Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Those numbers convince me of something I wouldn't have believed: that, under U.S. conditions, no practicable level of drug law enforcement can raise the prices of mass-market drugs. (Prohibition itself, along with enough enforcement to avoid having the law become a dead letter, does influence drug prices: pharmaceutical-grade cocaine costs your dentist between $5 and $10 a gram.)
|
I do know how I feel, but using the price to reach his conclusion tells us almost nothing, without an analysis of changes in demand and supply. At a minimum, one would have to determine what portion of the $500 price resulted from product costs and what from delivery costs (which is the thing principally affected by the criminal-enforcement regime) in order to make a semi-coherent conclusion.
That said, it's quite clear the war on drugs is less a morass than Iraq principally because it's been a complete and utter failure, rather than only of ambiguous benefits.
