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Under the market system, there is demand for a product if a lot of people want it - but that demand counts for nothing if those people have no money. If they lack money, their demand essentially doesn't exist...This explains why the drug industry is not investing money to develop a cure for a disease known as sleeping sickness, which leaves its victims in a coma. The disease...killed 66,000 people last year and threatens to infect 60 million more - but the only people who are afflicted by it are poverty-stricken Africans with no clout in the marketplace. Interestingly, there is a drug called eflornithine that is effective in lifting victims out of their comas. But drug companies stopped producing eflornithine in 1995 because it was no longer profitable to continue. The drug was still desperately needed, but only by people without money. So, following modern market practices, these people were simply left in a coma.

 

Linda McQuaig

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It does harm a great many other people, but primarily because it's prohibited. There are an enormous number of innocent victims now. You've got the people whose purses are stolen, who are bashed over the head by people trying to get enough money for their next fix. You've got the people killed in the random drug wars. You've got the corruption of the legal establishment. You've got the innocent victims who are taxpayers who have to pay for more and more prisons, and more and more prisoners, and more and more police. You've got the rest of us who don't get decent law enforcement because all the law enforcement officials are busy trying to do the impossible.
And, last, but not least, you've got the people of Colombia and Peru and so on. What business do we have destroying and leading to the killing of thousands of people in Colombia because we cannot enforce our own laws? If we could enforce our laws against drugs, there would be no market for these drugs.

 

Milton Friedman

 

More people die every year as a result of the war against drugs than die from what we call, generically, overdosing. These fatalities include, perhaps most prominently, drug merchants who compete for commercial territory, but include also people who are robbed and killed by those desperate for money to buy the drug to which they have become addicted.
This is perhaps the moment to note that the pharmaceutical cost of cocaine and heroin is approximately 2 per cent of the street price of those drugs. Since a cocaine addict can spend as much as $1,000 per week to sustain his habit, he would need to come up with that $1,000. The approximate fencing cost of stolen goods is 80 per cent, so that to come up with $1,000 can require stealing $5,000 worth of jewels, cars, whatever. We can see that at free-market rates, $20 per week would provide the addict with the cocaine which, in this wartime drug situation, requires of him $1,000.

 

William F. Buckley

 

If FDA officials err on the side of under-caution in approving an unsafe drug, they are attacked by the media and patient groups, and investigated by Congress. Their victims, sick and dead people, are highly visible. If FDA officials err on the side of over-caution, keeping a safe and effective drug off the market, who's to know? The victims are invisible. For example, neither the Americans who get sick or die from meningitis C this year, nor their loved ones, will know that their illness or death could have been prevented had it not been for errors by FDA officials. It's a no-brainer to figure out which error FDA officials prefer to make.

 

Walter E. Williams

 

There are almost half a million Americans behind bars today for breaking a drug law. The United States incarcerates more people for drug law violations than Western Europe incarcerates for everything, and they have more people than we do. There were 50,000 people behind bars on drug charges in America in 1980; now we have almost a tenfold increase. Yet extraordinarily few politicians are talking about that.

 

Ethan Nadelmann