The innovative supply chain of illegal drugs--even in prisons

 Strategy sets are big, so we’re not going to be able to end illegal drug use by spraying defoliants on fields of poppies, or arresting dealers, or attacking speedboats. If we can’t stop the spread of drugs even in prisons, the chance of purely police/military solutions for stopping drugs on the streets isn’t looking good.

The NYT has the story:

No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing
Lab-made drugs soaked into the pages of letters, books and even legal documents are being smuggled behind bars, killing inmates and frustrating investigators. By Azam Ahmed and Matt Richtel 

" Today, fringe chemists are ushering in a total transformation of the illicit drug market. Operating from clandestine labs, they are churning out a dizzying array of synthetic drugs — not only fentanyl, but also hazardous new tranquilizers, stimulants and complex cannabinoids. Sometimes, several unknown drugs appear on the streets in a single month. Many are so new they are not even illegal yet.

"Nearly all of them are harder to trace than conventional drugs, less expensive to produce, much more potent and far deadlier, according to scientists and law enforcement officials across the globe.

...

"After that first death in the Cook County jail in January 2023, it took months for Mr. Wilks’s team to realize that these mysterious new drugs were being sprayed onto the pages of the most innocuous-seeming items: books, letters, documents, even photographs.

"The sheets of drugs, worth thousands of dollars a page, were being torn into strips and smoked by inmates 

...

"But the traffickers were cunning. When regular mail got checked more closely, smugglers began lacing legal correspondence. Soon, officers discovered sealed packages that looked as if they had been shipped directly from Amazon, with drug-soaked books inside. "

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It’s hard to shut down markets that people want to participate in.
Someone should write a book about this. 

Paid plasma donations are becoming more middle-class

 The NYT has the story:

The Middle-Class Suburbanites Who Sell Their Blood Plasma to Get By.  Across the United States, plasma centers are opening in wealthier areas as more people struggle with the high cost of housing, groceries and health care.   By Kurtis Lee and Robert Gebeloff   March 20, 2026

"Every day, an estimated 215,000 people donate plasma, the yellowish liquid component of blood. Mr. Briseño is among them. He is not jobless or facing eviction, but, like many in the American middle class, he is caught in the vise of rising expenses and wages that aren’t growing fast enough to cover them. So he is turning to a method more commonly associated with the lowest-income Americans. For people like him, an extra $600 or so a month can mean making a mortgage payment or covering increased health-insurance costs.

"A recent study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Colorado, Boulder, observed that while older plasma centers are clustered in low-income areas, newer centers were increasingly likely to open in middle-class neighborhoods. A New York Times analysis shows the trend has continued: Centers have sprung up in more than 100 such neighborhoods, in suburbs and wealthier sections of cities, since researchers finished collecting their data in 2021."

 

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Here's an earlier post on the study that sparked the NYT report:

Wednesday, November 16, 2022  Blood Money, by John Dooley and Emily Gallagher

 

The States as the laboratory of democracy: helping organ donors

News from the States:

Pa. senators mull inheritance tax cut, deductions for organ donors 

"While employers across the state are allowed to claim tax deductions for time off offered to living organ donors, donors themselves receive no such benefits.

That would change if lawmakers pass a bill sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Williams (D-Allegheny) and Lynda Schlegel Culver (R-Northumberland), who testified to members of the Senate Finance Committee almost five years to the date after receiving her sister’s kidney.
...
“I’ve seen firsthand the gift of donation and what it means,” Culver told lawmakers. “It has allowed me and so many others the opportunity to have a full life.”

According to the University of Pennsylvania Health System, more than 6,000 Pennsylvanians were on the transplant waiting list in 2025.

Culver and Williams’ proposal would allow living organ donors to deduct up to $10,000 in unreimbursed expenses related to the donation from their taxable income. That would include costs like travel, lodging, lost wages and medical expenses.

According to Culver, studies show the average living organ donor faces roughly $5,000 in expenses, which includes things like travel, lost wages and child care during recovery.
...
The measure was passed unanimously by members of the Senate Finance Committee." 

PS 205: A brief address to my elementary school alma mater, about science in grade school

 A few weeks ago I was surprised to receive this email from a teacher at the elementary school that I attended, PS 205, in the New York City borough of Queens:

"Dear Mr. Roth,

I am a teacher at The Alexander Graham Bell School, PS 205 in Bayside, NY.

This is my 29th year teaching at this school and it is still an amazing school where children acquire the skills to blossom as adults!

It is my understanding that you are a graduate of this school.

We are holding a Career Day on Friday, March 6, 2026.

It would be wonderful if you could participate in some way, whether in person, zoom pre-recorded video or by another method.

As a Nobel Prize winner, this would be very inspiring for our students.

Please let me know if you would like to be part of this awesome event."

 

After some further correspondence, I sent a video greeting of a bit over a minute.  Here's the transcript:
 

 Transcript:

"Hi PS 205!  I hear that you’re having career day today.

  Mr Blum asked me to say a few words about how my career began to take shape when I was a student at PS 205, way back before your parents were born. I was a PS 205 student from 1957 to 1962, and it was in those years that I started to think about becoming a scientist.

In 1957, when I started school, the Sputnik satellite was launched by Russia, and in 1961 the first American astronaut, Allan Shepherd, rocketed into space. So science was in the news.  My big brother Ted (who was also a PS 205 student, four years older than me) was excited by the idea of becoming a scientist, and that made me excited too. And pretty soon I was entering the school’s annual science fairs, with demonstrations of scientific things.

When I grew up I did become a scientist, a social scientist.  I’m  an economist, which allows me to study how we humans coordinate and cooperate and compete with each other, in ways that have made us, on average, live longer and healthier lives. In fact one of the things I have worked on is to help doctors organize how more people can get kidney transplants if they need them, which helps them live longer and healthier lives.

Science can be a lot of fun.  In 2012 I won the Nobel Prize in Economics, which means I got to go to a big celebration of science and literature in Sweden, which almost everyone in that country watches on television. It’s sort of like their Super Bowl.

I can only imagine the things that you will do as you grow up. It will be an adventure."

The Faroe Islands are moving to end their ban on abortion

 Some controversies are familiar all over the world.

The NYT has the story:

The Faroe Islands Are Changing Some of Europe’s Strictest Abortion Rules
A new law allowing abortion up to 12 weeks will be a major shift in an archipelago of 55,000 people, and there are strong feelings on both sides.   By Amelia Nierenberg and Regin Winther Poulsen

"The Faroes, a self-governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark in the North Atlantic hundreds of miles from Copenhagen, allowed abortion only in rare cases.

...
"The Faroes have had a near-total abortion ban, one of Europe’s most restrictive, under a law that dates back to 1956. Like Ms. Jacobsen, some women lied to their doctors to get around the restrictions and end their pregnancies, doctors, lawmakers and advocates on both sides of the issue have said. 

...

"But late last year, the Parliament in the archipelago of 55,000 people ratified a law that allows women to end a pregnancy within its first 12 weeks, a major shift in a place that has long been more religious and socially conservative than its Nordic peers. The law is set to take effect in July.

...

"But a parliamentary election is set for late March and polls suggest that power could pass to a conservative coalition that may try to block implementation of the law or change it." 

 

Pre-publication review of Moral Economics from Publisher's Weekly

Another small adventure in publishing:) 

Here's the pre-publication review of Moral Economics from Publisher's Weekly. "

TL;DR "Bringing balanced, evidence-based analyses to emotionally fraught debates, Roth reveals the power of markets to inspire solutions. This is trailblazing"

 

Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work

Alvin E. Roth. Basic Venture, $35 (368p) ISBN 978-1-5417-0201-1

"Nobel Prize–winning economist Roth (Who Gets What—and Why) delivers a stimulating study of morally contested products and services, such as abortion, assisted suicide, and marijuana. He refers to these as “repugnant transactions,” as they spark objections primarily on religious or moral grounds but don’t cause easily measurable harms to those seeking to ban them. Viewing these transactions as markets, or systems that can be designed to “allocate scarce resources efficiently and equitably,” can help people make progress on challenging topics, he argues. For example, analyses of legal prostiution show it can increase the market for paid sex but can also reduce rape and the spread of sexually transmitted disease. Another topic discussed is kidney donation. There is a nearly universal ban on compensating donors based on the concern that payments might lead to poor or vulnerable people being coerced into selling their organs. Meanwhile, there is an extreme shortage of donors, and loved ones are often incompatible with those they want to help (kidney disease runs in families). Roth and his colleagues designed a kidney exchange, in which incompatible patient-donor pairs exchange kidneys with other such pairs. Because no money changes hands, the problem of paying donors can be avoided. Bringing balanced, evidence-based analyses to emotionally fraught debates, Roth reveals the power of markets to inspire solutions. This is trailblazing. (May) 

 

 

International statistics on plasma donation show that it is quite safe

 Peter Jaworski collects the statistics from Europe and North America:

Plasma donation is safe
And commercial plasma donation is not less safe than non-commercial donations
Peter Jaworski
Mar 16, 2026 

"Source plasma donation (also called “plasmapheresis”) is inordinately safe (so is whole blood donation). And the best publicly-available donation safety data give us no reason to think that commercial plasma collection is less safe than non-commercial plasma collection.

" That claim may be surprising in light of the recent heartbreaking deaths reported after plasma donations in Winnipeg. These tragedies have raised questions about the safety of plasma donation in general, with some critics suggesting that commercial plasma donation is inherently less safe than non-commercial plasma donation.

"The evidence for the claim that plasmapheresis, including commercial plasmapheresis, is safe can be found in countries with the largest plasmapheresis programs, which publish annual reports on serious donor adverse events. Some of these countries have exclusively non-commercial plasma collection, while others have predominantly commercial systems. "