"This is bad", Gino said. "It was rough when the gangs warred over turf, and when the narcs blitzed us, but nothing like this. At least in those days there was always a supply.
You might have to twist some arms or call in a few favours or pay a
premium, but you could always find what you needed to stay in business somewhere. We should have known when we started getting into bed with the competition, and then the government, it was going to be trouble."
He
looked around forlornly at the empty warehouse. What had once contained
fifty million dollars worth of high-grade, street-ready drugs, and a
state of the art laboratory, now sat idle, strewn with empty cartons
and nothing more. "Globalization", Gino said, shaking his head.
It
had seemed like a good idea at the time. The drug business was risky,
dangerous, and horribly inefficient. The Deal promised to make it easy,
even respectable. The big players would all get together, agree on
prices and territories, and buy together from the farmers and
syndicates in Colombia, Afghanistan, Burma, and the other producing
countries. No more wars, bloodshed, or flooding the market with cheap
product. No more haggling with the producers -- at the wholesale level,
the Syndicate would be the only game in town, and they would buy only
in tonnes, at a price just high enough to keep the producers in
business, but not high enough that they could afford to get out of
line. With their global reach and depth, the Syndicate could play
producers off against each other, buy from the cheapest country, and
hence reduce costs and increase 'productivity' every year.
It
worked for awhile. The deals they struck cut allowed them to cut street
prices in half while actually increasing the Syndicate's margins. And
the quality and consistency of the product got so good that business
picked up, and the government slacked off a bit. Then someone had the
idea of going to the government and making a deal with them: The
Syndicate would be 'licensed' to carry on their business, would pay the
feds a license fee and agree to maximum quantities of each drug in each
city. They would also guarantee product quality and to keep the
retailers on the street in line -- no violence, no turf wars, no
criminal sideline activities, no gouging the strung-out customer. In
return there would be no prosecution and no harassment -- they'd be as
legit as the corner liquor store. Despite the huge mutual distrust and
the outrage of conservatives, it seemed like a no-brainer, and The Deal
was struck.
But then things started to unravel. It turned out
controlling the guys on the front line wasn't so easy. With the
wholesale price halved, it was just too tempting for the retailer to
keep some of his cost savings, and prices started to rise again. That
caused some price wars which led to renewed violence. A lot of the
pushers bailed out of the business entirely -- no thrills, and no
respect just being a dumb middleman told exactly what you could sell at
what price and to whom. Might as well work in Silicon Valley, where you
got the same deal with air conditioning and a pension.
At the
other end of the supply chain and the globe, things were also going
awry. The suppliers, squeezed by the Syndicate on price, were either
starving or cheating. They sold to the crime lords from struggling
nations for 50% above Syndicate prices, and soon the Syndicate was
facing new competition from rough, disorganized, and extremely violent
gangs. Most of these gang members were illegals, outcasts from their
own families and countries, strung out on their own product, with
nothing left to lose. True desperados. Dealing with them was more dangerous for the Syndicate than dealing with their former competitors, or even with the narcs.
What
was worse, with profits constrained, the producers were limiting what
they produced to what they know they could sell -- there was no place
to sell surplus product, so surpluses were eliminated as the producers
turned their land and labour to other products that were not so
price-constrained.
And then the government started to get pushy.
They wanted the Syndicate to reduce supply each year, develop less
addictive products, even counsel their customers about the dangers of
their product. License 'fees' rose. Big Pharma lobbied and won licenses
to produce equivalent synthetic products to those the Syndicate's
suppliers produced, creating a whole new set of competitors with retail
outlets and marketing budgets the Syndicate couldn't match.
Then
the retailers started to organize. They formed their own buying group
and negotiated better prices from the Syndicate, and began to run
other, illegal, coordinated businesses using different front men. The
feds demanded the Syndicate crack down on them. The Syndicate insisted
'their' people were all legit and playing by the rules. Violence,
tempers and arrests flared up again.
And, as the conservatives
warned, the increase in supply created an increase in demand, and soon
addiction rates soared. The government was pressured to renege on The
Deal, but instead mounted a propaganda campaign to lay the blame on the
Syndicate and justify some spectacular busts, well-covered by the
media, that changed nothing but made the government look like it was
managing things, and made the Syndicate feel used.
More and more
of the world's struggling nations, desperate to find a cash crop that
could compete with the huge North American and European agricultural
subsidies, switched their fields from food to drug crops and, by
employing children to harvest them, undercut the traditional supplying
nations while making food so prohibitively expensive for their own
people that starvation, malnutrition and disease rates ballooned. The
Deal was affecting much more than the availability and cost of drugs.
Then
just as everyone thought the situation could not get any worse, it did.
The Fungus hit the crops all over the world almost simultaneously.
Because of low prices, and desperation, producers were planting and
then neglecting poor quality stock in even poorer, contaminated soils.
Some of the stock was infiltrated by sterile, genetically manufactured
strains. The entire system became extremely vulnerable, with only just
enough produced to meet current cut-price orders. When The Fungus hit,
supply fell suddenly to 10% of street demand.
For everyone in
the 'industry', this was something new. The whole world believed in the
market economy, the law of supply and demand. And now that drugs had
been legitimized and brought under the forces of the market, surely the
supply would always be there? But as global warming whipped up
sandstorms in dry nations and monsoons in wet ones, drought and The
Fungus combined to reduce supplies to the point most producers just
gave up and abandoned their emaciated crops. Big Pharma was already
operating at capacity, and the synthetics were more expensive and
produced an inferior high to the 'natural' products. And the
synthetics, full of the by-products of the chemistry lab, also had far
more side-effects, and their long-term toxicity was not really known.
So
suddenly the streets erupted in rage, as desperate addicts attacked
their suppliers, convulsed with the symptoms of withdrawal, and sought
out any alternative concoctions to numb the agony. There were huge
increases in poisonings, suicides, murders of family members and
complete strangers, heart attacks and other diseases that plague
weakened and stressed-out bodies. Gun violence became so common it was
no longer even reported. Hospitals, filled beyond capacity, refused to
admit patients suffering from drug- or gun-related injuries or
diseases. The entire life, health and liability insurance insurance
industry went bankrupt, creating enormous misery for millions. Police
forces collapsed from lack of recruits and were replaced by private
security forces -- for those who could afford them. Without liability
insurance, the Big Pharma industry collapsed, despite attempts by
governments to shield it from litigation, prop it up, and finally
nationalize it. As farmers in affluent nations scrambled to meet the
shortfall in supply of drugs by switching from food crops, and despite
ever-growing government subsidies, the cost of food in these nations
septupled -- and then The Fungus wiped out the drug crops in these
nations as well.
Who could have imagined such consequences of just trying to introduce a little market discipline, a little efficiency, into the world's second-biggest (after war) industry? -- an industry that wasn't even acknowledged to exist as such
because no one wanted to admit that a sector that preyed on human
weakness, depression, and desperation for escape from reality could be
so huge and so prosperous. Who could have imagined the global economy
was so fragile? With markets, commerce and supply chains collapsing
worldwide, with civil order degenerating into anarchy, with governments
and corporations falling like dominoes, what could be done now to put
things back on an even keel?
"I know what we need to do", Gino
said to himself quietly. "We need to go high-tech. No crops --
everything made in the lab. Instead of making drugs from plants, with
all the hassle and shipping and vulnerability, we need to make them out
of oil."
There
is more to this story, of course, than meets the eye. It's not a
cautionary story about drugs at all, but a parable about a market
economy that is fragile, grossly distorted by political interests and
the abuse of money and power, increasingly dysfunctional, utterly
unsustainable, and hugely vulnerable to inevitable shortages of key
resources.
For the record, I am adamantly opposed to the so-called War on Drugs, and this story is not
a defence of that war or of prohibiting production of or access to
'recreational' drugs. Such a war is futile, extravagantly expensive and
massively destructive. But as Big Tobacco has shown us, letting the
'market' self-regulate unhealthy and addictive substances is not the
answer either. As recent studies of mice, indicating they only get
addicted when they're imprisoned and depressed, demonstrate, the only
answer is to create a new society in which we have neither need nor
want of dulling of our senses or escape from reality. I'm not holding
my breath.
And in case you still think this story is about drugs, please read this earlier article.
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