Maybe biomechanics is how you end the cartels?

If drug addiction is biomechanical in root cause... maybe the right way to defeat it is through demand?

I’m gonna veer a bit off the typical topics today… and zoom out to a more societal level.

I was a young teen in the late 1980’s and early 90’s when the infamous ‘This is your brain on drugs” commercials were rocking the tv airwaves in the US.

It was a concerted effort to tackle America’s massive drug problem from the demand side.

Commercial from the 1980s

The results in terms of reducing drug use was, however, pitiful. It was basically useless.

And it’s the last major effort that I remember where the US tried to tackle the booming drug problem from the demand side.

Rather from then on they focused mainly on the supply-side.

And in today’s day and age tackling the supply side has meant fighting the cartels.

Something that Trump recently has taken to a new level by categorizing them as a terrorist organization and using special forces against them.

Don’t get me wrong…. I think we need to attack the supply side as well.

But should we really give up on the demand side?

Years ago I would have said attacking the demand side was completely useless

Telling people to not use drugs just didn’t seem like it would ever work.

Some people just live in circumstances or places that make it difficult to abstain. And you could educate them and barrage them with messages all you wanted.. but it was not gonna make a difference with the vast majority of regular drug users.

It reminded of the movies I watched that protrayed Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933.

Just by making it illegal you were not gonna stop people from consuming alcohol. Rather you were only going to make the criminals supplying it much richer by driving up the price and limiting the supply.

Drugs seemed to have the same trend. Except the criminals behind it were becoming multi-billionaires and therefore were developing the methods to get around the most advanced law enforcement techniques.

So if you can’t stop it on the supply nor the demand side…. perhaps there is no stopping it? You just need to limit its fallout?

But biomechanics has me thinking differently now

The patterns i’ve seen in myself the past decade have me thinking differently about this whole problem.

I’ve never really used drugs more than a handful of times on a recreational basis, but I consumed alcohol like most other adults.

And in 2019 I drank myself to sleep every night for months. My neurological system just seemed like it was on fire and i needed it to calm myself down to fall asleep.

There was a strong physiological need.

Now it is over five years later. I think i had a total of 2-3 beers in the past 4-5 months. That is all!

And this massive change took pretty much ZERO effort. It was all biomechanics. My body just doesn’t like the idea of consuming alcohol during this biomechanical healing process.

I feel energized and happy without it. So why bother?

I am pretty confident biomechanics impacts everyone in a similar way

Meaning that I don’t think my story about alcohol usage is unique. I’ve heard many folks say the same think in our Skool community.

Not just about alcohol, but also about marijuana and other types of drug usage.

And not just about illegal drugs… rather they’ve also reduced usage of the harmful long list of pharmaceutical drugs like Adderall, opioids, anxiety drugs like Xanax, antidepressants like Prozac, sleep medications like Ambien, etc.

The more I see how this is evolving, the more I think drugs are almost always a byproduct of biomechanical collapse. And if you fix the collapse, you fix the drug problem at its true root cause.

I wrote more about this here in case you’re interested.

Is this stuff at the root cause of alcoholism and most addictions?

So maybe America’s drug problem is addressable on the demand-side?

If we can fix the biomechanics of our citizens at scale one day… we potentially fix our drug problem as a byproduct.

Both illegal and legal drugs.

I’m not saying it’s gonna happen over night. And i’m not saying that long-time, addicts are just gonna up and quit as soon as they throw a mouthguard in their mouth.

It will take many years. It might even take a generation or two.

But does it beat investing many billions of dollars each year to attack the drug problem at the supply side?

I definitely think so.

Because as long as there is a strong profit to be made.. there will always be criminals that will find a way to satisfy the demand.

Closing thoughts

I’ve had a long time to think about these biomechanics. Over ten years to be exact.

That entire time i’ve been paying attention to patterns.

Drug usage is one of those patterns.

And so I like to sometimes zoom out and ask “what if?”

What if I am right and drug usage is almost always a byproduct of biomechanical collapse?

What if humanity addresses biomechanical collapse at scale one day? After all mouthguards are not expensive.

What will the world look like if that happens?

I can tell you what i see in my daydreaming... I see that it will be a much happier and healthier world.

So… why not try?