erstand by a majority anyway.

What do you think? The Congress wouldn't be allowed to vote for anything the public doesn't understand. Yeah. If you're joining late I'll just tell everybody this is a burn on my lip. If you think it's something more exciting I kind of wish it were but it's just a burn. A score for readability would be something that AI could do. There you go. Artificial intelligence could write a summary of every bill. How about that? This is pretty good ideas.

All right, here's a provocative idea that I don't think that I'm quite in favor of but I want to share with you. It comes from a doctor. All right, so this is not from me, this is from a doctor on Twitter. He goes by Doc Anarchy. He's got a Substack you might be interested in as well. Has lots of interesting and provocative ideas that are not quite the normal point of view that you see. So it's worth seeing it even if you disagree with them. I love seeing an actual medical doctor who's thinking through things critically. So that alone is worth doing, right? So if you want somebody to follow that you're not following, follow at Doc Anarchy for interesting points of view. Not ones you're all going to agree with, right? So it's not about agreeing. They're just interesting points of view.

All right, here it is. His interesting point of view: nobody overdoses on prescription opioids. I don't know if that's true completely. This sounds like a little bit of an overclaim but he's a doctor. So let's say it might be hyperbole but don't get too caught up on whether that's 100 percent true. Let's say it's 95 percent true. It probably is. It's probably closer to 95 percent true but we'll allow a little hyperbole. Okay. And then he goes on, eliminate the black market for opioids and you'll eliminate 99 percent of overdoses.

Now remember he's a doctor. So at least anecdotally and probably he's looked at the studies too that it's hard to overdose on a prescription med because you would know what the overdose amount would be. Now before you question him you should do your research because the addicts themselves will tell you that the real danger is the fake stuff. Now again I'm operating purely anecdotally right here, right? But my own stepson told me in direct language that he wouldn't take counterfeit pills because they probably have fentanyl in them and you can't know what you're getting. And then he died of an overdose. So he probably did exactly what he said he wouldn't do the week before. Which is why I questioned whether this would work. But anyway let's get to that.

So if you eliminated the black market for opioids you wouldn't get the fake stuff. If you could give legal, well-known entities to the addicts, would they take these legal well-known things and not have overdose deaths? Now some of you are going to say yeah, we're talking about unintentional overdoses. We're not talking about suicide. So can you compare this to the San Francisco outdoor drug thing that looked like a huge failure? And Michael Shellenberger talks about that a lot. Do you think what he's talking about is similar to this outdoor free drug clinics? No, no, he didn't say that. You're conflating two stories. That's the problem here. You're conflating the homeless problem which he's not even talking about. That's not his topic. Giving free drugs to homeless people doesn't make them be less homeless. So if you're trying to clean up San Francisco which is all the homeless people walking around and taking over the city, giving them free drugs is not going to make them leave the streets or go away or anything. So it doesn't do anything about homeless. But what I don't know is if it reduced the number of overdoses. I haven't heard one way or the other so I don't know.

But what Doc Anarchy is talking about is really just a narrow point that if the only kind of opioid that was available, and let's say there was some way to make that happen, if the only kind available was high quality controlled, that alone would eliminate 99 percent of overdose deaths. What do you think?

Now let me be coldly analytical here. What would happen if you stopped a hundred thousand addicts per year from dying? All right, now this is going to come back to me so don't think I'm exempting myself from the following