Osler's Razor

Yesterday, 76 people overdosed on the New Haven Green.

There is a lot going on with that story that I would like to unpack.

First, some news stories made it sound like this occurred in some remote park, with people hiding in the woods. That's very wrong-- the New Haven Green is actually a large open space right in the middle of the city, bordered two sides by Yale and on a third by one of the major shopping streets in the city. Two major bus stops are on the Green. You can sit on a bench and literally see the entire thing. It is not remote or hidden.

Second, it appears that what happened here is that someone sold a lot of people bad drugs-- probably synthetic marijuana-- and they used it right there where they bought it. What this did was reveal how many people on that one day were using drugs in that small area (and probably not all of them-- just the ones who bought from that one guy). It's as if pop-up bubbles appeared over the residents of a defined space identifying them as people using narcotics at that moment... and there were a staggering number of pop-up bubbles.

And that brings me to the third, and most important thing: The problem with narcotics in America has a lot more to do with narcotics use than it does with narcotics trafficking. We are a huge consumer of narcotics: in fact, with 5% of the world's population, we use 25% of the illegal narcotics, and consume more illegal narcotics per capita than any other nation. We spend 10 times more on narcotics than we do on going to movies!  The myth is that the trafficking creates the use-- that is, that "pushers" get people addicted. That's ridiculous. There are sellers because there is demand for the narcotics, and the law of markets tells us that so long as there is demand, there will be supply.

People who think that most drug users were drawn into it by drug sellers have not spent much time around either. While, certainly, there are people who first tried drugs because a seller talked them into it, in most instances people try drugs because a friend or a lover talked them into it, or they wanted to in the first place, or because they couldn't get a prescription medication anymore.

Think of it this way: In the real world, do you think drug sellers are going around trying to find buyers, or the buyers are more often trying to find the sellers? It's the latter.

Americans use too many recreational drugs, and there is a cost to that. Some drugs are harmful and some are not so harmful. If we can stop pretending that we can restrict demand simply by temporarily affecting supply, perhaps we can focus on lessening narcotic use, encouraging harm reduction, and making people's lives better.