The Law of Conservation of State
Physics says energy cannot be created or destroyed—only transformed. Human behavior runs on a parallel rule: state cannot be legislated out of existence—only rerouted. Call it the fourth drive (after hunger, thirst, sex): the urge to modulate our internal state. We wake up and move the sliders—up (alertness), down (anxiety), sideways (mood, focus). That motive force doesn’t vanish when a substance disappears; it seeks the next available conduit.
Prohibitions mistake supply for source. Ban one valve and the pressure doesn’t go to zero; it displaces. People substitute (more caffeine, more alcohol, more “study aids”), compress (stronger, smaller, riskier goods), or migrate to markets with worse tolerances (potency spikes, contamination, no QA). The pattern is as old as policy: remove the well-lit corridor and traffic shifts to darker alleys. You didn’t reduce desire; you reduced telemetry.
Nicotine is the live case. Combustion was the worst channel—fire, tar, secondhand fallout. Cleaner delivery (pouches, regulated vapes, heated) separates signal from plume and shrinks externalities. Shut that corridor rather than steward it and the drive routes elsewhere: to black-box stimulants, to alcohol creep, to “legal” but high-variance stacks. The harm budget doesn’t disappear; it gets reallocated—often toward options with higher volatility per dose.
A smarter frame is hydraulic, not heroic. Shape the flow. Keep youth out hard. Standardize purity so the “clean” stays clean. Price and message by relative risk so complete switching is rewarded, not punished. Put bright lights on the corridor you want used and starve the ones you don’t with enforcement focused on variance, contaminants, and illicit distribution—not on the adult who’s choosing the lower-harm path.
The lesson isn’t that any drug is a virtue; it’s that drives are conserved. When the social body offers safe, age-gated, low-variance channels, demand is domesticated—predictable, inspectable, boring. Weld those channels shut and the same energy reappears as leakage, potency compression, and policy whack-a-mole. You cannot outlaw the impulse to change state. You can only decide whether it flows through a measured pipe—or bursts a seam.
