Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: drugs

Musk’s In A Lot of Trouble And Won’t Be the World’s Richest Man Much Longer

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On January 31, 2025

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I’ve discussed this before, so we’ll keep it brief. Much of Musk’s wealth is in Tesla stock. Tesla car sales are down, and getting hammered particularly, but not only, in China. The Chinese are producing better, cheaper electric vehicles with autonomous driving which actually works, because they use Lidar, which Musk personally decided not to use. Even Western carmakers are catching up to and exceeding Tesla vehicles.

Musk tried to get a fifty billion dollar payout from Telsa, which was spiked in the courts, because, I suspect, he knows Tesla’s going down. He’s been systematically selling Tesla stock, but he can’t sell too much at any given time. So right now he’s trying a parlay, he has to keep Tesla stock up for as long as possible to get as much money out. His strong support for Trump was almost certainly based on the need to keep Trump from ending electric vehicle subsidies, which, so far, Trump has done, even though he was very hostile to them for much of the campaign.

Now don’t feel bad for Musk, he’ll still be one of the richest men in the world, but for whatever reason: distraction, rumored drug use, health or something else, he’s not handling the day to day, month to month business of managing his corporations very well. X/Twitter has bled users, losing millions and while advertisers are coming back, that’s only to kiss up to him for as long as he has Trump’s ear, and Trump is fickle with who stays in the inner circle.

SpaceX is doing well, but SpaceX is still, mostly, a creature of the government, with the exception of its satellite internet. Its success was made possible by Obama policies intended to build a private space industry. It still requires government contracts and aid to do well.

If I had to make a bet, I’d bet on Blue Origin, Bezos’s space outfit. Yes, it’s far behind, but Bezos is an operator and still seems very skilled and focused, unlike Musk. And with him stepping away from day-to-day operations at Amazon, he’s got the attention to spare on what is a dream from him: he made the money at Amazon so he could do space.

The Chinese space program, as you’d expect, is doing very well, including putting up satellite internet which appears to outperform Musk’s, but America is never going to pay China to use its lift capacity so there’s a guaranteed moat.

Musk, in short, has almost certainly peaked. His political actions are, from a business perspective, necessary because he’s screwed up his core business and needs powerful government access. His competitors are chewing on his heels, he personally seems to be in some sort of decline, and his days as number one are drawing to a close.

 

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The Problem with Pharma Research

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On October 7, 2019

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Capitalism is based on the premise that profits reflect work that people want done, which is also worth more than the costs of its inputs.

The problem with this theory is that it often just isn’t so; the work being done involves a misallocation of resources.

Take pharma, for example. It is more profitable to sell someone a pill a day than to cure them.

This is simply inescapably true in most cases.

A man who needs erection pills, a person who needs insulin, are much better customers than someone who needs a single round of the latest antibiotic.

If you do have an actual cure, since you can’t keep charging forever, you want to charge as much as possible for it. So you raise the price for a Hep C cure (the majority of the research actually having been done with public money) to six figures, when it costs about a $100 to produce.

And a lot of people die or suffer who don’t have to.

The profit motive is a very blunt instrument, and it’s unnecessary for a lot of work. To be sure, no one wants to pick up garbage, but plenty of people want to be medical researchers, because it’s interesting work which does good for humanity, and a lot of people want to do good. Give them a salary sufficient to support their family and a lab, and most of them will be fine with that.

The actual manufacturing is not so fun, but that could easily be done by a range of contracting companies or even by the government.

And in such a situation, suddenly the emphasis is on cures.

If you must have big payouts, make them bounties: “Cure X, and we give you a billion dollars.”

Pharma does do a lot of research, but it wants a pill a day, it wants extensions of already profitable drugs, or it wants hugely pricey cures. It wants to create new forms of addictive drugs, like opiates, rather than just using, oh, morphine and various other forms of painkiller which work perfectly well and already exist and which can’t be patented.

None of this is hard to figure out. There’s a place for private pharma, to be sure, mostly to act as a cost check on public pharma, but as it exists now, what it’s doing is massively misallocating resources.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

The Solution to Opiate Fentanyl Deaths

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On December 18, 2017

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Why have opiate deaths spiked?

In the last half of 2016, fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, was detected in 56.3 percent of the opioid overdose deaths in the ten states that make up the CDC’s Enhanced State Opioid Overdose Surveillance program…

How do you solve this? You make available for purchase legal, reasonably priced, pure drugs. You make help getting off drugs available to anyone who wants it, free. (Tapering works in almost all cases.)

This is not a hard problem to solve. It is an easy problem to solve. It is also true that demonizing opiates, in particular, means that a lot of people don’t get the pain relief they need, especially chronic pain sufferers, whose nervous systems change over time so that they are more susceptible to pain.

We do not solve this problem because we are a bunch of moral hysterics who want to force our morals on other people, when their actions are less harmful than our prohibition is.

We also refuse to look at the actual cause of the opiate epidemic, which is fairly clearly economic despair and hopeless lives. Indeed, most drugs aren’t particularly addictive to people who have happy lives and things they want to do.

If you want to end at least half the deaths caused by opiate addiction, make it legally available (it will be more than half, because its illegality drives much of the behaviour that leads to death, beyond just adulteration.)

If you want people to get off opiates, create a society and economy which values them and treats them well. The policies to do this are fairly simple: Updated to deal with racism, sexism and environmental concerns, they are approximately the policies which ran the developed world in the post-war period until the ’70s. Tax the rich brutally, support high wages, have near-free tertiary education, make sure that jobs (or money) are so available that employers have to treat employees well, because employees who walk can always find another job.

This stuff can be complicated in the details, but it’s easy conceptually and hard only in the sense that you have to have the political will and to stay on top of it.

As for opiates and other drugs, just make them legal, regulate them, and make addiction treatment available.

The dead frustrating issue about most of our social problems is that the solutions are more or less known, we just don’t, actually, want to solve them. We prefer the problems to the solutions, or enough of us, combined with enough oligarchs, do.

We can fix our economy, our society, and our drug problem any time we want. Sadly, that is no longer true for the environment, but we can mitigate that damage.

Perhaps one day we’ll decide to do so. Much of this suffering is by choice, and as a society, we’re choosing it.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

The Cause of the Opiate Epidemic

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On June 4, 2017

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Let us introduce you to Rat Park. You’ve heard the story about how addictive drugs are. Put a rat in a cage with a lever for water and a lever for water with drugs (heroin/cocaine) and without drugs, and the rat will soon be hitting the lever for drugs as fast as it can.

Drugs are sooooo addictive.

Right.

Well, here’s Rat Park.

Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: Everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?

In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.

The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.

Sigh.

Somehow the story of Rat Park doesn’t get told often. I’ve read a lot on pain policy and addiction, and I hadn’t heard of it until recently.

Why is that, I wonder?

What has changed in the US to cause the “sudden” opiate epidemic, do you think?

…

Well, we all know the answer. The US isn’t “Human Park” any more, it’s a dystopian nightmare, full of poverty, despair, and people isolated from friends and family. The social welfare stats for large parts of the country are in free fall.

When life is shit, people turn to chemical joy–or chemical anaesthesia, at least.

What the US is doing is cracking down on opiate use, as if it’s a criminal problem. OR they are pretending it’s a medical problem.

It’s neither. It’s a social and economic problem, and its to do with a society which offers shitty lives for people.

In the 1800s, Emile Durkheim, the pioneering sociologist, did a study on suicide. He did it specifically because suicide seemed like the most individual of decisions.

And he found that it wasn’t; the likelihood and number of suicides tracked social engagement almost exactly. Roman Catholics committed suicide the least and had the strongest social ties. After the Catholics were the Protestants, then then non-religious, and those categories tracked how much social contact people had.

Most of who we are is other people and our relations to them. Most of the rest is our environment. Decisions that seem like they are made by individuals are really only partially so; they are informed by the environment in which we live. They are influenced by people, economic opportunities, and beauty, or the availability of love, friendship, security, and hope.

The opiate epidemic won’t be “fixed” through criminilization or medicalization: Even if opiate overdoses go down, people will turn to other forms of self-destructive behavior. This is because the problem isn’t opiate availability, it is that their lives are objectively shit.

Want to fix the opiate epidemic? Start with a 90 percent marginal tax rate on the richest people in America and spend the money on making everyone else’s lives better. Oh, and do simple stuff like universal health care, which, well, costs less and produces better results and doesn’t lead to despair, because people know that if they get sick they’ll get the care they need and it won’t cost them everything.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

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