Unlike my wife, who prefers three-digit temperatures, I’m a big fan of summer in Idaho. Delightfully warm but not overly hot. Blue skies punctuated with cotton ball clouds and the smell of growing crops and pine trees. The whisper of cottonwood and aspen leaves. The throaty, sibilant sound of mountain creeks pouring over rocks and river grass.

But getting to each green and mellow summer means putting up with Idaho’s crazy springs. And by late April each year my patience with springtime is wearing short.

Enough with the mid-30s mornings. Enough with coats. And enough with the wind.

Call me crazy, but I’m tired of sunshine, a livable temperature just shy of 50, and a list of outside chores to accomplish only to walk out the door and get blasted by a west wind that puts dust in my eyes and a coat on my back.

I’m tired of waking up in the middle of the night to the sound of nearby trains—except that there aren’t any trains. It’s just the trees being shaken by the wind like nature’s hand rattling dice before letting them roll.

Through the years I’ve lived in both Texas and Oklahoma. I’m used to yearly roof repairs due to tiles worn loose over time and finally blown away. But there’s constancy to the wind on the plains. In time you don’t notice it as much.

But in Idaho it blows like crazy then leaves you alone. You think you’re done. You notice birds are no longer walking around on your driveway because they can fly again. You head back out to your garden.

But then, bam. A good Idaho wind can go from zero to 50 in a half hour. And when it hits you may as well go box store shopping in the afternoon, because you’re not going to get anything done outside.

Well, not everything stops for winds. I admire the farmers in the cabs of their tractors plowing their fields. At least I think they’re plowing their fields. All I can see are the dark clouds of stirred up dirt I have to drive through on the way to Walmart. There’s either a tractor out there somewhere, or the Oklahoma dust bowl has just relocated to the Northwest.

In the warmer climates starting about 700 miles south of us it’s springtime by March. Think of that. Their tulips have already blossomed, and their sweaters have been packed away for a month. Newly tanned legs are peeking out of their owners’ shorts like the first shoots of corn coming up in the fields. Birds sing. Sprinklers dance.

And here we are, almost to May, and half the women in Costco are still wearing sweatshirts.

Personally, by the time April rolls around I’m ready to rebel. Earlier this week the wind was howling, the temperature was in the mid-40s, and I was wearing shorts. Sometimes you just have to take a stand.

Meanwhile, every morning I get up and turn the thermostat to 72 degrees. All day long the heater hums. I have a vague recollection of once sleeping with the windows open, but who am I kidding? It’s only May. Maybe by the Fourth of July.

It’s true my tulips are blooming. But I’m sure they do it to mock me. I see them through the window and decide it must be a good day outside. How can you have tulips blooming and it not be a good day? So I go outside, and immediately come back inside for a coat. Shorts and a coat. I may be a rebel, but I’m not dumb.

And so it goes with springtime in Idaho. The summers are great — all eight weeks of them—but sometimes, I admit, the spring roller coaster gets old.

Yes, the last few days have been great. Are we over the hump? It’s possible. But then again it’s still springtime. And this is still Idaho…

We live in a complicated world, but parts of it are simple enough for a first-grader to understand. If your mom bakes the world’s best chocolate chip cookies, you’ve got clout in the school cafeteria.

It’s called supply and demand, and it’s been driving national economies and school lunch dessert swapping for centuries. In 1691 philosopher John Locke first brought up the idea, and Adam Smith’s 1776 book “The Wealth of Nations” achieved immortality by taking a deep dive into how it works.

Supply and demand explains why people buy Super Bowl tickets just to scalp them, and why Ford just announced it will stop making the Fiesta, Fusion and Taurus cars. If demand is high, people pay. If demand dies, so does the product.

Supply and demand determines the fate of actors and columnists. There’s a reason why The Rock made $64 million last year, and I swallowed hard before buying a new lawnmower this spring.

Everyone understands this, but occasionally even the best of us can lose sight of such an obvious truth — such as when the talk turns to illegal drugs flowing into the USA.

We have a problem with illegal drugs in this country. We see it in ruined lives, overdose deaths, in the lost productivity of people doing poor or no work due to drug use, and the taxpayer expense of housing prisoners due to drug-related crimes. The social and financial costs of illegal drug use in America are enormous.

And so we cry for tougher laws, longer border walls and harsher penalties for dealers. President Trump has floated the idea of executing drug pushers. In the battle to out-macho your political opposition, that’ll be a tough stance to top.

America’s drug problem is truly a Trojan horse, killing us from within. But all the cries to eradicate the dealers are utterly missing the mark.

Don’t take my word for it. Just ask John Locke and Adam Smith.

The truth is that walls won’t stop illegal drugs. The bad guys will just go under, over, or around them. Tougher laws won’t stop illegal drugs. With so much wealth at stake, there will always be those willing to take the risk.

What gets lost in the debate is the real root of our drug problem — We the Users of the United States of America.

As long as people want to get a marijuana buzz or a cocaine dopamine overload, or an opioid heroin euphoria, someone will turn up to sell them what they’re looking for. And apparently there are a lot of Americans who are looking.

I doubt Messrs. Locke and Smith would condone illegal behavior, but I suspect they’d consider our current state of affairs as the logical consequence of basic market forces. Where there is demand, markets develop. Suppliers emerge. And if the demand is high enough, the legality of what’s demanded will be worked around.

We talk about a War on Drugs. Nonsense. If there’s a war to be fought, it should be a war against the social issues that have produced ever-growing numbers of all ages who seek chemical alternatives to lives of rootless boredom, emotional despair, lack of opportunity, and perpetual feelings of personal, social and economic failure.

Not to mention support and rehabilitation services for the suffering souls inadvertently addicted to doctor-prescribed opioids.

But instead, we work to up the ante on pusher punishment, which offers only a superficial solution to a much deeper problem. If all the pushers were gone, would the demand for drugs in America go away?

History buffs need look no farther than Prohibition to answer that one. When alcohol consumption became illegal, a large chunk of America simply switched to breaking the law.

Al Capone once famously said, “All I did was supply a demand that was pretty popular.”

Personally, I’m fine with locking up drug dealers, but I’m not naïve enough to think that incarceration or executions will stop, or even slow, drug use in America.

John Locke and Adam Smith were right. Whether it’s Al Capone or Pablo Escobar, whenever enough of us have an itch, someone will show up to scratch it. For a price, of course. Supply and demand.

Chris Huston lives in southern Idaho and has enjoyed a 30-year career in journalism. Connect with Chris at www.chrishuston-modernlife.com, and on Facebook at Chris Huston-Modern Life.