Drug info - INCREASING DANGER OF COCAINE NO REASON TO

[Alfa]

INCREASING DANGER OF COCAINE NO REASON TO CELEBRATE


U.S. Drug Czar John Walters worked the phone with major media reporters yesterday to share seemingly good cocaine news: prices are up, purity is down. The drug war, he suggested, is doing what it's supposed to do.


According to data released by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the street-level price of cocaine rose by 19 percent from February to September. That means a gram of cocaine rose from just over $120 last April to more than $170 in September.


Not exactly the dramatic increase I experience with gas prices during the same period, but I understand, the folks at the ONDCP are starved for good news. They are also happy that cocaine purity is down 15 percent.


Various news outlets quoted typically vague but emotional analysis from Walters. "What we see on the streets of the United States is the clear and irrefutable evidence of a change in availability that will help us reduce demand and will change the profitability of the cocaine market for those who make money off the death and destruction of lives through addiction," Walters told Reuters.


Some mainstream media stories mention the expense of Plan Colombia, a U.S. military aid package that has cost taxpayers about $4 billion since 2000. None of the stories I read mentioned the human and environmental price of dumping herbicide across large swaths of land where people are trying to scrape out a living.


Is the cost worth the alleged success? I don't think so, but even if we put that aside (along with other questions, like: Is the data really good? Did Plan Colombia cause the price increase? Can this be yet another temporary blip, or have we really "turned the corner"?), let's try to look at it from the drug czar's perspective.


If it's true, and the supply of cocaine is being limited in a way that impacts prices, we should ask, do we really want more expensive, less pure cocaine on the streets?


Both those conditions lead to problems. Less pure cocaine means more cutting agents, which can be riskier for users. More expensive cocaine means users who can't afford the increases may turn to illegal means to finance their use. Other users will move on to cheaper, and possibly more dangerous substitutes, like methamphetamine, increasing demand on that front.


Exporters and dealers will see profits increase in a fragmented market, spurring competition. (I love how Walters spins this ever so carefully in his statement: the increased prices "...will change the profitability of the cocaine market for those who make money..."!


Business owners throughout the world would love to "change the profitability" of their markets, if only they had their own high-level bureaucrat consciously working to artificially raise prices.)


To me, it doesn't sound like there's much to be happy about, unless the ultimate goals are to perpetuate prohibition and maximize harm.


Even when the drug war goes according to plan, the rare successes can be just as dangerous as the frequent failures.

[Alfa]

COCAINE PRICES RISE AND QUALITY DECLINES, WHITE HOUSE SAYS


BOGOTA, Colombia - After years of disappointing news about the easy availability of cocaine on American streets, the Bush administration on Thursday said its multibillion-dollar drug war in Colombia was showing signs of success, with the retail price of the drug in the United States sharply higher and the level of purity lower.


From February to September, the price of a gram of cocaine rose 19 percent, to $170, while the purity level fell 15 percent, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said.


White House officials said those trends were consistent with a shortage of cocaine and validated the United States' $4 billion, multiyear plan to wipe out cocaine drug crops in Colombia through aerial spraying.


"These numbers confirm that the levels of interdiction, the levels of eradication, have reduced the availability of cocaine in the United States," John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said Thursday in a telephone interview from Washington. "There's a change in availability. The policy is working."


But drug policy analysts critical of the administration's war on drugs said the White House was drawing unrealistically rosy conclusions from too short a period. They noted that a Rand Corporation study for the White House in 2003 showed that as the war on drugs had expanded since 1981, the price of cocaine had tumbled to historic lows while purity levels had risen.


Drug policy analysts also said that like any commodity, the price of cocaine sometimes fluctuates wildly. Yet the cocaine trade remains intractably lucrative, they said.


"Cocaine is not like computer chips, where new technology makes it cheaper and cheaper," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, an independent New York group that says the war on drugs has been counterproductive. "A small blip upward after so many years of decline in price and increase in purity is essentially meaningless."


Since 2000, American officials have insisted that an aggressive push to spray land used for Colombia's huge drug crops with glyphosate would pay off. Hundreds of thousands of acres, many in a swath of southern Colombia held by Marxist rebels, have been sprayed.


But this year, even after reporting that 336,000 acres of coca plants had been sprayed in 2004, the White House acknowledged that the amount of coca across Colombia was "statistically unchanged" from 2003.


Coca cultivation has spread to most states, growers are planting more potent strains and the amount of cocaine Colombia produces is still more than enough to satisfy American demand.


Right-wing paramilitary commanders have continued trafficking much of Colombia's cocaine, fearing little from the administration of President Alvaro Uribe, which has granted generous concessions shielding them from serious punishment as they participate in a government-sponsored disarmament process. Human rights groups and some Colombian political leaders say that the paramilitaries are evolving into a Mafia-like organization that depends on the cocaine trade.


John Walsh, who follows American drug policy for the Washington Office on Latin America, a policy analysis group, said cocaine trafficking regularly rebounded after difficult periods. When Colombia dismantled the Medellin cocaine cartel in the late 1980's and began an offensive against the Cali cartel in the mid-1990's, "cocaine price increases, while obvious, were equally obviously short-lived," he said. "They were quite ephemeral."


Still, the American government says the overall picture is positive:


its figures show that seizures of cocaine are way up and that cocaine use among some sectors of the American population has declined.


The White House said the newest figures were just the start of a positive trend. Officials say that trend took time to develop because the traffickers had probably overproduced when the spraying effort began and for months used stockpiles of cocaine to supply American consumers.


"We kept watching this and watching this and that started to change,"


David Murray, a drug policy analyst at the White House, said of the price and purity figures. "Nobody is saying victory. We're just finding a figure that's consistent with some of the other data sets we had."

[Red_Baran]

120-170$ a gram? wtf swim has never seen yay ever cost so much, where do they get thoes stats?

[moodybluze]

Last timeswim was in New Yorkswim paid





for two very nice grams. As someone said, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.


[hmmm... prices mentioned aplenty upthread in an article postedby a moderator; still, edited accordingly ]


Edited by: moodybluze

[Woodman]

Originally Posted by Alfa

According to data released by the Office of National Drug Control Policy,
the street-level price of cocaine rose by 19 percent from February to
September. That means a gram of cocaine rose from just over $120 last
April to more than $170 in September.

Lets see...:

120 x .19 = 22.8


So 19 percent of $120.00 = $22.80

If the price of cocaine went up %19 percent, then a gram should now cost
$142.80


Where did they get $170.00 from?

Did I miss something?

[motorhead]

^lol, ya it seems like they just make stuff up all the time doesnt it?