Interdiction By Law

Society loves its illicit and ever-so-tempting substances that the law forbids yet are available through a multitude of sources, as long as one can come up with the money required to obtain them.  It makes little intellectual sense for people to harbour a deep desire to acquire harmful substances whose use takes a dreadful toll on the human body over time, but people are not always sensible.

And a significant proportion of any population is drawn to the use of hallucinogenic substances, drugs and alcohol whose use allows them to temporarily inhabit another world than the real one they live in.  Under the influence of alcohol or drugs everything appears different; troubles become insubstantial, and there's a glossy overtone of self-assurance and mastery of one's world.

Even though recreational drug use comes with a heavy social stigma, it's still cool.  All those stories of ruined lives, people descending into squalor, their family lives wrecked, with little prospects for the future due to ill health, lost employment and evaporated self-respect, nothing seems to restrain others for whom these personal stories of woe are readily accessible, from setting out on their own journey to hell.

The threat of being caught by police in an illegal drug transaction doesn't seem to bother most people.  Drug transactions take place in visible, public areas, including schoolyards with teens taking the plunge to find out for themselves what all the fuss is about.  Teens are notoriously curious about the world around them; anything forbidden becomes instantly attractive.  And friends go out of their way to enlist other friends in the neat experience.

In any given population up to 20% will become hopelessly mired in some kind of addiction, be it gambling, smoking, drinking or drugs.  From there, when taken to excess, need replaces reasoning capacity, and the downward descent is fairly rapid.  Prostitution, petty criminal offences, break-and-enter, assault, robbery and all manner of malfeasance geared to paying for the next fix become part of the lifestyle.

The cost to the individual and the cost to society is enormous.  It isn't the people who make themselves wealthy from the misery of others who largely spend time in prison.  It is the middleman, the pusher, the person who distributes drugs trying to fund their own addiction, for the most part.  Prisons burgeon with the population of convicted drug pushers, the little dealers who think they're big-time.

Cocaine, because it is illegal, has a grossly inflated price on the street where demand for it is high, and an expanding demographic of people become addicted to it, from all walks of life, some able to control their craving and reputations because they have personal wealth and connections, others descending into the netherworld of dependence and ruin. 

In the countries where cocaine and heroin come from, they're cheap.

And readily available through the cartels whose business acumen runs deep and brutal, expressed through jealously guarding their turf and violently eliminating any who have the audacity to challenge their territory.  And because there is so much at stake for them, they don't mind one little bit offering bribes to corrupt those who enforce the law, at every level.

In North America today, roughly half the population supports legalization of marijuana use.  That's the soft drug that has medicinal properties recognized by the medical fraternity, the community of the afflicted, and the governments that allow permits for their legal use.  That is also, should marijuana become completely legalized, the garden path toward hard drugs.

And the whole tangled mess and convoluted headache-inducing problem of combating illegal drug use, costing billions of tax dollars to prosecute, in the process filling jailcells and the bank accounts of the cartels goes round and round like a lunatic carousel.