Comment by jjfoooo4
24 days ago
Surely both manufacturer and convenience store have incentive to push the addictive product in this scenario.
In any case, drug dealers really don’t need to do any pushing, the drugs sell themselves. Have you ever taken an opioid? The idea that unfettered access would result in less addiction and death is a pretty remarkable POV
> Surely both manufacturer and convenience store have incentive to push the addictive product in this scenario.
In this scenario the addictive product has the margins of a generic commodity and 75 competing suppliers. Getting the customer addicted has close to zero returns because the margins are thin and the customer's future purchases are more likely than not going to a random competitor rather than you. Notice how little advertising you see for things like flour or onions. If something is completely fungible and commoditized the incentive to push it on you is minimized.
And retailers have the opposite incentive, because making a $0.05 margin on a bottle of pills once a month is worth far less to them than not having someone who is a repeat customer lose their job to addiction or die of an overdose and then stop buying all of their other products.
> In any case, drug dealers really don’t need to do any pushing, the drugs sell themselves.
If the drug dealers don't need to do any pushing then why do they spend so much time and effort on pushing? It'd have to be because pushing gets results, and therefore blunting the incentive for pushing gets results the other way.
>The idea that unfettered access would result in less addiction and death is a pretty remarkable POV
It's not that crazy, but it has to be coupled with accessible recovery programs. The classic tale (one that people in my life have gone through) is the prescribed opiates -> street heroin when the scrip runs out / when they change the oxy recipe so that it doesn't dissolve in water anymore so you can't shoot it.
This is obviously much more dangerous than getting oxy from your doctor, so the logic of "keep people from seeking heroin on the street" actually does make sense to me from a public health perspective.