Drugs and Growth-Efficient Prevention: An Inter-temporal Portfolio of Machos, Narcos and Angels

In many countries substance abuse is a social epidemic. This paper deals conceptually with some macroeconomic aspects of widespread substance abuse with special reference to narcotic drugs. The labour force is divided into non-using and therefore fully productive workers, a number of whom are employed by the government in drug-use prevention, and only partially productive drug users. An efficient management of the nation’s portfolio of workers is taken to be the trajectory of drugprevention that maximises the present value of the stream of the disposable national incomes.