Up till now the war on drugs has been a huge failure. It has incarcerated millions of people. Corrupted entire societies. Destroyed millions of lives. Cost many billions -- maybe even trillions -- of dollars.
This essay argues that governments of advanced societies should kill the demand for dangerous narcotics by supporting development and distribution of benign substitutes that, at the very least, do no harm, and persuade users of bad narcotics to switch, and at best, improve the functioning of users.
A first class of benign substitutes - the most important class - would emphasize enhancing the ability to achieve goals, perform tasks, both complex and simple, and should fulfill ten important criteria: good mood - not quite euphoria, not quite high, but feeling good, without loss of personal control; improved cognition; low irritability; better short term and long term memory; better health; more energy; doing no harm; improved learning ability; strong focus on the current task; reduced distractability. The entire point here is to remove feelings of low self esteem, depression, and replace low functioning in day to day living with efficiency and success in achieving goals.
A second class of benign substitute, for recreation, for relaxation, would be euphoriants of varying levels of intensity, which should to a certain extent mimic euphoriants currently consumed in various societies, such as alcohol, marijuana, heroin, cocaine, but without the dangerous side effects or addiction. By distributing these at low cost, this should kill the demand for dangerous narcotics.
Ideally there would be a number of different kinds of substitutes: there would be fast acting substitutes to immediately wean users from dangerous narcotics; and at the other end of the continuum, substitutes that might take a substantial amount of time to have full effect, such as a diet or combination of diet and exercise. It would be politically easier to sell substitutes based on consuming existing food products... the idea that improving your diet will make you feel better and function better. But the effects of a new diet are not likely to appear before a substantial time period has passed, and would not be useful for immediately weaning users from dangerous narcotics.
Before further discussion, let me attack the argument that humans should not try to invent new substances aimed at improving human well-being, because it might have disastrous results. Humans have for a very long time been observing the effects of substances on people. At its simplest, it's been observing what is safe to eat, and the effect of different substances, and different processing/cooking methods, . Observation was greatly improved when written records emerged. And over the past few hundred years there have been great strides in observation and experimentation, development of more accurate measurement, record keeping, observational tools, and increasingly better safety precautions in protecting human subjects.
I think the main objection to governmental support for developing new substances is fear of being manipulated and controlled by governments. In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley described an item called "soma", that made people feel good, and that made them compliant with an odious government. This should not be a problem when there are a large number of countries with democratically elected governments and strong universities and strong journalistic institutions.
The reason for leaving development and distribution of benign substitutes to governments is that private companies are chiefly interested in profits and return on capital. The profit motive tends to tie things up in patents and trying to bolster prices. Like the disgraceful behavior of Pfizer profiting from Covid.
Governments can take a much longer view and a view that is not constrained by the money-making motive. Private companies should not be excluded, and could act as subcontractors, but the basic thrust of the enterprise would be to devise inexpensive benign substitutes to wean users from dangerous drugs. And — a wider objective — to devise substances / diets / that could improve quality of life for all people.
