While detailed discussion of the driving forces behind regulation must be deferred until Section 5, one salient fact can be observed here: consumer regulation creates a fundamental conflict between the value scales of some consumers and the legal system. After all, if the choices of consumers coincided with governmental directives, then compulsory regulation would never have been deemed necessary in the first place. If there was no basic conflict, then peaceful persuasion would have been used instead of legal force. This conflict has several important consequences.

First, if the conflict becomes severe enough, then consumers will naturally attempt to resolve it, maximizing their value scales by turning to black markets or gray markets. Because such markets are necessarily clandestine, buyers cannot easily obtain reliable information about the products purchased, as they do in open markets. Under these clandestine conditions, it is virtually impossible to enforce normal prohibitions against fraud, manslaughter, and criminal damage in these markets. For both of these reasons, the consumer is exposed to far greater dangers in the black market than he or she would suffer in an unregulated free market. For example, the consumer prohibited from buying steroids in the United States may seek to purchase the product from black marketeers, who smuggle it from Mexico. More generally, users are driven by narcotics prohibitions to buy "street" drugs. Because such products is illegal, buyers often cannot obtain accurate information about their concentrations or even about lethal impurities. In these cases, the danger inherent in the products is vastly compounded by market conditions—conditions stemming not from the nature of the products, but from the governmental policy of prohibition.