When you study economics, the law of supply and demand is a cornerstone to understanding it, as are the principles of scarcity, diminishing marginal returns, and opportunity cost.

The existence of supply and demand is an unquestionable fact. The principles on which the demand curve is built, which shows that the lower the price, the higher the demand, and the higher the price, these are solid statements. Similarly, the supply curve is based on high coherence inference. The higher the price, the greater the incentive to produce and offer the product on the market, the lower the price, the lower the incentive to produce and sell the product. That is, the rise or fall of prices have opposite effects on supply and demand.

And the teaching of economics in countries where drugs are consumed loudly preaches this reality.

Ecuador today suffers from the tragedy of violence stemming from the drug trade. For decades, the world’s failed strategy has been to fight the scourge of drugs by trying to destroy supply. Well, then, what the consumer countries leading this strategy, especially the United States, are learning is that if the supply decreases, the price increases and there will be an incentive for others to start producing.

The proliferation of drugs alternative to cocaine proves this, and it also proves the failure of the strategy to destroy coca plantations and prevent it from going to the US and Europe.

This past week, we had a distinguished guest at the University of Espíritu Santo, the Spanish representative Adolfo Suárez, the son of the extraordinary president of the same name, who successfully led Spain to transition from fascism to democracy. In the very interesting dialogue we had, we touched on the subject of drugs and he made a comment that captured my attention, because he said that it is more understandable that in a country with the resources of Ecuador, which in any case captures a lot of drugs, it passes port control, because in European countries, with resources, great border control and much more technology, are not detected on entry.

How true that thinking is so great! And in the United States, a country with satellites that can spy on us even in the bathroom, drugs enter by land, sea and air.

A kilogram of coke is worth 7 to 15 times more in the country of consumption than in the country of transit. This margin allows even the most efficient and fair systems to become corrupt.

The biggest mistake in this fight is to try to solve the problem of supply and demand only on the supply side. This is contrary to all the thousands of textbooks on economics and what we were taught by the Nobel Prize winners for this science, it is contrary to Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, and above all to what the convincing evidence of history shows with countless examples.

Legalization must come with the fact that the same states of the producing countries control the production and give the drug through hospitals and rehabilitation centers to those who consume it, so that they do so under supervision and in detoxification treatment. This is more logical than the struggle in which the victims are the countries where, due to poverty, many engage in this work, because they have to survive.

It is also surprising that this battleground war has the streets of producer or transit countries rather than the streets of consumer countries. I have never seen a really persistent and firm persecution of those who distribute it in large consumption centers, nor those who in basements and in secret places produce synthetic drugs with a much greater destructive power for the brain and health than the already perverse enough cocaine.

If consumer countries want to be consistent with the economic theory they preach, which is also very true, they must show what is being done on the demand side, so that we can understand why we have so much violence in our countries to dispense medicine just because of the struggle on the supply side.

No one can argue that it should not be fought against, it is the scourge of humanity. We can all demand reasonable and logical strategies that don’t seem to exist today, because the result of 50 years is looming. Consumption is increasing, and the menu is infinitely larger today than a few decades ago. (OR)