Some major things like what? I’d love to know how to end market demand, but that’s a very hard problem to solve.
OK, so to end the market demand for these drugs you first have to understand why they’re used at all. Everybody knows they are harmful and addictive, nobody starts using them without knowing that it will harm them. So why do they use them? Primarily it is because of isolation and poverty, which are the two biggest indicators of crime and drug use. Humans have a built in need for socialization, and without that we have to cope in some way. Poverty is very similar, when we do not have stability in our life, a good source of food and shelter, when our well-being is in bad shape, just like with isolation we need some way to cope. Often times that method is drug use.
So if we can tackle the things leading to this isolation and poverty, it can go a long way towards reducing people’s drug use. So lets look at the first of these source problems, and some solutions.
Isolation - Nowadays people have a great deal of difficulty maintaining communities. Part of that is poverty, but the largest part is how we structure our society. Here in the U.S. we don’t have any semblance of work-life balance. We are the most productive we have ever been and yet we work more than we have in almost a century. How can somebody be reasonably expected to have a social life when they must work two jobs to make ends meet? We also get far less time off than other developed nations, in large part because we have no guaranteed minimum time off. Other countries on the other hand get weeks of time off at a minimum. There is also the physical structure of our society, the city planning and infrastructure. Everything in the U.S. is car dependent. Do you want to go hang out with friends? Do you want to go to church? Do you want to volunteer? Doesn’t matter what activity you want to do, you are required to get their by car because no other valid options exist. We don’t have the freedom to travel to places through other means because all cities everywhere are built for cars and only cars. It is also just dangerous to travel by foot or by bicycle in the U.S. because so little thought is put into the safety of pedestrians. Even if something is technically within walking/biking distance, there may be no sidewalk, pedestrian barriers, or trees. We also do not have the density or mixed use zoning that is needed to allow people to make strong communities in our neighborhoods. Everything is built too far spaced out when it could easily be built with community in mind.
So to fix the isolation we need:
More mixed use & higher density zoning
Better public transportation support
Better pedestrian safety
Minimum time off requirements
U.S. GDP/Productivity rates need to be inversely tied to quantity of working hours without effecting wages
So that more or less covers the easy part, isolation. Poverty is a whole other monster.
Poverty - So this is a two part issue, a wage issue and a price issue. On the wage side of things, we as a society simply are not paid enough. Productivity rates have grown massively, but wages have not. And all that extra wealth that is being created is going directly to the rich. As a result people are impoverished. CEOs, company owners and shareholders take home extreme levels of wealth while your average Joe takes home crumbs at best. CEOs currently get paid somewhere on the order of 670 times as much as the lowest paid workers. CEOs are not working 670 times harder than any other worker out there. Our country has plenty of wealth to make sure everybody has a stable food source and secure housing, but the wealth is distributed such that it always goes to the rich. Part two of the poverty issue, is the price issue. Whether it is for pharmaceuticals, college, housing, or just groceries, the prices of everything have gotten completely out of hand. And that’s not because these things take much more to manufacture/maintain. The cost to manufacture insulin is about $6 a vial yet it is sold for $300 at least for example. Colleges waits shit loads of their money on administration and sports. Housing is intentionally kept scarce to keep prices up, etc. Corporations and landlords are extracting every single ounce of wealth out of us as they possibly can, and it has immensely damage our society through poverty.
There is a lot more to it than that, but I think you get the gist. So to fix this, some of the things we will need to see is:
Wages need to match productivity rates
Minimum wage should return to being a living wage as it was originally intended to be, and to keep it that way it needs to be tied to inflation
Regulation must stop CEOs & the rich from being paid at such high rates. I think a limit of 10 to 1 would be reasonable, as in for every 1 dollar the lowest paid employ is paid, the highest can only be paid 10. And that should include all methods of payment/benefits.
Regulation for price gouging needs to be tightened to stop pharmaceutical companies from continuing their robbery of our citizens
Housing needs an overhaul, I’d personally recommend georgism, massive investments in market rate housing construction, and zoning overhauls to allow for higher density housing & mixed use zones
Education needs an overhaul as well. We ought to catch up with the rest of developed nations to have free higher education, but that is also it’s own massive topic.
Healthcare, same as education, we need to catch up with the rest of the developed world to have medicare for all. Our for-profit healthcare system has utterly failed us, again it’s own massive topic.
And so that covers largely the source reasons why people start drug use in the first place. But there is still more to it. The third main category of fix for the cartels would be ending the war on drugs. It’s been ~50 years of trying to get rid of drugs and we are no closer to doing so. It’s clear that it isn’t working. Drugs are more potent, dangerous, and available than they ever have been. If we were to decriminalize use of them we would save billions of dollars that could instead go towards the above fixes, and it would also reduce the profitability of the cartel’s trade. If somebody is addicted to a drug, they should have a harm reduction program to help them through it. If the drugs on the street are more expensive, dirtier and riskier than what a free prescription can get them, then cartels would evaporate as they would have no customers. Other nations have tried this approach, and study after study shows that it is the most effective way to help people stop using drugs off the street, and to stop using drugs all together.