Recently, a collective opinion piece published on April 15, 2025 in the French newspaper Le Monde denounced a shortage of many psychotropic drugs essential for the treatment of certain psychiatric problems in France. The list is long and growing by the week:

…sertraline and venlafaxine, the gold standard antidepressants; lithium, essential for bipolar patients, with an “undetermined” date of availability; and even extended-release olanzapine, reserved for the most difficult-to-stabilize forms, is unavailable due to a manufacturing defect in the injection needles.

These shortages can cause serious problems for some patients, who are unable to keep up with their treatment and find themselves in sometimes complicated and desperate situations. Later in the article, the authors present several reasons for these shortages: dependence on foreign suppliers, production problems, and insufficient national strategic reserves: “The causes of these drug shortages are multiple: fragile supply chains, dependence on single foreign industrial sites…”

The authors then briefly mention another cause: “As pharmaceutical companies’ commercial strategies favor more profitable markets, price regulation in France is considered insufficiently attractive by manufacturers.” Of all the causes cited, this is indeed the one: the French state’s intervention in the pharmaceutical market is the real cause of drug shortages, driving manufacturers to other, less restrictive markets.

It’s a story as old as time, and one that we need to keep reminding ourselves: shortages of goods are the result of political interventionism, which—in trying to make goods accessible to the greatest number—only creates distortions and shortages. …

What happens next? A headlong rush to more and more controls. Since the government always thinks it can solve a problem it has created, it will impose new constraints on producers and introduce tighter price controls. In our French example, the two proposed solutions to shortages are, not surprisingly, more controls and more government intervention. For example, imposing higher fines on laboratories that fail to meet their minimum and legal stock obligations.

If these additional interventions prove ineffective, the next step will either be rationing of the goods in question, greater control of individuals, or a return to common sense and an end to economic interventionism. Since the latter solution is rarely deliberately chosen by the state, the former is the most likely. It will also bring about the necessary increase in the coercive capacity of the state. It will gradually turn into a police state as its control over the economy increases. Interventionism is an unstoppable, infernal machine.

In the end, this double ignorance—historical and economic—is inevitably paid for, but never by politicians, always by consumers, who are the first to be affected by the goods in question. History rhymes and the same question remains: is it better to have an expensive, but available product or a cheap but unavailable one? Ironically, free markets are notorious for providing both affordable and abundant goods.