This program is ripe for a serious cost-benefit analysis that also takes into account the extra suffering to those with colds and flu who end up with weaker medicine as well as all the extra time wasted by people in line at drugstores.ST. LOUIS – At the height of the methamphetamine epidemic, several states turned to a new weapon to disrupt the drug trade: electronic systems that could track sales of the cold medicine used to make meth.
Tracking sales by computer allowed pharmacies to check instantly whether a buyer had already purchased the legal limit of pseudoephedrine — a step that was supposed to make it harder to obtain raw ingredients for meth.
But an Associated Press analysis of federal data reveals that the practice has not only failed to curb the meth trade, which is growing again after a brief decline. It also created a vast and highly lucrative market for profiteers to buy over-the-counter pills and sell them to meth producers at a huge markup.
In just a few years, the lure of such easy money has drawn thousands of new people into the methamphetamine underworld.
"It's almost like a sub-criminal culture," said Gary Boggs, an agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration. "You'll see them with a GPS unit set up in a van with a list of every single pharmacy or retail outlet. They'll spend the entire week going store to store and buy to the limit."
Inside their vehicles, the so-called "pill brokers" punch out blister packs into a bucket and even clip coupons, Boggs said.
In some cases, the pill buyers are not interested in meth. They may be homeless people recruited off the street or even college kids seeking weekend beer money, authorities say.
But because of booming demand created in large part by the tracking systems, they can buy a box of pills for $7 to $8 and sell it for $40 or $50.
What we need is not a forum where people clap at zestily-enunciated lines about “responsibility.” We need simply to imagine a day when a Jevon thinks about dropping out of school and selling drugs and realizes that he can’t do that because drugs are available for low prices at Rite-Aid and CVS.The one thing that McWhorter does not emphasize, but should, is that reducing the number of young black men with criminal records would mean much improved employment chances, and higher earnings conditional on employment, later in life.
The pretax retail price of marijuana will substantially decline, likely by more than 80 percent. The price consumers face will depend heavily on taxes, the structure of the regulatory regime, and how taxes and regulations are enforced.Those are reasonable and important conclusions and come along with a healthy dose of uncertainty. There just is not really any variation in the available data that looks like re-legalization. Marijuana was last legal in the US early in the 20th century and there were not a lot of social scientists around back then doing surveys on drug use.
Consumption will increase, but it is unclear how much because we know neither the shape of the demand curve nor the level of tax evasion (which reduces revenues and the prices that consumers face).
Tax revenues could be dramatically lower or higher than the $1.4 billion estimate; for example, uncertainty about the federal response to California legalization can swing estimates in either direction.
There is considerable uncertainty about the impact that legalizing marijuana in California would have on public budgets and consumption, with even minor changes in assumptions leading to major differences in outcomes.
Nor, he said, is wine-making a sign that the monks of Buckfast Abbey have strayed from the teachings of St. Benedict, an accusation recently leveled by an Episcopal bishop.Amen to that!“It’s always wise to remember that Jesus turned water into wine,” the spokesman, Jim Wilson, said in an interview.
