Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
It seems to work okay with tobacco, which is far more addictive than almost all of the illegal drugs. Even with the government taxes raising the price of cigarettes up to ten times their free market value, tobacco addicts in withdrawal bum cigs off of strangers but they don't mug them.baumgarten said:Don't forget that gangs that control turf have the advantage of artificially inflating drug prices, since they force out any competition. In the United States, we have similar problems with legal pharmaceutical products. How do we ensure prices stay low enough that addicts don't have to mug other people to pay for them?
It also seems to work okay with alcohol, which is less addictive than tobacco but makes up for it by motivating much more violent anti-social behavior. A lot of winos live on the street because they're too drunk to work and too broke to pay rent, yet they merely pester us for booze money rather than robbing us.
And it works okay with caffeine, even though it drives quite a few of its users berserk. Nobody's ever been mugged by a Starbucks junkie with the shakes.
Many prescription drugs are horribly expensive. Some of that is simply capturing the R&D costs, while some is just opportunism, taking advantage of the elderly. But there's a limit to how high a corporation could raise the price of a recreational drug because they're too easy for laymen to produce. You can grow marijuana indoors under lights. Refining coca leaves and opium poppies is not rocket science. You can't say that about some of these ten-dollar pills that your grandpa takes.
If sale and use were legal it would be difficult to crack down on private bootleggers undercutting corporate prices. And especially difficult to crack down on people who grow their own and don't even transact business. Prices would have a more or less reasonable cap because of competition from suppliers who are not members of the corporate guild.
People can become addicted, in the colloquial sense of the word, to a great many things, including sex and shopping. The path to ruination of their lives is much the same as with chemical addiction, and the withdrawal symptoms can be harder to treat.samcdkey said:Yes but is there psychological addiction without chemical changes in the body?
Many of the drugs of the hippie era, such as marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms, seem to have no physically addictive properties. In fact, often just the opposite because the highs can be self-limiting. A second dose of acid is useless and smoking more pot after being stoned for 4-6 hours usually results only in a craving for sugar, followed by carbohydrate shock and sleep. But people can become so enamored of the feeling of being high that the term "psychological addiction" is meaningful. We just have to keep our perspective and remember that this is the same kind of craving people get from the joy of sex or shopping.