Musing About the Legal and Illegal Drug Trade

I wonder if anyone has ever done the stats on deaths with a prescription drug versus an illegal equivalent. One would have to subtract all the deaths due to a drug being illegal. Most obvious would be people dying because of violence rather than overdose, but I also think deaths due to drugs being cut with something dangerous should be subtracted too. The basic desire for repeat business is enough for even unethical businessmen to not use rat poison; it's only the short-term high-risk nature of selling under a ban that encourages such behavior.

Anyway, what got me started thinking about this was some news piece on folks in college using stuff like Ritalin, Adderall, and Provigil in order to study. Now this stuff definitely costs more than, say cocaine, which nobody has a patent on. None of this is a particularly good idea, but since the more modern drugs are prescription, a strong mentality persists that it's somehow less bad.

I seriously doubt it. I know the cost in terms of dollars in a free market would be hugely different; cocaine would be dirt cheap if it weren't illegal. Then there is the potential for death and complications, and that's the part I'd like to see researched. It probably won't be researched because grant money tends to fund research with the potential to reinforce the current regime.

I'm using cocaine here as example. There may be a better illegal alternative to the prescription cocktail the kids are using now. My purpose here is to point out that the illegality of certain drugs creates conditions where people make choices that may actually be worse than if none of it were illegal. We are far more familiar with the drugs that have been around for a thousand years than with the ones created in the past five, yet the ones that are legal are the ones we usually know less about.