Nitazenes and the Iron Law of Prohibition

In 1986, Richard Cowan, who would later become ED of NORML, coined the term “iron law of prohibition”. The term posits that harsher penalties and increased scrutiny from law enforcement aginst certain substances and those who use and/or sell them results in increasingly potent substances being brought to market. Against a backdrop of ineffective and harmful policies such as increased mandatory minimums for the sale and posession of fentanyl, murder charges for anyone providing fentanyl to a person who dies as a result of using it, and other approaches that proved to be ineffective at deterring the use or sale of drugs long ago - the increase in the production of stronger and stronger opioids, like nitazenes, is absolutely predictable. Whether we look back to the puritanical experiment of the prohibition of alcohol in the US or to more recent examples, the iron law of prohibition becomes more convincing when we examine the USA’s history of drug laws and policies. Unless, of course, you are DEA Spokesman Dan Reuter.

In April of 2003, Thomas K. Highsmith, a chemist at ATK Thiokol in Utah, was arrested for manufacturing the drug etonitazene, ostensibly for his own personal use. According to an article about the arrest, Highsmith had made a solution of the drug that he snorted from a nasal spray bottle. At the time, Reuter thought that there was little possibility of this kind of drug being widely manufactured due to its potency and his opinion that it was difficult to make. “Unless (the drug) is highly diluted, it’s extremely dangerous,” Reuter said, apparently not recalling the aforementioned lessons from history that someone in Reuter’s position should certainly have knowledge of. Reuter must now be eating his words as we are beginning to see etonitazene and other nitazenes creep into the drug supply in some areas.

While our drug checking program at UNC has only identified nitazenes in a few of the over 1,000 samples that our lab has analyzed so far, we have seen the evidence from other areas in the US that show nitazenes being found more and more in the drug supply. The iron law of prohibition is again being validated as our elected representatives continue to follow the drug war playbook in cooking up new, harsher sentencing standards and criminal penalties, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are providing the impetus for cartels to produce increasingly potent drugs like nitazenes. As a cartel leader, why would I not want to get more bang for the buck out of a substance like etonitazene, which is 10-20 times more potent than fentanyl? If we are to stop our slide down the scale to more and more potent drugs that are more difficult to mitigate the potential harms of, we have to make the ineffectiveness of the war on drugs a well-known fact among a lot more people than it currently is. It’s a huge task, but at least we have fact and truth on our side.