I have no recollection of having posted that comment or even having had this conversation with you,
drug mentor . But checking my recent posts says I did, actually. It's a sign that, for me, typically indicates I had an eventful yesterday.
I do enjoy the anterograde amnesia accompanying the profligate use of CNS depressants (like nitromethaqualone, liquor, clonazepam, secobarital, and so forth). I think of the effect as being like a sort of forward-traveling pharmacologic time machine. If one doesn't like today, they can simply press the fast-forward button labeled "GABAA" in their brain and arrive at tomorrow in what appears to them to be no time at all. I confess that I've purposefully skipped at least enough days to make a year this way. You could say as a figure of speech that I'm habitually existentially truant.
I was pretty drunk when I posted last night, it wasn't my intention to come across as hostile or quarrelsome but I can see how you got that from my post, sorry about that.
Thanks. I'm always appreciable of a discussion's interlocutor's attempting of at least an affectation of a conciliatory tone or an amicable comportment. There are few activities quite as off-putting and mentally ennervating as participating in an internecine, caustic, or unnecessarily emotive discussion.
It is disingenuous because there are considerably more places in the World where the going rate for a pound of cannabis is a fraction of what you have stated than there are places where it commands such a price. The market in California makes up a tiny percentage of the entire World's cannabis market, you are cherry picking the most expensive examples to make your point while failing to consider that a pound of weed is considerably cheaper in most of the World.
I agree with the veracity or truth of your objection. Indeed, cannabis is usually less expensive than heroin or cocaine are within a given locality, not more expensive. However, it is not the factuality or truth of your objection that I disagree with, rather it's the applicability or pertinence of that objection to my argument that I find issue with.
For example, the statement "people are mammals" (hereinafter statement X) is incontrovertibly true and is a biological fact. But that indubitably factual statement X does not make for a logically coherent refutation of or response to the statement "dogs are not cats" (hereinafter statement Y). While the truth value of statement X is not changed or lessened, it still is patently invalid and fallacious if used as a retort to statement Y. In this example, statement X constitutes a non sequitur. In addition, it could also be an example of a straw man argument, because it might have resulted from a distorted or contorted version of statement Y, rather than simply poor argumentation.
Your objection would be appropriate and considerable if and only if the omphalos of my argument had been that the price of cannabis exceeds the prices of heroin or cocaine (either on average, as a rule, within the majority of the world's geographical realms and social milieus, etc). But that is not the omphalos of my argument, and therefore the gravamen of your objection is not appropriate nor logically valid as the two are mutually incompatible and irreconcilable.
My contention was, in point of fact, that the price of the world's highest quality cannabis exceeds the price of the world's highest quality heroin or cocaine (quality per dollar per kg) and had nothing to do with prices and qualities of these drugs as they are within the same geographical vicinity or on the basis of a specific location's markets. My argument was only about the global drug market, not about comparing local markets to one another. My argument was also about the typical wholesale cost(s) of only the highest quality of these drugs, and the geographical locations or particular local markets within which they occur is only coincidental.
It just so happens that the world's most potent weed is almost always grown and sold in Canada, America, Western Europe, and other wealthy and developed regions where expensive grow-ops are affordable and advanced growing information is readily accessible to the public. And it just so happens that Afghanistan makes the most abundant and least diluted heroin. And it just so happens that coca leaves grow well in the Amazon and that Colombia or Peru or Bolivia have the most abundant and least diluted cocaine.
Because the comparison of prices is between the world's highest quality of each drug in question, we must necessarily compare Western cannabis with SW Asian heroin and South American cocaine because those areas are, for whatever reason, where each drugs' highest quality is most readily, abundantly, typically, or in some cases exclusively found and sold.
You say you are comparing the prices of "only the most superlative quality of each drug" but I don't understand how this is a fair or relevant comparison.
It is relevant because it functions as an illustration of my hypothesis to account for why cannabis has a higher profit per km² than Papaver somniferum (including perhaps Papaver bracteatum which contains the alkaloid thebaine (like P. somniferum), which can be extracted and theoretically employed in the syntheses of so-called Bentley compounds) and coca. I care not if my comparison is fair, but factual.
Most heroin and cocaine are produced to a high quality, most cannabis is not.
Most heroin and cocaine may be manufactured with exceptional purity, but by the time they have migrated even as little as a few hundred kilometers from their point of origin, they have been traded between hundreds of intermediaries and the purity is less than 2/3rds what it was originally. By the time heroin, say, reaches the West, its potency has fallen even lower.
To only consider a small fraction of the entire cannabis market worthy of comparison is obviously not going to be representative of how profitable that market is as a whole.
This is merely frivolous pettifogging, at best. But I'm argumentative and patient enough to address it, nonetheless.
Here, you seem unaware of the fact that an equal or greater percentage of heroin and cocaine sold at the retail level directly to consumers is as low or lower in quality than most cannabis on the market. Most people in most areas of the world (outside the regions of origin of cocaine and heroin) have a substantially higher probability of finding cannabis with a quality (relative to the most potent cannabis that could possibly be sold) greater than that of both heroin or cocaine (relative to the highest conceivable purity of each). In simpler terms, the difference between the highest quality of weed sold in a particular city is closer to the highest quality of weed sold in any city than are the highest quality of cocaine or heroin sold in that city to the highest quality of cocaine or heroin sold in any city. That is to say, the best weed is better than both the best cocaine and best heroin in most cities not within the margins of the latter two drugs' production regions.
Moreover, while the highest quality weed is merely a fraction of all weed on the market, the highest quality cocaine is an even smaller fraction of its market than weed, and the highest quality heroin is a smaller fraction of its market than cocaine. The overall tenor of your post is that I've disingenuously misrepresented and inflated cannabis prices and deflated cocaine and heroin prices. Thus, I'd imagine you made this point to buttress that objection (though, admittedly, I cannot see how it achieves that intended goal). However, if the reality is actually opposite of what your point suggests it to be, and the suggestion embedded in the linguistic structure of that point is intended to support your objection, then it logically follows that the objection is equal to or greater than the incorrectness of the point, insofar as that objection could be logically supported by that point if both were true and accurate.
Therefore, your point in the quoted text—trifling as it may be—is predicated on two erroneous, ill-conceived presuppositions. Seeing as how the overall tenor of your whole remonstrance is about my alleged sophistry (that is, my supposed disingenuously inflated cannabis prices and deflated cocaine and heroin prices)—for what motive, no one knows—I wouldn't be wrong to surmise that this quoted text is intended to somehow buttress those accusations of duplicity and subterfuge. However, since both proffered points are not consistent with reality and are demonstrably false, they seem to only have the effect of augmenting and strengthening the dismal presentiment I already had regarding the probability of you proving me wrong in this discussion.
With such egregiously incorrect and asinine premises and supporting arguments, how could one reasonably hold any measurable degree of confidence in the validity of the main argument being propounded, I ask.
It was you who posted a source stating that Afghanistan was the largest producer of cannabis on the globe, to view California as it's main region of origin because you don't want to consider anything but the highest quality is obviously going to paint a skewed picture with an artificially inflated price for cannabis.
Your argument is concerned not, it patently seems, with the validity or rationality of the parameters used in my comparison nor with the truthfulness or verity of the conclusions and hypothesis I derived therefrom. Instead, your reproof is based on preference rather than probity.
This is tantamount to one arguing with another about whether the color and style of the shirt they're wearing is unbecoming or gaudy, instead of if the shirt is worn backwards or inside out.
The Romans are credited with thousands of pithy apothegms and keen maxims. One such Latin aphorism that I think is apposite here is typically phrased as
de gustibus non est disputandum , which loosely translates into English as "in matters of taste, there is no dispute/discussion". Its interpretation or meaning should be lucid enough for me to forgo explaining.
I don't discount the credibility in the argument that there is an expensive market for high quality cannabis in some regions of the globe and this would have the obvious effect of pushing up the price if one were to calculate a Worldwide average. I just don't think this effect is as dramatic as you do, because in most of the World, including the regions that produce the most cannabis (like Afghanistan), cannabis is much, much cheaper than the prices you are stating.
So you accept the plausibility of my hypothesis, but just not to its extremity? So not only do I not believe your critique, but apparently neither do you.
Failing to account for this is not cheating in weed's favour, it is actually doing the complete opposite.
A drug is an inanimate object. If my impression of people is rarely tendentious (in fact, I consider most people not at all, and those of whom I do, I normally find them more repulsive than attractive), why would I have any partiality or favoritism for the perception (rather than consumption) of a drug, and of all things its economics?
I think the higher profitability of cannabis in relation to other drug crops comes mainly from the fact that there is considerably more yield of usable material out of a cannabis harvest in any given space
I concur. A m² or individual cannabis plant will almost always result in a greater yield of product than a m² or individual poppy or coca leaf realistically could.
However, if we forget about price per m² for a moment and focus exclusively on price per kg, we can exscind the superfluous conjecture and needless guesswork. Because we are now thinking in terms of weights and not area we don't have to suppose or presume that weed costs more because it puts out more kg of drug per hectare, say, than do coca and poppy, because one kg of cannabis is equal to one kg of anything else. When we analyze and compare the average price of a kg of cocaine, heroin, and weed we see that the price per kg for an equivalent quality (not just the most superlative quality, as I had once incautiously phrased it) of each drug, we find that the cost of cannabis modestly exceeds that of the other two drugs.
A gram of average-quality weed is roughly $10-$15USD on average. Basic arithmetic says:
($10-15/g × 454 g/lb) × (2.2 lb/kg) = $9,988-$14,982/kg —— rounded up we get $10k/kg to $15k/kg.
And that price is not the result of hundreds of dealers having added hundreds of arbitrary markups en route to the end consumer, like with cocaine or heroin. In fact that high price for the weed may have indeed been appended by the producer himself or usually by no more than two or three people down from him, between the consumer and grower.
Compare that to cocaine or heroin which has only passed through two or three sets of hands other than the manufacturer's and the price is roughly equivalent, if not lesser, than that of cannabis, if variables such as weight and the quality are equal.
Of course, I haven't adjusted for discounts for bulk because that is an unknowable variable which is contingent on the caprice of the particular drug dealer and varies considerably between dealers. But this isn't problematic because we will simply exclude this variable from the cocaine and heroin price estimates, which effectively levels things out.
it also requires very little processing to be usable when compared to poppy and coca which need to have their active material extracted, and in the case of heroin it is processed even further after the active ingredient has been extracted.
It's incredibly simple, straightforward, and inexpensive to manufacture heroin from opium gum or cocaine from coca paste. This is why they are so ubiquitous and why drugs like LSD or synthetic psilocybin are exceedingly rare. The former two are almost entirely made by poor, uneducated people with few resources and little wherewithal at their disposal. While the latter two are absolutely impossible to make without being erudite (an ignorant yokel trying to make LSD would be funny to watch from a distance), well-heeled (furnishing a lab fit for the synthesis of most serotonergic psychedelics, especially ergoline derivatives or many substituted tryptamines, is not at all cheap), and well-connected (if you can find a source for wholesale quantities of each LSD precursor without arousing suspicion from the authorities, for example, I dare say you'd find obtaining a dirty bomb a veritable cinch in comparison).
I think what you are arguing clearly does have some impact on the high profitability of cannabis, I just think it is a mino consideration when compared to the two I just mentioned.
That's OK with me; think whatever you want. But you musn't argue your thoughts with such blowzy, sophomoric argumentation within a debate, if in fact your objective is to persuade the opposing party or defend against their aspersions and attacks. Otherwise, the opinion would have been better off if left unsaid, as none of one's time would have been squandered or frittered away by taking their opinion down a path leading to one's inescapable dialectic perdition and their ego would not have gotten bruised and enfeebled along the way. It's a commonly committed gaffe and is the cause of many, if not most debates and verbal disagreements.
Maybe you're correct and I'm the one who is wrong. Maybe—not likely. But as George Orwell once put it:
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
