How Economists Would Wage the War on Drugs
In Mexican villages, drug cartels provide basic public services and even build churches—a cynical version of the “corporate social responsibility” that ordinary companies use to clean up their images.
.. Demand for drugs is inelastic—that is, when prices rise, people cut their consumption relatively little.
.. Demand-side interventions are not only more effective, they’re also considerably cheaper than playing about with helicopters in the Andes. A dollar spent on drug education in U.S. schools cuts cocaine consumption by twice as much as spending that dollar on reducing supply in South America; spending it on treatment for addicts reduces it by 10 times as much. Rehab programs for prescription-painkiller users might seem costly, but they prevent those people from slipping into the colossally more expensive problem of heroin addiction.