Once again, an American president has announced a new flanking maneuver in the war on drugs. Under the most recent proposal, Bill Clinton wants to shift more money from interdiction to rehabilitation and prevention.
All the other shifts haven't worked to much advantage, so it's hard to work up a genuine emotional rush about this one either. Maybe we're going about this drug "crisis" thing all wrong. We've been treating it as a crime when, in the spirit of the times, we should be subjecting the phenomenon to a rigorous macroeconomic analysis. There is heavy-duty economics in the drug trade, and after all, this is the era of maximizing economic benefit.
The genius of the drug marketplace has followed the supply-demand model quite nicely. What used to be economically beyond the reach of all but the most affluent and the hard-core criminals who plied their gruesome trade to support their drug habits has become a relatively commonplace transaction even for little kids.
Granted, the 10-year-olds probably have trouble convincing Mommy and Daddy that their run to the "ice cream shop" will cost $10, but by the time they are teenagers, what's 10 bucks to unsuspecting parents?
Depending on local market conditions, that's about the going rate on the street for a rock of crack cocaine. Most everyone can afford the stuff. In fact, crack opened the egalitarian window of opportunity to the excitement of cocaine, which for years had been restricted to the recreational indulgence of the rich.
By removing the remaining societal taboos and criminal sanctions, imagine the lucrative opportunities under creative marketing! Imagine the possibilities for distribution and market penetration! Imagine the economies of scale, the ripple effect through a wide range of economic sectors!
Of course, there may be a few nasty little "externalities," as economists are fond of calling them--dead bodies, psychological cripples, glazed-eyed, zombified human amoebas--but the marketplace has a way of "correcting" itself and adjusting.
Therein lies the real bonanza for forward-thinking entrepreneurs.
Envision a booming trend in mortuary franchises. Not only will this create intense demand and job opportunities for new morticians--possibly a chain of technical schools specifically to train embalmers?--but support services and industries will benefit as well: hearse manufacturers and mechanics to maintain them; embalming fluid producers; casket crafters; possibly even limited partnerships to exploit real estate speculation to meet the burgeoning demand for new cemetery plots.
Those who don't go to their immediate final reward will provide the impetus for a growth service industry for psychologists and psychiatrists who specialize in reconstructing maimed psyches.
Armed with sophisticated market surveys, and depending upon the level of federal intrusiveness under eventual national health-care reform, the creative investor will recognize the earnings potential and tax advantages of a syndicate of drug-trauma emergency clinics to treat the crazed refugees who fall by the wayside in the race toward chemical nirvana. At current growth levels, this target group offers amazing potential with only modest capital investment.
A variation on the same concept, if properly marketed, could extend to a network of counseling centers to accommodate families and loved ones who must cope with the long, long, long (beginning to catch the fiscal drift?), long and torturous ordeal of nursing the druggies back to normalcy.
With aggressive amortization and depreciation of such facilities, a lean and efficient staff of counselors will contribute nicely to both near-term and long-term return on investment--and to treating patients, too, of course.
Not everyone will appreciate the macroeconomic benefits of such concepts. In fact, a sizable portion of the public will continue to call for tighter law enforcement, despite the proven failure of federal, state and local agencies to so much as dent, much less blunt, the market demand for illicit mind-altering substances.
But even a public finally aroused to action may be receptive to yet another market approach to resolve such matters profitably. The notion of turning over prisons to the private sector for more efficient operation is already an accepted practice. Why not practice private-sector, profit-motivated law enforcement specifically to combat drugs?
Government agencies have proven themselves incompetent to perform what has been demanded of them by law, although they complain that the political leaders provide inadequate resources to do the job.
In the interest of incentive-driven efficiency, let the private sector lend a hand. With the continuing reductions of the armed forces, there are hundreds of thousands of veterans from as far back as Vietnam, and from Panama, Desert Storm and Somalia who mastered specialized skills that could be applied--with proper systems analysis and personnel management--to a variation of search-and-destroy missions.
There are paramedics, paralegals and parapsychologists. Why not a private-sector Paramilitary Drug Enforcement Service Systems, Inc.? Let the competitive bidding begin. After all, if the drug economy fosters such a bull market, somebody besides the mob and the pushers should be able to profit from it.
Adam Smith, meet Rambo.
Tommy Denton's column is syndicated by the New York Times News Service.
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