In 1971 Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, famously declared the “War on Drugs”. Well, here we are, forty years later, so I thought I’d better give you all a bit of an update on how that’s been working out.

The good news… the War on Drugs is over.

The bad news is… drugs won.

In these posts, I will talk about who won and who lost and share some ideas about some possible solutions to the drug problem that we face.

Who won?

Do you recognize this man? He’s Amado Carillo Fuentes. At the time of his death, on an operating table in a hospital in Mexico, he is reputed to have been worth $25 Billion. No, that is not a typo, it is billion.

And he is not alone. Carlos Lehder, Dawood Ibrahim, Joacquim Guzman (El Chapo), Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar are just five well know drug world figures who, in their lifetimes, amassed about $15 billion between them. Guzman even made it into Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people.

These men keep details of their operations very secret so it is likely that there are many other billionaire drug dealers whom we will never know about. But how did they get to be so rich?

A kilo of poppies, purchased in Afghanistan,  costs between $130 – $180. In order to make a kilo of heroin, you have to buy poppies and refine them, a fairly simple chemical process that yields a kilo of heroin for a total cost of around $2,500. That heroin will sell on the streets for about $10 a “point”, which is one tenth of a gram. That $2,500 kilo has a street value of $100,000! A four thousand percent markup. Approximately the same metrics apply to cocaine. Illegal drugs are by far the most profitable commodities in the world.

In a normal business, prices are governed by the marketplace. If I want to sell a commodity into an established market, I sell at a lower price than my competitors. The end result is that commodities reach a stable price at which all the competitors can make reasonable profits. If competitors price fix, they are subject to regulation by various government bodies. In the drug trade, it is normal for one gang to control the retailing in a specific geographic area. If a competitor wants to come into that area and compete on price they will likely end up on a slab in the morgue. Thus retail prices are maintained and astronomical profits are assured.

An interesting aside: the drug trade has a similarity to organizations like MacDonald’s and WalMart. The people at the top are very wealthy (the Walton family are worth some $90 billion between them) while the people who actually sell the goods to the public are minimum wage earners. In his excellent book Freakonomics, Steven Levitt points out that the average street level drug dealer makes less than the minimum wage.

In the War on Drugs, it is very clear who won big time. In my next post, I will talk about some of the harm associated with drugs.

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5 Comments

PENNY · June 11, 2011 at 8:20 pm

If drugs were legalized, i wonder if the number of addicts would increase.

Michael Kingswood · June 14, 2011 at 7:19 am

Penny,

Probably not. But you sure wouldn’t have people being killed left and right over the drug trade. It’d be out in the open, not run by gangsters, and we wouldn’t waste trillions of dollars in a vain attempt to stop it. Sounds like a win all around, to me.

    El G · October 1, 2014 at 11:14 pm

    I suppose the use of party drugs and hallucinogens might increase and become more ‘socially acceptable’ substances to use at parties, nightclubs, et cetera. Look at alcohol for example; one would not refute the fact that the most commonly consumed drug is found on every curb-side bottle shop, family restaurant and in Christmas cakes (although, the alcohol would chemically burnt off) for crying out loud- and the world is bursting at the seams full of its ‘users’ who do so, simply because they CAN.

The book that changed my mind about reviewing | Robert P. French, indie author · February 17, 2012 at 4:53 pm

[…] Firstly, Little Men is about the drug trade, a subject that is the backdrop to my own novel, Junkie. Through great story telling, Yax takes the reader through the genesis and rise of the Ecstasy trade in London in the 1990s. (Yes, the E in E Book stands for Ecstacy not Electronic). Starting with the death of a high-profile celeb in the club scene, the book takes us through the machinations that lead to his murder and has a great surprise twist in the ending. It also supports my belief that the prohibition of drugs is a stupid and futile waste of time, money and lives, that does nothing but keep the drug gangs rich. (See…) […]

The harm done by illegal drugs | ROBERT P. FRENCH · February 23, 2019 at 11:17 am

[…] the heels of my previous post, CNN published a report Organized crime won the war on drugs and this was in the LA Times: U.S. […]

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