about it, the more it bothers me.

When I was in college I took this very interesting class called Drugs Across Cultures. This class was fascinating in that each lecture was about a different drug and how the production and consumption of each drug affected the economy and the culture of where the drug was produced and where it was consumed. Inevitably a culture forms around the purchase and use of the drug in which all the people involved develop their own jargon when talking about the drug, their own rituals for where and when to consume to drug and their own social mores for how to behave before, during and after use. A very risky economy is produced in which the players are paying money for the drug, and there is a complex distribution pattern that gets the drug from where it was produced to where it is consumed, and all the people involved all get paid along the way. If anyone in this chain is compromised by law enforcement, then the entire system is impacted and its economic gains are interrupted.

While learning about the economical and cultural ramifications of each drug was very interesting, the main thing I took away was the law of the international drug trade. When you deny a supplier a market, the supplier will find another market. If you deny a user a supplier, they will simply seek another supplier. In other words, the demand still exists whether or not the supplier exists. As long as the dealer knows there is demand somewhere, then all they have to do find those people who demand the drug. All that is necessary for a drug dealer to flourish is for the demand to be present.

Why is the demand present? What is it that people are looking for when they buy and use drugs? And why do we as a society think that having to provide a driver’s license at the pharmacy to buy a box of Sudafed will do anything to lessen the demand—which is what actually drives the drug trade?

This is the very idea of why it bothers me that I had to provide a driver’s license to buy Todd some Sudafed. If there’s someone out there who is hell-bent enough on producing and distributing meth—to keep up with the demand of their customers--then having to provide their driver’s license to buy the main ingredients will not stop them. They will simply find another way to get the ingredients back to the lab and keep up with production. There are trucks to be robbed, fake IDs to be gotten, or maybe by now there are Sudafed mules whose job is to go into the stores and get Sudafed. Limiting the quantities of Sudafed will only be a speed bump for the producers and dealers of the drug, and will only drive up the cost of the drug—because getting the ingredients to make it is now just a bit harder.

This policy—whether it’s a law or a store policy—though good intentioned does little to address why the demand for crystal meth exists in the first place.

Diatribe over.