… All of a sudden, we started seeing large numbers of herion users, many of them “novice” injectors, still using their veins. Most of them were pretty frank that they had only recently started using heroin, and few of them had any record of ER visits for drugs in the past. So, amateur economist that I am, I started systematically asking the heroin users how long they had been using, whether and what they had used before, and why they changed. …
Excellent post about economics in action, as seen by an Emergency Medicine physician.
Nice one.
FWIW, Fort Worth is mostly a cocaine town, with a smattering of meth and black tar heroin only once or twice a year. AFAIK, our Rx drug problem is hydrocodone (sorry about that word, spam filter, you’re about to get a pounding). I think Oxycodone and its ilk being Schedule II in Texas, requiring different State prescription pads, has kept that class abuse down (some).
This reinforces my belief that people, including drug addicts and other chemically-compromised individuals, are perfectly capable of making rational economic decisions about all sorts of things, provided they’re not shielded from the actual price.
There’s a lesson here for the health care system.