Tyler Cowen: observation

Transcript context

…People have totally different physiologies, too. People have addictive personalities, and I think everyone knows if they have one of these or not. I don’t, but other people — when it comes to alcohol, for example, one drink is never enough. If I think of the crack epidemic of the 1980s, the 1990s, there’s a pattern, a significant chunk of at least a generation burning itself out. But then, maybe it’s the younger siblings see what’s happened, and interest in the drug wanes, and some semi-stable equilibrium reemerges. Is that going to happen with opioids and fentanyl? Or is this a different pattern because maybe they’re more addictive? If we go back through the decades, yes. Crack really did seem to burn out, but that seems to me to be kind of the exception to the rule. Take the meth epidemic, for example. We thought that was sort of winding down, and the passage of these laws made it so you couldn’t get Sudafed without going behind the counter. So they thought, well, the production is going to stop. Instead, it went to Mexico. Now meth is worse than ever. Cocaine, same thing. It seemed to be on the decline. Pablo Escobar was killed. Now there’s more cocaine coming out of Colombia than ever. So I am certainly not optimistic at all that the opioid epidemic is going to wind itself down.…

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