What, no data for Colombia?! This map shows the street price of a gram of "cocaine", as advertised, but it doesn't tell us anything about the purity of that gram. A recent police report in the UK suggested street purity had dropped from 30% to around 9%, compared to the 70% of stuff hot out of the factory. A recent government sponsored report on drugs misuse in Britain found the supply chain to be completely flexible: big busts higher up the chain would simply result in more cutting agents added lower down, with customers seemingly willing to pay standard street price for whatever purity they could get. Demand is rising, if anything. It's interesting that police have now turned their attention to the supply chain of the cutting agents. We're fighting a war on laxatives.
From having a friend who has an addiction to cocaine here in Perth, I can confirm the $285 figure is pretty close to correct, although it is in Australian dollars, not USD, so with that in mind I decided to run some of the figures in the article through a currency converter (against the US dollar) to get a more normalised view.
Prices seem to be in $ instead of purchasing power. So not really meaningful, except insofar as it indicates where someone buying with $ would find the cheapest.
"Prices seem to be in $ instead of purchasing power. So not really meaningful, except insofar as it indicates where someone buying with $ would find the cheapest."
I decided to use the Big Mac Index to satisfy your hunger for knowledge (pardon the pun) to figure out purchasing power.
Appropriate Links at the end of the comment. As with my above comment regarding street prices here in AU - it is assumed that the prices are in the local currency, so these figures represent local currencies.
US - 27.17 big macs
Canada - 23.71 big macs
New Zealand - 63.67 big macs
Australia - 82.61 big macs
The chart doesn't specify what their data sources are. There are a number of conflicting agendas that go into the reporting of illegal markets. The police want to make the criminals appear wealthier, to justify more police enforcement, so they tend to inflate statistics. Caught criminals want to be able to hide some of their cash so they tend to deflate their prices.
Some of these differences likely reflect the reporting methods, and not the underlying markets.
You used to be able to buy real Mate de Coca on Amazon. I have no idea how they never got caught for that until recently. They are working on bringing back a version without the cocaine now, last I checked.
