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And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
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I say and I say it again, you've been had.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as a fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like say our name been saying say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys introducing the great Mark Thornton from the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian school economics.
He is senior fellow there.
He is the book review editor of the quarterly Journal of Austrian economics.
His publications include the economics of prohibition, tariffs, blockades and inflation, the economics of the Civil War, the quotable Mises, the Bastiat collection, an essay on economic theory, and the Bastiat reader.
And it was he and Robert Blumen, who really were very first back in 2005, at calling the then current housing bubble that of course, popped and destroyed nearly the entire global economy.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Mark?
Hey, Scott, I'm doing great.
It's great to be on your program.
Listen, I'm always very happy to talk to you and very grateful that you would make time to come on the show.
Now.
So first things first here.
You're not really a drug culture guy.
That's not your thing.
Your thing is you're a capitalist economist and not just a capitalist economist.
But there's, I guess the classical capitalist economists and then there's the Chicago School Milton Friedman types.
But you're of the Austrian school, which means you're as capitalist as a capitalist economist could get.
Am I right?
Well, that's absolutely correct.
There's a lot of free market economists, but Austrians are distinct from some of our friends in the Chicago School of the supply siders.
They basically use mainstream approaches to economic analysis where the Austrians use an entirely different radical method based on logic and common sense and deduction, rather than mathematical models and computer generated statistics and so forth.
Okay, right on.
And so I just wanted to emphasize that point for people, especially who are new listeners, and maybe not be may not be too familiar with this, who may just assume that if anybody argues for legalizing drugs, all drugs, real drugs, hard drugs, dangerous drugs, as you do, that that person must just be a roadie for a metal band or something.
And then so your whole thing is you understand capitalism so well that you're saying we ought to legalize heroin of all things.
Go ahead and hit a mark.
Well, Scott, our country is going through an horrendous opioid crisis, where we have 35,000 people dying in the last 12 months from overdoses of heroin, Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet, etc.
And so this is absolutely horrendous.
And of course, it starts with the fact that, you know, these drugs, specifically Oxycontin and Vicodin, passed the government's test, they passed the FDA test, they did not pass the market test.
In the market test, you not only have to be able to sell your product, but you also it also has to be reasonably safe.
You don't want to be selling a product that's just going to generate a lot of lawsuits.
So in a true free market where pharmaceutical companies and doctors have liability, you know, you get much safer, much saner policies.
And what we've gotten with the government is that as long as you can pass the FDA test, you can sell and you can sell with impunity, basically, as long as people are following the government directions, they really don't face much legal liability.
And then on top of that, the prescription, pain prescription guidelines have been changed in the United States over the last couple of decades, where once they were too stringently opposed to opioid prescriptions, and then they just started prescribing it for any little thing.
And they were encouraged to do so.
And you know, they were encouraged to, you know, to follow these guidelines, which told doctors that Oxycontin and Vicodin, which are very similar to heroin, could be used safely by the general public outside of, you know, direct care of it, like being in a hospital or something like that.
And as a result, hundreds of 1000s of people have been addicted, addicted to these drugs.
And consequently, you know, well, let's just say you you've hurt your shoulder, you've broken your leg, you go to the doctor, you get it fixed, you and then you get a prescription for 30 or 60 days of Oxycontin or Vicodin.
And you know, the chances are pretty good that you're going to be addicted at the end of the 30 or 60 days, but you're going to go back to your doctor, your leg is healed, or your shoulders healed, they can't rewrite you prescriptions for those drugs.
And so you're out of luck, basically, at that point, your only three choices are to go through drug rehabilitation, which is very expensive, very time consuming, and doesn't really work in most cases.
So that doesn't work for most ordinary Americans.
And believe me, ordinary Americans, if they knew that Oxycontin, Vicodin were just like heroin, there's no way they would take it.
But they're not told of the dangers.
So if you don't go through drug rehab, the next choice is to buy Oxycontin and Vicodin on the streets in the black market, again, where there's no legal liability by the people selling the stuff.
The only problem with that is, you know, a Oxycontin pill might be $25, you know, maybe $5 one week, but then it might be $25 the next week.
And as a result, again, most ordinary Americans can't afford to finance a habit like that.
And so, you know, they, they can go back to those same drug dealers and purchase heroin at a much lower price than they can the Oxycontin and Vicodin.
And so you've got these 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of ordinary Americans facing this choice.
And they ultimately will choose some of them, heroin, and the dangers of heroin, you know, Oxycontin, Vicodin are very dangerous and can produce overdose deaths, and do so with 1000s and 1000s every year.
But with heroin, of course, you don't know what's in it.
You don't know what the potency is, you don't know if they've added fentanyl to it.
And the ultimate result is that we're losing 30 to 35,000 Americans every year.
It's just a disgrace.
And now explain the part about the fentanyl and the heroin.
Well, fentanyl is an artificial opiate.
And it's basically anesthesia.
It's designed to put you to sleep.
But if you're if you're taking heroin with fentanyl, you might go to sleep and never wake up again, that that's the problem.
And fentanyl can be 100 times more potent than heroin itself.
And of course, the people mixing these drugs are not, you know, scientists, these are amateurs to say the least.
And they're in the black market, they're putting fentanyl.
There was just a story today about marijuana, black market dealers putting fentanyl in the marijuana.
So it's a very dangerous drug.
It's what killed Michael Jackson.
It's probably what killed Prince.
And so the so called unexplained deaths, a lot of them are traceable back to fentanyl use, used in combination with black market heroin.
And, you know, in the the amount of fentanyl coming into the US economy from places like China and Vietnam is enormous.
It's growing.
The DEA just found a shipment coming into the country with 1 million doses of fentanyl.
And so it's very dangerous.
It's what you know, is putting people over so they'll be taking the Oxycontin they're doing okay.
And then they go over to heroin, and they're still doing reasonable.
And then all of a sudden they get heroin that's mixed with fentanyl.
And it puts people to sleep and kills them.
And, and so it's just an outrageous situation caused by the government and the government bureaucracy, the DEA, and the American Medical Association, which is really put these heroin like pills in millions of people's hands.
And it's, it's, again, it's just a disgrace.
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I mean, there's so much important stuff here.
And I want to get to the free market solutions to the problem.
At the end here.
I mean, you you certainly explained how the intervention has screwed up a lot of things.
But so to go back to the beginning about how people are getting addicted to this, when we're talking about 30,000 people a year dying, I think, and maybe I'm, you know, being too rude and presumptuous about this.
But I think most Americans actually don't care if somebody who does heroin for recreational purposes ended up addicted and dead.
They kind of think of those people as marginal enough anyway, or frankly, people who are poor, and from like broken and abused backgrounds who have, you know, severe drug addictions as their method of coping with trauma and self medicating and that kind of thing.
And let them rot in prison or let them die in an alley or whatever.
Most, most people don't really care about that.
But I think that what's really changed now that would have more people probably willing to listen to you when you explain, you know, the economics of this and, and, and your solutions to a free market and well, free solutions to this is that, as you're saying, it's not people who get high recreationally who are suffering from this.
It's people who have been over prescribed and they are I don't know the numbers, but it seems like they're by far in the majority here are people who are not drug abusers in any sense that they're just trying to have a good time, which is terribly abusive.
But they're, as you said, they got out of the hospital, and then they got in a situation where the heroin was cheaper than the Vicodin pills on the market and this and that kind of thing.
And so I guess, you know, that's the real point to point out is that the heroin addicts really all along, they never were criminals, you know, some of them, it used to be they were more marginal, and easier to ignore.
But think of how unfair people have been treated all along for what ultimately is, in essence, a sickness.
I don't know about a disease that's kind of overblown, right addiction as a disease, but it's a disorder.
It's a problem that people need help with.
It's not a crime to be condemned.
Think about going to the penitentiary, just because you're sick because you're addicted to a painkiller.
You know, it's insane the way that it I start this episode off by saying, Oh, Mark Thornton, the burden is on you.
But how could that be that the burden is on those saying legalize after all this?
Yes, I mean, the poster child for heroin addicts, back in the 60s and 70s, was minority inner city, you know, problem makers, Vietnam vets, you know, things of that nature, very restricted to the very large cities, and and that sort of thing.
So nobody did care about those people, really.
And then as we get into the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, the heroin problem started going out into, you know, suburbian high schools, and things like that.
So you'd be started to hit home to Middle America.
And then when they change the pain prescribing guidelines, basically, it's everybody that's being affected people with families, people in in the community.
So you're talking about like, fishermen in Maine, you're talking about coal miners in West Virginia, you're talking about school teachers, you're talking about football players and cheerleaders, who get hurt in the ordinary course of events, they go to the doctor, the, you know, the, the cast is put on and the prescription is written.
But instead of, you know, a painkiller, back in the old days, you know, when they would give you very mild, non addictive painkillers, and, and now all of a sudden, they're giving opioid painkillers, and not even telling people what they're being given is the real sin.
I was given a prescription for Oxycontin about 10 years ago.
They didn't even mention what the drug was, or you know, that there might be complications or problems or, you know, that it's not safe to drive and all that kind of thing.
Now, my wife is sick, and they're constantly trying to give her opioids for ear infection or whatever it is.
And it's only because she really knows better and is thoughtful about it that she always is like, No, I'll just take Tylenol.
Because, you know, somebody with chronic pain, if you know better than you know, not to go down that road, there might be no way back from it, you know?
Yeah, and you don't want to even take Tylenol, consistently large doses over time, because that's very harmful for your liver.
You know, so I urge people to be really careful taking any kind of prescription.
They all have dangers, complications, contraindicators, interactions with other drugs.
And so I think we need to be very careful and self motivated in this area, because a lot of doctors are not really looking out for us.
And if you don't have a regular doctor, and you're going to a doc in the box, that is even worse, in terms of the care that the physician uses in terms of treating patients.
And so we're in a whole new world.
And, you know, President Trump just a couple days ago, finally declared a national emergency regarding this issue.
I think it's, I think he's right to do that.
But I also think that he has, he and his team and his committee have no idea, you know, how to solve this problem.
I know.
So let me tackle something you said there that I think probably sounds really counterintuitive to people.
You say that the regulations are what put us all in danger.
And that if there were no regulations, that's how there would be real liability.
When people think that, on the face of it, that, well, geez, in a laissez faire free market system, they can do whatever they want.
The regulation is the regulation.
Without that, what do we have?
Nothing.
Yeah, our health care and our drugs and all that is completely controlled by the government.
There's not a ounce of free market out there, basically.
They control how the doctors manage their practice.
They control what prescriptions are being given.
And of course, so you have the FDA and the AMA, which is a government granted monopoly.
And of course, the pharmaceutical companies are government granted monopolies.
The whole thing is government monopolies of one sort or another.
And so there is no free market in medicine to speak of these days whatsoever.
And I was challenged last week, and you know, somebody said, well, you know, if we took your approach, where anybody could just go and buy OxyContin and Vicodin, that there would be even more people taking these drugs.
But that's not really the case.
As I mentioned, pharmaceutical companies have passed the government's test.
And as a result of passing that test, they have a monopoly.
And there's restrictions on their liability.
Because of this government good housekeeping seal of approval in the free market, you know, drug companies don't get off the hook, so to speak, with respect to their liability.
And as a result, drug companies have to be very careful of what they do what they make, and what they sell.
Because it can very quickly, the value of their companies can very quickly be just disappear.
You'll remember, in the 1980s, Johnson and Johnson, the maker of Tylenol, there were nine people killed by cyanide in the Tylenol capsules in Chicago in 1982.
And Johnson and Johnson lost 25% of its value in one week.
And as a result, they had to respond.
They spent $100 million on TV advertising telling people not to take their product.
They took every bottle off the shelf and paid customers, even if the bottle was empty.
And they went about redesigning Tylenol, so that it was a caplet instead of a capsule.
And you couldn't, you know, just open the capsule and put cyanide in it and put it back together.
And they also came up with the tamper resistant bottle.
And these, you know, improvements have spread throughout the entire industry.
Now, and as a result, Johnson and Johnson's stock price recovered within 30 days.
And so that's what, you know, companies have to do in the free market, they have to protect their customers.
Or they can face liability, or they can just simply face losses in the stock market, as a result of bad behavior.
Well, it's really the other aspect of that, too, where the regulation becomes the hall pass.
So, hey, Your Honor, yeah, maybe we poisoned this guy and his family, or whatever.
But we have a happy face on our report card from the EPA.
Or in this case, you know, yeah, maybe we poisoned this guy to death.
But or, you know, got him addicted to something unnecessarily.
But the, the FDA said that we could, we're within the guidelines, as long as we're in the guidelines.
That's the only question for this court to decide.
And then the judge dismisses the case, right?
That's right.
And I love that term hall pass.
Because that's the kind of feeling that companies have when they have these government protections, they, you know, they feel like they're bulletproof.
And the free market takes away that, that kind of lack of control on a business's behavior, you have to behave, you know, and if you go back before government made these things illegal, you know, there were people who were selling heroin.
There were people selling, you know, what are dangerous drugs, but like cocaine, for example, but Coca-Cola, the famous soft drink, originally had cocaine in it.
However, it had so little cocaine in it that it couldn't possibly harm the customer.
And, you know, and then eventually, they found, you know, bear sold heroin.
And it was safe in the version that they were selling.
But eventually, they figured out that it was, you know, it wasn't a safe alternative to morphine addiction, and that it itself was addictive.
And bear ended up pulling that product off of the market, and introducing aspirin.
All right, so listen here, what if I got my magic wish, and I made Ron Paul the president, and he said, Oh, yeah, we're legalizing not just pop, but heroin and cocaine and all of it, too.
And we're just gonna, I'm gonna refuse to enforce any laws, I'm gonna refuse to pay the FDA, and the market is just gonna have to work it out.
Go ahead, market, do your thing.
What would happen?
Because I know that you know what all the fears would be?
Why wouldn't all those fears come true?
Yeah, the fear, fear, fear, that's the that's the big factor.
People can't visualize the difference between free markets and black markets.
In black markets, there's no liability.
And so anything goes.
And the market is driven by prohibition to sell the most dangerous possible products.
And the more they enforce them, the more dangerous they become.
But if we legalize these drugs, it would really be a boon to society.
So for example, a corporation could sell a heroin product or heroin replacement product, you know, of a set dosage, which could not induce an overdose death unless, you know, somebody was trying to commit suicide.
You know, if you just took the product as directed, it couldn't kill you.
Now you say, well, it could addict you.
But we're really talking about here is people who are already addicted.
It's very difficult to become unaddicted.
If you had a choice between a disease and an addiction, the disease, some kind of disease is preferable, in my estimation.
And as a consequence, you know, a 30 day rehab program is likely not going to work.
And, you know, you don't have time to fix your addiction, your economic circumstances, which are usually bad, your social circumstances, which are usually bad, your family circumstances, which are usually bad.
And so in order to fix all these problems, you've got to, you've got to have your wits about you, you've got to have, you know, your ability to deal with these problems.
Heroin addicts spend all their time trying to finance their addiction and find the drug source.
And so they're always nervous about, you know, not being able to get the drug, whereas if they were able to get a corporate produced drug, that wouldn't kill you, then they wouldn't have to worry about any of those problems.
And they could set out full time to deal with all of these other aspects so that when they beat their addiction, they're in good circumstances, they've got their economic situation, their family situation and their social situation, mostly fixed.
And so becoming unaddicted permanently becomes much, much more likely.
If people have access to legal, safe, and inexpensive heroin or Oxycontin, or some kind of other substitute where doctors are free to treat addict patients with the product they're addicted to, and maybe that might mean tapering off over time, I'm not sure what would be best in every individual circumstances.
That's the role of a doctor to know.
And so we want these addicts under the supervision of doctors taking, you know, rehab treatment, and also not having to worry about maintaining and financing their drug habits.
All right, man.
Well, listen, I really appreciate you coming back on the show and paying such good attention to this issue.
I actually am slightly hopeful.
I mean, I don't want to say optimistic, but it just seems like with this whole new round, as you said, Trump declaring the emergency and everything.
It just seems like, hey, you know what, maybe we don't have to just double down on the Jeff Sessions drug war.
Maybe there are ways that we can get through to people, especially coming at them with your approach here, you know, with the free market economic approach to the issue, get past the emotions and the and their defenses in that way.
And get to the real point.
I mean, I saw a thing today where the heroin addict lady was complaining that you guys said come down here and get clean needles to stay safe.
And now you close that down.
And, you know, this is part of the new drug war.
They're taking back their clean needle program.
And so like, is that really where we're going to start this is the clean shutting down the clean needles is where we're going to go back to that, you know, just seems like, I don't know, maybe we really have an opportunity here.
So I just appreciate that you're doing this work, Mark.
That's all I, you know, I think this is one area where libertarians are winning.
We've won the ideological battle.
The drug warriors are putting up one last stand, I think here.
But ultimately, we're ahead in opinion polls.
We're ahead with voters, we're ahead with younger people, we're, we're ahead and more educated people.
And people are finding out that marijuana is not a deadly drug.
But in fact, it has lots of great medical uses.
And so people are waking up and finding out that the government has been lying to them systematically.
And so I hope that this war on drugs issue gets turned around.
And more people realize that the government lies to them is not working in their best interest is working with special interest groups against them.
And so the more people learn about this, I think it opens up a tremendous opportunity for a much more libertarian society.
Right on.
Thank you very much again, Mark.
Appreciate it.
No problem, Scott.
Glad to be on your program.
Yep.
Happy to have you.
You guys remember Bill Hicks said about this?
He goes, Yeah, see, if you evolve the idea, then something like heaven might dawn, which is, you know, maybe a little, a little overly optimistic there.
But yes, it makes no sense to put sick people in jail, does it?
Bill?
No.
All right.
Listen, everybody, that was the great Mark Thornton.
Check out these articles at the Mises Institute site there mises.org, M I s e s mises.org, the real cause of America's opioid epidemic.
And big pharma makes drugs that please regulators, not consumers, both of these very powerful essays against the war on drugs, and for a real economic understanding of prohibition, and of medical regulation, and the problems that come with them.
All right.
Thank you, everybody.scotthorton.org fools Aaron.us libertarian institute.org antiwar.com twitter.com/Scott Horton show.
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