Gifts of Nature, Maladies of the Market
Sucrose, common table sugar, chemical compound C12H22O11. Traditionally, humans found sucrose, along with other sweeteners such as fructose, through natural means. Keeping bees, tapping maple trees, extracting juice from sugarcane stalks. Sourcing sugar through these processes is incredibly labor-intensive and results in relatively low levels of sweetness. Before the advent of modern industrial sugar production, consistent access to sweet treats was accessible only to the noble and merchant classes. The peasantry, at most, nursed their sweet tooth during peach or strawberry season, or with lightly sweetened goodies using what scraps of honey, syrup, or table sugar a family could afford or produce. This sparing availability is why sugar plums, mere balls of nuts, seeds, and dried fruit, would dance in the dreams of children before Christmas feasts. While such treats are scoffed at by the corn syrup-addled youth of today,1 at the time sugar plums would have been seen as decadently saccharine. As a result of industrial production and the cheap availability of sugar in the modern age, the volume of sweetness we can experience daily is astronomical, leaving the treats of yesteryear as bland by comparison.
A white powder of notably worse reputation, cocaine, has experienced a similar evolution. Traditional consumption practices include chewing the coca leaves or brewing a tea, both resulting in a mild high. While several Amerindian cultures understood its addictive potential and restricted its use to ceremonial occasions, these modes of consumption involve absorption levels much lower than refined cocaine (Biondich & Joslin, 2016). These consumption practices pale in comparison to the effects of refined cocaine, which can impart an incredibly intense high and result in devastating addiction. Like with sugar, the refinement of a more benign wild form created a far more potent product.
This is a process that has been applied to many chemical compounds found in nature. Opium, caffeine, THC, alcohol, and many more, and could potentially happen to a range of other compounds. You start with a chemical compound that produces a desired effect, normally some form of intoxication, hallucination, or stimulation. Initially consumed in its natural or close to natural state, over time market demands drive producers to introduce methods to refine the compound in question and produce products of higher concentration, as seen with sugar and cocaine. These industrial processes of refinement are paired with institutions and infrastructure to more easily deliver such products to market, such as sugar plantations or drug cartels. Thus, not only are more potent products being produced, but they are also being made cheaper and more available to consumers.
Let’s look at caffeine as an additional example. Initially discovered by goatherders (or more accurately, their goats) in the mountains of Ethiopia, early consumption of coffee involved foraging for berries off the wild plants for snacking and tea making (Gugino, 2004). Caffeine levels in these wild plants were quite low, and consumption would only occur during the fruiting season. Eventually, however, proper cultivation and plant breeding commenced in Arabia, leading to varieties with higher caffeine concentrations and the production of dried ground coffee guaranteed year-round access to a more potent product (Jazayeri et al., 2025). As plantations expanded, prices dropped, opening access to this stimulant to the broader market. This spike in demand for quick energy soon stretched coffee supplies thin and eventually led chemists to identify methods for producing synthetic caffeine, thus leading to the advent of highly potent energy drinks with caffeine levels impossible to achieve by purely biological means.
The forces driving this process are, of course, markets. These compounds are quite pleasant to consume, and demand will always exist for them. Their historic, more benign use was constrained by a lack of refinement technology and a lack of scale in their distribution and sale. This kept their use to be less individually and societally problematic. The mere presence of the chemical compound is not the source of the malady, the system that refines and mass markets a hyper-concentrated form of the compound is. This process organizes technological, labor, distribution, and financial resources toward refining and marketing these compounds through both legal and illegal channels.
Sugar, THC, mescaline, psilocin, and other natural compounds are a bounty of the natural world for us to enjoy. They provide epicurean enjoyment and spiritual fulfillment while taxing little from our bodies or communities. Chewing on coca leaves has an upper limit to how destructive it can be on one’s health, but once refining and trade networks are established, getting millions hooked on cocaine becomes much easier. Ever since the first batch of beer was brewed, some individuals had a problematic relationship with alcohol. Becoming an alcoholic, however, became much easier with the widespread use of distillation and the increased availability of spirits. The obesity epidemic was only possible once prodigious quantities of sugar permeated our food supply. In their natural state, these chemicals are benign and engender a moderate source of enjoyment. Once pushed through this machine, however, they are transformed into the agents behind mass addiction, violence, and sickness. Gifts of nature turned into barely recognizable maladies of the marketplace.
This process is not a thing of the past. It is currently being applied to THC, the active compound in marijuana. Post-legalization cannabis strains have much higher THC concentrations than what our parents and grandparents smoked (Freeman et al., 2021). A legal marketplace has allowed for proper investment in plant breeding programs to produce such varieties. Additionally, a wave of highly potent products, such as shatter or dab pens, are now readily available that provide up to 95% THC contents, way higher than what is possible from the plant alone (which max out at around 30% THC) (Stuyt, 2018). Even if such products were floating around pre-legalization, their constant availability in legal markets makes regular consumption much easier. The potential health impacts of this are yet to be known, but they are certainly not nothing (Dubner, 2024).
Another class of substances is potentially slated for broader legalization in coming years – hallucinogens. Many of these compounds originate with fungi and plant species such as psilocybin mushrooms or the peyote cactus. Researchers are exploring their use in therapeutic treatments and regulations governing their use are slowly being loosened in some areas. In 2020, Oregon passed a law legalizing magic mushrooms for medical treatments, with clinics now offering such services in the state (Stringer, 2023). The legal status of these compounds is entering the stage marijuana was at in the mid-2000s. If present trends continue, we could see mass legalization of both medical and recreational hallucinogens in our lifetimes.
While I think this is broadly a social good, particularly the prospect of novel medical treatments, I am concerned given the history of the process outlined above. Once the market gets its hands on these popular compounds, what happens when concentrations are inevitably raised, and consumers are taking these high-concentration products regularly? Not only is this entering uncharted territory from a health perspective, but it also denudes the highly spiritual character of compounds like psilocybin and mescaline. Is that something we want the market to corrupt?
There are three pathways society can pursue in managing such compounds: prohibition, legalization, and decriminalization. Ample evidence shows that drug prohibition does not work. When tried with alcohol, it drove the creation of a massive shadow economy and mass violence and corruption. Similar effects are the result of the various prohibitions employed today, exacerbating transnational crime, racial injustice, and criminalized illness. On the other hand, I’ve already sketched out the market-driven consequences of legalization.
There is, of course, a third way. Decriminalization is already a commonly proposed approach to managing the damage of harder drugs while avoiding the troubling consequences of criminalization. By removing the threat of arrest and instituting services such as supervised consumption we can treat those afflicted with addiction while preserving their humanity.
Decriminalization also has potential benefits in avoiding the perniciousness of the refinement process. There are four components to drug laws: cultivation, possession, transportation, and sale, with parallel policies for medical and recreational use. Perhaps a model of legalization for cultivation, possession, and transportation, with a decriminalization of sale for recreational psychedelics could be a path forward. This would preserve small-scale local markets and allow for regulatory oversight (such as substance testing) while preventing highly capitalized enterprises from entering the industry and creating widely available concentrated products. Obviously, medical treatments using psychedelics should be legalized fully after adequate approval from regulatory agencies is achieved.
The Decriminalize Nature movement has a good approach, pursuing the decriminalization of the cultivation of any plant or fungi species by individuals while preventing the establishment of larger commercial interests. Individuals cultivating these gifts of nature in their own gardens and apartments, trading them among their core communities, mindfully enjoying the benefits.
I’m not sure what the exact best policy mix is to maximize benefits while minimizing harm. What I do know is that we need to think carefully about how market forces might be applied to psychedelics as they enter the market and develop strategies for steering the ship towards a more holistic, human direction for the commercialization of these substances.
What I’m Reading, Watching, and Listening to
Vegetable Farmers Make Do: The current marketplace of massive machinery results in low availability of equipment for small-scale farmers. The strategies they use to circumvent this state of affairs are quite interesting.
Five years since COVID, Louisiana's readers are thriving. This is their secret: A rare bit of good news in these trying times.
References
Biondich, A. S., & Joslin, J. D. (2016). Coca: The History and Medical Significance of an Ancient Andean Tradition. Emergency Medicine International, 2016, 4048764. https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/4048764
Dubner, S. (Director). (2024). Who Wins and Who Loses Once the U.S. Legalizes Weed? [Broadcast]. In Freakonomics. Stitcher. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/who-wins-and-who-loses-once-the-u-s-legalizes-weed/
Freeman, T. P., Craft, S., Wilson, J., Stylianou, S., ElSohly, M., Di Forti, M., & Lynskey, M. T. (2021). Changes in delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) concentrations in cannabis over time: Systematic review and meta-analysis. Addiction, 116(5), 1000–1010. https://doi.org/10.1111/add.15253
Gugino, S. (2004, June 14). A Brief History of Coffee. Wine Spectator. https://www.winespectator.com/articles/a-brief-history-of-coffee-2103
Jazayeri, S. M., Jazayeri, R. S., Shooshtari, M. S. B., Murillo, R. A. L., Loja, P. D. C., & Villamar-Torres, R. O. (2025). Chapter 18—The compositional differences between wild and domesticated coffee. In V. R. Preedy & V. B. Patel (Eds.), Coffee in Health and Disease Prevention (Second Edition) (pp. 193–205). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-443-13868-3.00030-2
Stringer, G. (2023). Oregon’s legal psilocybin clinics draw hundreds—Mostly from out of state. Oregon Public Broadcasting. https://www.opb.org/article/2023/11/29/psilocybin-mushrooms-oregon-service-centers-price/
Stuyt, E. (2018). The Problem with the Current High Potency THC Marijuana from the Perspective of an Addiction Psychiatrist. Missouri Medicine, 115(6), 482–486.
Trust me, I tried serving some at my family holiday festivities. There were plenty of leftovers.