The latest target in the war against illegal drugs is an unlikely culprit—it’s baking soda. Almost universally functional, baking soda finds uses in home and commercial baking, cooking, and cleaning, as a deodorizer, an antacid and a tooth polish, a [bane of science teachers] science fair project, and as a safe ingredient in children’s play doughs and other modeling compounds, to name a few. What has recently given baking soda a questionable status is the fact that criminals also find it useful—in the production of crack cocaine. At least one lawmaker has nominated baking soda as a candidate for the list of goods subject to legally restricted purchase. The reason: to make headway in the war against illegal drugs. The question is, are there pros and cons to this approach?
Early in 2006, legal restrictions were placed on purchases of Sudafed and similar decongestant products. By requiring consumers to register with a pharmacy, and to have pharmacies track individuals’ purchasing habits, lawmakers hoped to eliminate easy access to the decongestant pseudoepinephrine, necessary for manufacture of methamphetamine. Legal users would be inconvenienced and bear additional costs, but lawmakers reasoned that the effect would be to reduce domestic meth production—and ultimately consumption—by limiting access to one of its basic ingredients.
On the one hand, the easy availability of common ingredients used to produce illegal drugs suggests that it may in fact be all too easy to supply them. Making those ingredients harder to get, or requiring consumers to register with a pharmacy and provide ID to obtain them, could scare off purchasers with a criminal motive. And if that’s true, you might suppose you get less of the harm—the self-destructive drug use—by making it difficult or impossible to supply users in the first place. But is that the result? Probably not.
If the objective is to reduce the demand for illicit drugs, it’s not clear that cutting off one source, or even one drug, has any history of accomplishing an overall reduction in recreational and illegal drug use. It’s unfortunate, but thrill-seekers and addicts are amazingly resourceful, imaginative, and sometimes desperate people, when it comes to the demand side of the equation. They show evidence of being quite flexible with respect to the existing market, so if the drug of choice is less available, or more expensive, another one may well be accepted in its place. In short, this is a largely self-elected audience, and one willing, by definition, to take risks. Trying something new and unknown—by choice or lack of preferred options—isn’t beyond the pale. So like it or not, the demand side will not disappear because we tinker with the supply side. Altering demand would seem to involve maturity, education, and character or other personal issues, things that cannot be resolved by any conceivable manipulation of the market.
There are additional reasons why making tens of millions of legitimate consumers and producers of goods that include baking soda criminally suspect. The registration or restriction is unlikely to permanently suppress the market for crack cocaine. While restricted access to baking soda may cut down on local production of crack, it cannot reduce the quantity produced abroad. Evidence suggests that when domestic supply restrictions occur, import activity takes up the slack.
And just like producers of legal goods do, manufacturers of illicit drugs make substitutions when their usual inputs become harder to find. This usually means more dangerous and more potent concoctions—higher-yield-per-volume and easier to transport and conceal—or lower- more uncertain quality illegal drugs. There is no official redress in the illegal goods market, so there’s no worry about using ingredients that will kill you, or kill you faster, than you are already doing as an illegal drug user. Meanwhile, real criminals can take advantage of legal maneuvering to avoid prosecution under these statutes.
The net result: legitimate consumers are penalized and thrown under suspicion, and little if any criminal use is actually reduced. We can imagine that use of all kinds of ordinary and even necessary substances, like plain water, for example, or ordinary gasoline, might be suspect and subject to scrutiny for possible criminal intent. What is the logical stopping point, if something as widely used as baking soda is a controlled substance?
Superficially appealing, the idea of regulating ordinary, harmless substances because they are used in illegal activities is far too broad a brush in an economy in which there is still room for individual freedom and responsibility. It limits far too much freedom in a single stroke, and still fails to produce an effective way to reach its primary goal—reducing illegal drug use.
Regulation can mold market behavior by changing the options and freedoms that people enjoy. What simplistic regulation of common substances cannot do, no matter how well-intentioned, is promote a ‘greater good’ by trying to force people to be more virtuous than they are ultimately willing to be.