The ridiculous profitability of illegal drugs, in one chart

The ridiculous profitability of illegal drugs, in one chart

The illicit drug market is immensely profitable — lucrative enough to finance the violent activities of criminal organizations around the world, particularly drug cartels in Latin America.

This graphic, from the team at Information Is Beautiful, charts out just how valuable illegal drugs are compared to other crops:



The authors acknowledge that illicit drug prices are very difficult to gauge, so some estimates are made for cannabis (marijuana), coca (cocaine), and opium poppy (heroin and other opiates). But the available data gives a rough idea of how profitable illicit drugs can be.

Much of this high value is caused by the war on drugs. Prices are increased to reflect the difficulty of shipping drugs from Latin America to major markets in the US and rest of the world, since entire harvests can be lost at the hands of drug-busting government officials or rival criminal organizations. But in a perverse way, this inflated cost actually encourages criminal organizations to get into the businesses of drugs — they might lose some of their product along the supply chain, but any product that makes it through is immensely profitable.

The prices of illicit drugs would very likely plummet if any of them were legalized. That's why Mark Kleiman, drug policy expert at UCLA, expects the cost of producing and shipping marijuana to drop to match other crops, such as tobacco or tea, following marijuana legalization. That would help run many criminal organizations, which can't compete with the lower prices, out of business, but it could also lead to the increased access and commercialization of marijuana.

Is the war on drugs succeeding?
The goal of the war on drugs is to reduce drug use. If the campaign against drug dealers and producers were succeeding, drugs would become scarcer and prices would increase. Yet the data show just the opposite occurring.

The prices of most drugs, as tracked by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, have plummeted. Since 1981, the median bulk price of heroin is down by roughly 93 percent, and the median bulk price of powder cocaine is down by about 87 percent. Since 1986, the median bulk price of crack cocaine fell by around 44 percent. The prices of meth and marijuana, meanwhile, have remained largely stable since the 1980s.



Read the whole article -

http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/10/7175859/marijuana-legalization-heroin-cocaine-crops

Great post PD.. and we have a key reason why having drugs illegal actually promotes them. The black market created by their illegality causes such an inflated price compared to production that the drug king pens can lose shipments all the time and still make tons of money. I love how the drug bust headlines say that 6 million in drugs were nabbed.. in reality they costed a tiny stipend of this to create.

With drugs costing this much on the streets addicts are always short of money.. non addicts have money. Addicts are usually pretty good people.. but beaten down and dehumanized.. locked up and exploited.. desperate.. New people are turned on to fund desperate addicts supplies. A big reason they are desperate is the inflated price created by the drug war.

See many people killing over tobacco.. see many countries destabilized from caffeine.. See forty uni students mass murdered from alcohol.. no, and i mean its booze.. why is the worst drug on the planet less harmful then so many other illegal ones? its harm is highly dependent on its legal status.

Follow anything long enough in the drug war and you get to the money and oppression.

What a sick and perverted idea of government we've cultivated here in the ol' USA.

I guess cannabis is larger than cocaine or opium because more of the plant can create usable product. I know a ridiculous amount of crop is needed to make a small amount of cocaine but I'm wondering about poppies. How much of the relatively low price per km2 is due to the fact that only the sap is useful and how much is due to the production of legal medicinal opium?

edgarshade said:

I guess cannabis is larger than cocaine or opium because more of the plant can create usable product. I know a ridiculous amount of crop is needed to make a small amount of cocaine but I'm wondering about poppies. How much of the relatively low price per km2 is due to the fact that only the sap is useful and how much is due to the production of legal medicinal opium?

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naw, you can crop out more times per season with bud.

^ I thought most places only have one major season for bud? I know there are places where they have multiple grow cycles in a year, but my understanding was that this was more to do with the fact that they barely have a cold season so you can plant seeds about 3 times per year. I was under the impression that only one of these seasons was long enough to actually cultivate large plants and during the other mini seasons the plants will flower as soon as they are sexually mature, resulting in shitty yields. IIRC Jamaica and Hawaii are two of the places that this applies to.

edgarshade said:

I guess cannabis is larger than cocaine or opium because more of the plant can create usable product. I know a ridiculous amount of crop is needed to make a small amount of cocaine but I'm wondering about poppies. How much of the relatively low price per km2 is due to the fact that only the sap is useful and how much is due to the production of legal medicinal opium?

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Most likely not. Opium and coca are both more commonly grown in poorer, less developed regions and thus a kilo of coca paste or opium would not typically be as high priced as a kilo of cannabis grown and sold in, say, Canada or The USA. Hell, nevermind the coca paste and opium, think of the unbelievably cheap, yet more potent and refined cocaine and heroin in countries like Bolivia or Afghanistan, respectively.

Most people can't find a decent pound of weed in California for less than $2,000. Multiplied by 2.2 lbs for the price of a kg, we get $4,400/kg for good weed. A kg of the purest cocaine possible could conceivably be found in Lima or La Paz for a grand or more less than kg of chronic in California. And heroin? A kg of unadulterated SW Asian heroin runs for about 2-3 g's in, say, Kabul, perhaps 4 g's in Karachi or Kolkata.

Most commodities, especially domestically-manufactured and readily available exports llike heroin, are cheaper in their countries of origin, and cheaper still if that aforesaid country of origin is mired in abject poverty and turbulence. Because these drugs are easier to produce in their natural environments (due to weather, acceptance, or ill-equipped and/or apathetic police enforcementand a lax drug policy), they have to travel farther from their origin to reach foreign consumers.. Most Cocaine does not remain in Colombia or Peru, but is passed northwards by many hundreds of intermediaries, each of whom add their own markup for the next dealer to incur. The result of such long migrations and so many middle men is a much more expensive product. A kg of heroin can go from two thousand wholesale in Kabul to over 75k retail in San Francisco.

On the other hand, most weed sold and consumed in a given area was almost all domestically cultivated. Additionally, rich, Western nations account for most of the world's weed consumption. The effect is a drug (cannabis) that is exorbitantly priced as domestic drugs go, but is much more affordable than the smuggled-in foreign drugs. When cheap, undiluted heroin is shipped from the country of origin for a couple grand, the smuggler raises the price to match the destination's wealth and perceptions of expensiveness. Canadians can feel comfortable paying 40k/kg for heroin, only a fraction of 1% of Afghan's impoverished population could realistically afford such a relatively extreme price.

The price, like the variety and quantity, of a drug is one of the aspects shaped and modified based mostly on the consumers' palate and permission (and too a lesser extent, the difficulty of meeting demand). I couldn't sell a gram of anything for $500, say, if the buyer does not agree to pay it or cannot afford it, and especially if I have competition selling the same item for a lesser price. So I either evolve with my clientele and competitors or I go extinct.

The market for cannabis is substantially larger than the cocaine or opium markets because the demand is lesser for the latter two drugs and much greater for the former. Think about it. Everybody seems to smoke weed, yet the world would not look so familiar if everyone did, say, heroin instead. Drug barons don't just litter the black market with whatever the hell is easiest and fastest to make, pound-for-pound or dollar-for-dollar. The consumers' demand sets the supply quantity and it would presumably be difficult to account economically for the raison d'être, if you will, of some opposite scenario.

Drug consumers—the majority of them—don't just shoot heroin, smoke weed, sniff coke, or drop acid because those are what the dealers inundate the market with or force upon them. Rather, those drugs are demanded first and foremost, and then the dealers and drug tycoons creatively circumvent laws and narcs to make, grow, and supply whatever drug or drugs they know people will buy.

A drug dealer (a successful and shrewd one, at least) does not expand their business by merely selling some easily procured offal that takes a whole damned year to sell a kilo. Instead, they flow with the market and sell whichever drug can be sold in the fastest time (kilograms per week, say) and for the most money (50k per kg instead of 2k per kg, for instance). The drug's accessibility or ease of acquisition is only ever considered after the dealer has made up his mind on which substance to profit from. Moreover, while a small consumer base can put even the most gifted purveyor out of business, the cumbersome or tricky accessibility of the drug is only ever an insuperable hindrance to the least creative and least motivated dealers, but is less challenging the more creative and determined the dealer is.

For example, imagine how many cocaine -smuggling simpletons were busted by the Coast Guard until somebody more clever was inspired to use semi-submersibles for their narcotrafficking.

To further illustrate the irrelevance of acquisition compared to other variables, consider that an experienced and sensible drug dealer could theoretically sell many doses of LSD in a shorter interval of time than it may take another dealer to even explain what the hell his 25i-NBOMe is and why anyone should buy it, notwithstanding the fact that the faster-selling and more lucrative LSD may be even moredifficult to synthesize than the 25i-NBOMe. Why? Because the consumer says so.

^ While you do make some interesting points about cultivation of cannabis in North America driving up the price in relation to crops like coca and poppy being almost exclusively cultivated in the third world, I think that theory fails to account for the fact that there are many poor Countries who grow cannabis on a scale similar to North America but where the value is more comparable to that of hard drugs in their respective Countries. Some obvious examples would be places like Lesotho, Swaziland and Malawi, particularly in the cases of the first two Countries I mentioned a vast majority of the cannabis is grown for export to a more affluent market like South Africa.

A significant percentage of South American, Asian and African cannabis is domestically grown and sold at a price that would often make hard drugs a spit on the map away from where they are produced look relatively expensive.

Other than that I think your post is pretty spot on though.

drug_mentor said:

^ While you do make some interesting points about cultivation of cannabis in North America driving up the price in relation to crops like coca and poppy being almost exclusively cultivated in the third world, I think that theory fails to account for the fact that there are many poor Countries who grow cannabis on a scale similar to North America but where the value is more comparable to that of hard drugs in their respective Countries. Some obvious examples would be places like Lesotho, Swaziland and Malawi, particularly in the cases of the first two Countries I mentioned a vast majority of the cannabis is grown for export to a more affluent market like South Africa.

A significant percentage of South American, Asian and African cannabis is domestically grown and sold at a price that would often make hard drugs a spit on the map away from where they are produced look relatively expensive.

Other than that I think your post is pretty spot on though.

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That's a well-taken point. I didn't consider it whilst composing my comment, unfortunately.

Your foregoing counter-example may possibly impugn or disprove my argument, insofar as that counter-example is veritably the case and is corroborated by reality.


With that said, I am not particularly convinced that your counter-argument satisfies the aforementioned necessary conditions (found herein near the ending of the second paragraph above). That is to say, my observations have been different and so too has the evidence I've seen.

To illustrate why I believe you're wrong, we need to first determine which national or subnational entities (i.e., countries and their regions), outside the so-called West, that cultivate the greatest number of cannabis plants per hectare, per annum, and/or per capita (either gauge will suffice here, but they each may result in different orderings or rankings of the most productive areas).

If we use growth per hectare as our barometer, then the winners are probably unsurprising. They almost all lie in the Maghreb (namely Morocco), the Levant (namely Lebanon), Latin America (namely Mexico, Colombia, and to a lesser extent some Central American states), South and Southwest Asia (namely Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and least fecund among them being parts of western Iran).

According to a UNDOC analysis mentioned by Reuters (source: click here) , Afghanistan tops all other nations by an impressive margin, with an estimated 10,000-24,000 hectares of cannabis grown per annum.

That same source also revels that Afghanistan's vast crop yields an unsurpassed 145 kg per hectare of resin, compared to Morocco's comparatively diminutive output of 40 kg of resin per hectare.

After the resin is harvested, it is almost exclusively used for the production of hashish.

This is noteworthy because 1 kg of hashish is more expensive than 1 kg of cannabis. If John Smith grows 100,000 plants, he stands to earn a far greater profit if he makes it all into hashish than if he simply harvested and sold the plants' buds. This would in turn raise the profit earned per plant (and thus per hectare) of his crop.

Westerners mostly import their hashish from North Africa and Asia. Morever, Western people seem to have a greater proclivity to produce and consume only the buds (again, leaving the manufacture of hashish to some other guy with a funny-sounding name and sporting a turban).


Why is this? I think it may be due in large part to the quality of the cannabis being grown. People in developed nations have the cash, resources, and accoutrements to grow the world's most potent cannabis—up to 30% THC or higher, maybe. On the other hand, a poor Afghani subsistence farmer has neither the money, know-how (due to a lack of available information), nor resources (such as growrooms, greenhouses, store-bought soil, hydroponic growing equipment, HPS and mercury vapor light systems, or even electricity to use those light systems) to grow grade-A, highly potent, high-in-one-toke weed.

To overcome this potency issue, they (Arabs, Berbers, and Pashtuns mainly) simply convert the world's lowest-grade shwagg into the highest-grade hash, which the whole world practically begs them to share.

The case is different in the Spanish-speaking New World countries (to wit; Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia). In their case, they don't usually make weed into hashish. Rather, they just grow as much as it takes to get rich (with an exaggerated emphasis on a crop's quantity rather than its quality), press the harvested buds into 1, 5, 10, 25, or more kilogram square-shaped bricks, wrap 'em up, and courier the stuff northbound to the USA.

Most domestically grown cannabis in the USA and Canada originates from small-scale grow houses, are operated by no more than a dozen people, and deal with no more than 10-100 plants. With these operations, quality matters more than quantity because the crop is too small to earn its growers a sizeable profit by its weight alone. They must cultivate more expensive and higher quality weed to compensate for their low output.

In Mexico, the grow-ops are mainly outdoors and are massive in size, containing thousands of plants per crop. With so many plants, the weed doesn't need to be dank to make a $1,000,000+ in profit.

Does it make sense? And do you find any part of this post objectionable or assailable? If so, will you please explain? (I'm not trying to come off as certain of myself or self-assured or infallible, but I honestly would like to hear any issues you may have with this explanation, because if I'm wrong once I would hate to be so twice, lest I were to use this same reasoning again in another discussion on this same topic).

^ I am fairly certain that making hash is primarily a West Asian and North African thing, it fails to account for the rest of Africa, East Asia, The Caribbean, Central and South America. Even if you can argue that the Worlds largest producers of cannabis tend to be hashish producing Nations it does not mean that most of the Worlds cannabis is being processed into hash.

I don't really buy that hashish is considerably more profitable than cannabis buds either, I think it has more to do with being less hassle to sell and smuggle. I also think it has a longer shelf life, in places where you only get one harvest a year and weather/living conditions are not necessarily ideal for long term storage of buds this is probably a big consideration, especially among producers who smoke themselves.

If you look at how much herbal cannabis it takes to produce hash and compare their relative value it does not seem to me that hash is considerably more profitable and the trade in hash is driven by many factors, including, but far from limited to profitability. Of course 1kg of hash is more profitable than 1kg of cannabis, it is a silly comparison when you consider it takes multiple kilograms of cannabis to produce a single kilo of hash...

I also think you overestimate the percentage of Central American grown cannabis that is exported to the US, there are surely a great deal of smokers in this region and I understand there is no longer the same demand for their cannabis in North America. As I understand it, any Central American cannabis that does make it to the US is going to sell for incredibly cheap in contrast to any domestically produced cannabis.

Nom de Plume said:

In Mexico, the grow-ops are mainly outdoors and are massive in size, containing thousands of plants per crop. With so many plants, the weed doesn't need to be dank to make a $1,000,000+ in profit.

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I don't understand the relevance of this, we are talking about the profitability per square kilometer of cannabis compared to poppies and coca, I don't dispute that cannabis is grown in this manner in many regions, but I would argue that most poppy and coca plantations are cultivated on a large scale, even on smaller sized plots anyone growing drugs for profit is likely to be cramming as many plants as they efficiently can into the space they have.

Nom de Plume said:

Additionally, rich, Western nations account for most of the world's weed consumption.

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I am sure that this is demonstrably false. I don't have time to go around digging up how many smokers there are in each individual Country, I am sure that the average in the West is higher than the rest of the World. You seem to be unaware that there are more than seven billion people in the World, less than 1.5 billion of them live anywhere that could be described as a rich Western Nation, and that is a very generous estimate. Thrice as many people could smoke in the West on average and it would still not equal as much cannabis as is being consumed elsewhere. This is compounded even further if you accept that the quality of Western cannabis in general will be higher so less is likely to be consumed by any given user on any given occasion.

I don't see how anything you have said refutes what I said, which is that a majority of the Countries where cannabis is grown and consumed are not rich nations. Of course, the higher price of cannabis grown in the West is going to inflate the Worldwide average, I just don't see how it would to the extent that your initial post implies. You were comparing the price of high quality cannabis in California to the price of heroin in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that is hardly a fair comparison. Afghanistan produces a majority of the Worlds opium, California produces a very small percentage of the Worlds cannabis.

You mention indoor growing equipment, I don't think that factors in here. I assume that the chart is documenting the profitability of crops grown outdoors. If you are using 1000 watt bulbs and have all the latest grow equipment then someone can easily pull down over a pound in a metre square 3 or 4 times in a single year. That is not a fair comparison to an outdoor growing environment where there tends to be one major growing season annually and you have no control over the weather conditions. If they were including state of the art grow rooms and comparing it to peasant third world farmers then that is pretty meaningless and the result is hardly surprising.

Nom de Plume said:

This is noteworthy because 1 kg of hashish is more expensive than 1 kg of cannabis.

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not true. bought both. hash was cheaper. approx 5/g for gold seal or 7/g for AAA skunk weed

there are weird externalities in the drug market. hash is easier to smuggle. greater density = bigger loads. also hash is frequently transhipped across the pound with H (cheaper to 'only' smuggle hash when paying couriers). thus the hash gets dumped because the real money is in h.

Was heroin SERIOUSLY over $2,000/g in 1982???
JESUS

.:Holy::Toast:. said:

Was heroin SERIOUSLY over $2,000/g in 1982???
JESUS

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with inflation and it being cut to hell, yeah.

harmacologist said:

not true. bought both. hash was cheaper. approx 5/g for gold seal or 7/g for AAA skunk weed

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That's only true if the comparison is between low-to-mid quality hashish and high quality (and probably domestically grown) cannabis. I should have been more clear in what I had wrote. I meant to compare the higher profitability of low-grade weed (from a poor Afghani farmer's back yard, say) converted into hashish rather than just harvested and sold as cannabis buds.

Good quality Lebanese, Afghan, or Moroccan hashish (of which I am intimately familiar with, in both terms of distribution/economics (though I'm no pusher nor have I ever been, honest) and quality), can be sold retail (without the buyer feeling cheated) for around $15-$25 USD per gram in most US and Canadian metropolitan areas.

Of course a knowledgeable, well-equipped grower can cultivate cannabis worth equal to or greater than that price per gram. But I wasn't arguing against that. The savvy cannabis-growing maven from Vancouver, with his expensive and sophisticated indoor grow-op and privileged access to information on cultivation techniques via multifarious media, is a different species than the rural Moroccan subsistence farmer living off a <$5 a day wage who can't even afford the electricity to power a stove—let alone several HPS light bulbs—and has a house too cramped to comfortably fit his family—let alone a room of weed plants.

This sort of indigent weed grower doesn't have a subscription to High Times, a bookcase replete with reference tomes and informative texts on cannabis cultivation, Internet access, or libraries with pertinent information, and knows only to cover a seed with dirt and give it water. His resulting weed wouldn't fetch more than $3 per gram on a good day—it's utterly inferior. Therefore, that extra $5-$10 he'd get from a gram of hashish better eases his poverty and makes his illicit enterprise more worth the effort.

there are weird externalities in the drug market.

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The dynamics and mechanisms of the illicit drug market are identical to that of any licit commodity's market. The principal discrepancy is in their legality or absence thereof. The driving forces of evolution, morphology, economic and logistic variables, and mechanics of the illicit drug market are not some amorphous, enigmatic, and inscrutable set of economic phenomena shaped by unknowable factors diverging sharply from those indwelling within the viscera or fundaments of other markets. They're just illegal. But whilst they do not follow the laws of legal systems, they necessarily obey the laws of free markets. They are not 'weird', rather fairly typical and predictable.

hash is easier to smuggle. greater density = bigger loads.

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There are two issues I see with this :
1.) Density seems to be an unnecessary, supererogatory concern if one is smuggling multi-ton quantities of a substance. Is 1,000 kg of hashish really that much easier to traffick, less cumbersome to handle, and/or less conspicuous than 1,000 kg of cannabis? Both would require a box truck or a shipping container to haul.

2.) While buds are fluffy and less dense than hashish, a hydrolic press (which may be easily bought or handmade) can make the disparity between the density of cannabis and hashish negligible. Mexican narcotraffickers almost always press their weed into multi-kilogram bricks to decrease bulk, and they manage to have it easily sneaked pass border patrol most of the time without their notice. Why can't or don't Asian and African smugglers do this? Maybe because Mexicans make up for their low quality with higher quantity, and thus effectively obviate the more time-intensive manufacture of hashish. Whereas their Eastern coevals employ a different strategy to compensate for their low potency weed, which is to grow huge crops of inexpensive, subpar weed and turn it into expensive, qualitatively nonpareil hashish. It's just my hypothesis, but it still seems more cogent than the one you've proffered (no offense intended).

also hash is frequently transhipped across the pound with H (cheaper to 'only' smuggle hash when paying couriers).

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I'm not sure what you're saying here. Could you elaborate? Specifically, what is meant by "across the pound"? Also, can you explain the reasoning behind how you arrived at the notion inside the parentheses? I read it several times and am still unable to see how and through what premises such a conclusion could be logically deducted.

thus the hash gets dumped because the real money is in h.

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Drug dealers and narcotraffickers are venal and parsimonious businessmen. I don't believe they'd just "dump" a $10,000,000 amount of hashish because the worth of their equivalent amount of heroin is $50,000,000 greater. That's a huge loss of potential profit for anybody to bear, I think. A single kilogram of hashish is not worth the time or effort of the more avaricious smugglers, obviously—the former fetches a relatively miniscule maximum profit of about $15,000 retail and the latter earns one a substantially greater maximum retail profit of up to $80,000 in some locales, which makes for a substantive 5-fold difference in value. But we aren't talking about single kilograms, but tons. With such ponderous amounts, that would be exceptionally wasteful and would result in a loss of revenue I don't believe any serious drug baron would want to incur.

harmacologist said:

with inflation and it being cut to hell, yeah.

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I wasn't yet born in the 1980s and have no feasible way of knowing the going rate of a gram of smack back then. But what I do know is that the demand for heroin outweighed its supply at that time. Back then, the world's top heroin-producing nation was Burma (a.k.a. Myanmar, depending on your political tendencies), and their output of the drug was (and has been) greatly attenuated and diminished—a trend that began around the end of the Vietnam war. However, since the dissolution of Taliban control and governance of Afghanistan (circa 2001), Afghanistan has proved itself more than able of picking up where Burma left off. As a result, SW Asian heroin has inundated the black market and has achieved a feat the erstwhile regnant heroin-exporting nation, Burma, could not have dreamed of achieving even in its heyday—quenching the demand of nearly every junkie the world over.

When a commodity becomes more accessible or available to its consumers, its price typically takes a precipitous fall. The last liter of fresh water on earth will be incredibly more valuable—and thus costly—than a single liter amid billions of others would. Value effects price (but other variables can, too) and value rises as supply wanes, and rises even more if demand remains steady or increases. A diamond would be worthless if no one wanted them or if they were as plentiful as grains of sand. The same is true of drugs.

Nom de Plume said:

Good quality Lebanese, Afghan, or Moroccan hashish (of which I am intimately familiar with, in both terms of distribution/economics (though I'm no pusher nor have I ever been, honest) and quality), can be sold retail (without the buyer feeling cheated) for around $15-$25 USD per gram in most US and Canadian metropolitan areas.

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hash at wholesale is 140-300/oz

Nom de Plume said:

There are two issues I see with this :
1.) Density seems to be an unnecessary, supererogatory concern if one is smuggling multi-ton quantities of a substance. Is 1,000 kg of hashish really that much easier to traffick, less cumbersome to handle, and/or less conspicuous than 1,000 kg of cannabis? Both would require a box truck or a shipping container to haul.

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yup its alot denser (and brick weed devalues the product if you ruin the bud), even in small quantizes it makes it easier, think what fits in a gas tank or a suitcase.

Nom de Plume said:

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Could you elaborate? Specifically, what is meant by "across the pound"? Also, can you explain the reasoning behind how you arrived at the notion inside the parentheses? I read it several times and am still unable to see how and through what premises such a conclusion could be logically deducted.

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should read, across the pond, referring to transit across the ocean.

you hire a courier to smuggle 10kg of hash, but really its 9kg of cash, and 1 kilo of heroin. you pay the mule $1000 a kilo, because smuggling hash is low risk vs say coke or heroin which would fetch $5k a kilo for a mule.... also some people wouldn't work with you if you were smuggling smack, but a little hash is no big deal....

harmacologist said:

hash at wholesale is 140-300/oz

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You're probably correct. But I was talking about retail value. I've never purchased hashish before, but I have acquaintances who have bought and sold it—as intermediaries—from whom I've learned this.

yup its alot denser (and brick weed devalues the product if you ruin the bud), even in small quantizes it makes it easier, think what fits in a gas tank or a suitcase.

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Only a DTO's (narc speech for Drug Trafficking Organization) so-called mules or one of their many thousands of employed couriers would need to be concerned with fitting the drug into tight spaces—like a suitcase or, say, their ass. These couriers are not typically members of the organization for which they're smuggling contraband, but are ordinary people granted with an out of the ordinary, risky but enticingly lucrative proposition. They are usually approached by a lower-tier drug dealer (within the organization's echelon) who offers them money for their service(s). Since everybody has a price and nobody dislikes easy money, most of them seize the opportunity for some quick cash and consent to the dealer's offer.

These are not the people I'm talking about or interested in. The guy behind the wheel of a 5-meter-long box truck stuffed with heroin, departing from the garage of a nondescript two-bedroom home in Kabul, en route to the Iran-Afghan border is who I'm talking about. Or the smugglers who plant a cache of heroin with a multi-million dollar wholesale value in an inconspicuous and indistinct shipping container placed on a New York-bound cargo ship.

How incredibly tedious would it be to smuggle drugs if every gram had to be trafficked past the TSA by swallowing a drug-filled condom or snuck past border patrol by using one's large intestine as a hiding spot?

should read, across the pond, referring to transit across the ocean.

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Ah, of course. In the vernacular of English spoken in the UK and the Rep.of Ireland, 'pond' is colloquially used as a reference to the Atlantic Ocean. Honest typo.

you hire a courier to smuggle 10kg of hash, but really its 9kg of cash, and 1 kilo of heroin. you pay the mule $1000 a kilo, because smuggling hash is low risk vs say coke or heroin which would fetch $5k a kilo for a mule.... also some people wouldn't work with you if you were smuggling smack, but a little hash is no big deal....

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As I noted previously, almost all couriers are everyday people who couldn't tell shit from shimola or hash from heroin if their lives depended on it. So how might a drug-naïve mule distinguish hashish from heroin and determine which is which? I couldn't distinguish the two with absolute certainty by sight alone either, yet I know my shit. Unless you're an absolute wunderkind at this stuff, you'd have to try the drug (or test it, but how many people walk around with testing kits on their person, just waiting to be asked to smuggle drugs up their rectum, to test the drugs so they can spot a drug dealer's chicanery?), which you'd most likely be murdered for doing if caught by your employers.

Moreover, since most of these couriers are just random people randomly picked at some random public location (to ensure they can't rat anyone out if airport security gets suspicious and detains them) how might they know what their payment should be for transporting a given drug? If you're being offered $20,000 to take a few rectangular blocks of unknown powder from A to B, are you really going to challenge the offerers (who outnumber you and most likely each have a gun or two), and muster up the temerity to demand what you feel to be the more fair and equitable $25,000? No. You'd do as you're told and keep your thoughts, questions, inquiries, or concerns to yourself.

wow - so you can make money out of drugs.......it will never stop until they legalise it all.

Nom de Plume said:

Most people can't find a decent pound of weed in California for less than $2,000.

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It's hard for growers to make much money at 2000 a pound. I don't see how you could do it where i live, at least with HPS lights, without stealing electricity.

garbagegutz said:

wow - so you can make money out of drugs.......it will never stop until they legalise it all.

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Why do you say "wow" like that? Is being overworked, underpaid, and humiliated while toiling in the mud and going nowhere as an expendable wasting-away wage-slave, poor and pitiable peon, or depressed and dissatisfied desk jockey a more ethical, meaningful, or worthwhile vocation than peddling proscribed drugs? That is to say, is mindlessly following the rules to one's detriment more commendable than breaking them for one's benefit?

If drugs were decriminalized tomorrow, millions of people would be out of a job and thrown into poverty. And, like with everything else legalized, only the top 0.00001% will ever see 99% of the profit.