You find ants in your kitchen, or in your bathroom. What do you do?
There are some obvious things to try:
Interdiction: You try to find out how they’re getting in, and block those entrances.
Preemption: You make food harder to find by keeping everything in airtight containers, cleaning up all spills immediately, and so on.
Entrapment: You set out something that will attract them, but which contains poison.
Punishment: Just swat the ones you see.
But it’s also obvious why none of these should be expected to work:
Interdiction: There are just too many ways to get in.
Preemption: In word, entropy.
Entrapment: There are just too many of them, in too many places.
Punishment: There is an endless supply.
When he was a student at Princeton, the physicist Richard Feynman did some experiments with ants that had found their way into his bathroom. What he discovered was that if he wanted to move ants around, what he had to do was put something they wanted in a place where they could be expected to find it.
If he wanted them to get into his tub, he could put a small pile of sugar in the tub. If he wanted them to get back out, he could move the pile back out of the tub. It took a while for the ants to adjust, but they always did. If he found ants in his car, he could put a pile of sugar next to the car, and soon enough, they’d all be outside, ignoring the car.
Is this reminding you of anything? Because I see a lot of parallels between the War on Ants, and the War on Drugs. Decades of experience have shown that interdiction, preemption, entrapment, and punishment don’t work any better for drugs than they do for ants, for pretty much the same reasons.
But as Charles Kettering liked to say, a problem well-posed is half-solved.
Feynman’s discovery about ants suggests posing the problem of drug abuse this way: For someone who is at risk of abusing drugs, or already abusing them, what is analogous to the pile of sugar next to the car? What could we offer them, that would make the drugs not harder or more dangerous to get, but simply less interesting?
Because if we can find an answer that question, then we can stop wasting time and money (and destroying people’s lives, and eroding their liberty) on all those other non-solutions.
