Links 2024-02-25 - Drugs (both kinds)

The popular narratives suffer from hard core madness.

We will have come a long way once we can set aside emotional biases and rationally think about distressful issues like drugs. Sadly, we are not there yet.

Consider the newly building concern in the old story that marijuana has downsides and these are somewhat exacerbated by the drug having become much more potent. David Henderson answers the question about why weed is so potent today addressing a report in the WSJ.

Those familiar with my posting on this issue or at least for those who have a deeper than average understanding of the dynamics in play will not at all be surprised that it is our old nemesis, the Iron Law of Prohibition.

But wouldn’t one of the implications of making weed legal be that it should be less potent? Yes. But that’s in a world where weed is legal the way many other things are legal. We are not in that world. Instead, legalization has been accompanied by extensive regulation and high taxation. As a result, illegal weed still dominates.

One important side point I would like to make is that there are increasing returns to scale for legalization (free markets). This means it takes a lot of legalization to result in the full fruits of legalization—for it to live up to promises. In other words, a little prohibition goes a long way.

Sticking with indirect references to the WSJ but turning to criticism of an opinion piece, Jeffrey A. Singer takes issue with what he considers a flashback to “reefer madness”.

In a January 21 opinion piece, Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley sounded the alarm over the Department of Health and Human Services’ recent conclusion that “the risks to the public health posed by marijuana are lower compared to other drugs of abuse.”

…

She also alludes to evidence of marijuana‐​induced chronic psychiatric problems. But, as I wrote here, most evidence of an association between marijuana use and chronic psychiatric problems is correlative. Researchers have not been able to find evidence of a causal relationship between the two.

He followed up with a letter to the WSJ editor that was not published. It included this paragraph:

However, laws should not prohibit adults from consuming substances or engaging in activities simply because they are dangerous or harmful if children do them. If that were the case, lawmakers would bring back alcohol prohibition, completely ban tobacco products, completely ban gambling, and maybe even consider banning automobiles (many states let minors drive them and they are more likely to get in accidents than adults).

I hope the progress that has been made against the drug war especially in regard to marijuana is not meaningfully pared back much less lost because of the shallow analysis and bad conclusions so many would-be drug warriors are advancing.

Moving from illicit drugs to legal ones, perhaps we should be thankful for high drug (especially prescription drug) prices. So argue David R. Henderson and Charles L. Hooper in the WSJ.

Almost all new drugs are developed for the U.S. market, no matter where the company’s headquarters are. Why? America is a large, rich country with an advanced medical system. America’s gross domestic product per capita is 65% higher than Britain’s, 57% higher than Germany’s and 87% higher than France’s. There are four Americans for every German and nine Americans for every Canadian. We have many wealthy people. The Food and Drug Administration, which moves slowly, is still often faster at approving new drugs than regulatory bodies in other countries. While far from a free market, our medical system is freer than in many other nations. Countries with single-payer systems often take one to two years to negotiate the price of a new drug. If a patent is granted for 20 years but the first 13 years are dedicated to development and approval, then only seven years of patent-protected sales remain. If two years are added to that timeline for reimbursement negotiations, the interval drops to five years.

If new drugs can make it in America, they are developed. If they can’t, they aren’t. Other countries are considered secondarily. They are the cherry on top; we’re the sundae.

The FDA is extremely suboptimal. The approval process is unnecessarily fraught, and patent law as related to the FDA’s policies has inherent problems. Despite all of those shortcomings, we have the luxury of being the wealthiest nation by far. That comes with this relative burden. Consider it reverse inequality.

This is one more reason to try to make the rest of the world more like the U.S., wealth and otherwise, and not try to have the U.S. emulate the rest of the world. On this thought their closing paragraph is on point.

“No one in this country is happy that Americans pay for drug R&D while the rest of the world free-rides off our investment. But we don’t run the world. If we try to free-ride too, there won’t be a ride. When we look at our situation as it is, not how we wish it were, we can see what a good investment drug R&D is and how cheap-drug schemes such as importing drugs from Canada and “negotiating” Medicare drug prices generally won’t work. If they do, we’ll wish they hadn’t.”

Notice how David Henderson managed two appearances in today’s links. It should not surprise anyone that being able to intelligently, rationally, and non-emotionally see through a popular narrative in one respect would translate into another.