Originally a comment by Athel Cornish-Bowen on Standpoint epistemology.

DTjr is seeking mineral rights interests in Greenland, so as to keep himself stocked up with cocaine for the rest of this life

Probably that’s right. A question that never seems to get asked by journalists and politicians is where the money comes from that drives the international drug trade. The answer is perfectly obvious, but as people don’t like the answer they don’t ask the question. The money comes from the pockets of the people, mainly in North America and Western Europe, who buy the stuff. No demand, no supply. The chaps in Colombia who grow cocaine wouldn’t bother if chaps like DTjr didn’t buy it. Here in Marseilles, very much a centre of drug traficking, the police are beginning to show an interest in the people in the more comfortable parts (where I live) who buy drugs, but they’re being far too timid about it. Probably the local equivalents of DTjr’s father don’t want their sons to be hauled off to prison. It’s much easier to blame everything on illegal immigrants from Algeria.

At the turn of the century I was very much involved in metabolic regulation, and found that the law of supply and demand works almost perfectly in healthy organisms. When you have as much glucose 6-phosphate as you need for your immediate purposes you don’t make any more, because the supply is inhibited when the demand is low. [If you can bear it, see Hofmeyr and Cornish-Bowden (2000) “Regulating the cellular economy of supply and demand” FEBS Letters 476, 47–51]. Put simply, regulation according to demand works; regulation according to supply doesn’t, but politicians refuse to believe that.