Comments on: Undead ideas Dep’t: Buying the opium crop

By: Anonymous

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By: neil

neil — Tue, 23 May 2006 00:57:05 +0000

Let me get this straight — Instapundit, a libertarian who has been known to disparage American farm subsidies, thinks that the U.S. government should subsidize Afghani opium farmers?
Is there a difference between ‘buying up excess supply’ and farm subsidies? It’s the same idea, right?

By: Mo

Mo — Sat, 20 May 2006 21:04:53 +0000

M.K.
Serial catowner’s price was a pound of heroin for $60K yours were in kilograms. $60K*2.2 = $132K/kg according to the Seattle PD officer. Right in line with your estimates.

By: RickG

RickG — Sat, 20 May 2006 20:03:44 +0000

“The first step in solving the “drug problem” is to recognize that the problem is prohibition, not drugs.”
Exactly. The only subject left out of your post is the cost of the jails and prisons warehousing those arrested and convicted, over the lengthy terms of zero discretion sentencing.
Mark K makes the point there is no solution on the supply side. There isn’t one to the demand side either. The only rational policy option is dealing with fallout. With the addicts it is treatment, if they can be treated before killing themselves.
Most of the violence, the toxic waste cleanup (meth labs), etc. are purely results of probibition.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 20 May 2006 18:13:42 +0000

M.K. wrote:
“…but controlling the heroin problem by controlling the poppy crop is a mere chimera, and known to be so by everyone with any economic training who has looked at the problem. Our drug problem, if it’s going to be solved, has to be solved here.”
The first step in solving the “drug problem” is to recognize that the problem is prohibition, not drugs.
I’ve known many heroin addicts, and I’ve never met even one who was influenced by the drug to engage in criminal behavior. In those people who did engage criminal behavior (besides possessing and using the drug), the cause of their behavior was prohibition directly — the price of the drug, and the means of obtaining it, hence the price and means of not undergoing withdrawal, was more than they could afford to pay from legal employment.
One addict I knew practiced medicine, and unquestionably saved the life of a close relative of mine. Another ran a very highly rated and profitable legitimate business for decades. Most were ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, except for their addiction. While a few addicts I’ve known were petty criminals, they were petty criminals before they became addicts. If the drug were available to most addicts, even if only by prescription as a psych med, most would lead law abiding, and even remarkably productive, lives.
Only three groups profit from drug prohibition laws: drug dealers, prohibitionist politicians and policymakers, and narcotics cops. Ordinary citizens pay a terrible price in loss of all meaningful civil liberties and property rights, terror and murder by SWAT teams on bogus raids, proliferation of AIDS and HepC by contaminated injection equipment, and, adding insult to injury, higher taxes to pay prohibition enforcers’ and policymakers’ salaries.

By: Mark Kleiman

Mark Kleiman — Sat, 20 May 2006 18:09:46 +0000

It’s possible that the price of a (pure) kg. of heroin is now as low as $60,000. It’s also possible that the price being quoted is for “cut” (diluted) material.
Yes, the fentanyl family of synthetics is now illicitly producible at prices competitive with heroin, and is starting to appear on the streets. Since the fentanyls are far more potent, the initial result has been a rash of overdose deaths.
REMINDER: This comments section operates under “play nice” rules: no insulting other commenters. “Don’t be stupid” counts as an insult.

By: Rick B

Rick B — Sat, 20 May 2006 17:58:09 +0000

So what you are really saying is that the idea of buying up the poppy crop is an effort by the drug producers to expand their market to include the U.S. government.
That’s just good marketting if you can easily expand production without a great deal of fixed costs.

By: Maynard Handley

Maynard Handley — Sat, 20 May 2006 16:21:54 +0000

Who the hell is claiming that Afghanistan is the only place in the world that produces opium?
Or do you have some grand plan to bushisize the war on drugs just like the war on terror — the US will buy opium from Afghanistan but not from, say, Burma and this will, in some mysterious fashion, both reduce the heroin problem and increase the prestige of the US?
On a more serious note, just how difficult is the synthesis of morphine (or straight heroin if that is easier)? My point being that if all the opium production in the world were destroyed, would the effect simply be to convert heroin to a meth/ecstasy type factory drug with perhaps a factor of two change in price, or is this sort of synthesis currently impossible, or if not impossible the sort of tour-de-force of a research university that’s not going to be replicated in bulk in a hidden lab in the desert somewhere.

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Sat, 20 May 2006 12:47:19 +0000

“Because there isn’t a natural limit on poppy production. ”
Seems to me that, unless you’re claiming that Afghanistan has an infinite area, (In fact, I believe the cultivatable area is relatively small.) this clearly isn’t true. But you do make a good case that buying the opium probably isn’t a practical option.
Of course, if we dropped our price support programs here, the price would drop there, and growing something else might become economically sensible.

By: serial catowner

serial catowner — Sat, 20 May 2006 11:32:35 +0000

Say, I’ve seen some inflation in my time, but yesterday a Seattle police officer, in the Seattle P-I, estimated the value of a pound of heroin in Seattle at $60,000.
Sadly, he did so in this context- arrests of over 400 street level sellers, of whom about 370 will be charged with felonies, and claims that this enforcement operation had increased the amount of time it took to ‘score’ on the street from five minutes to 45 minutes- claims local residents disputed.
So, whatever the cost to the user, the cost to the police, and the citizens who pay them, of that pound of heroin was much greater than $60,000. They seized about seven pounds of drugs while arresting 400 people.