Valuing drugs at street value when they’re still at a lower value part of the supply chain makes for a good headline. But it’s really not an accurate portrayal of the real cost. I’d be interested to know how much cocaine this was based on how much cocaine is produced annually.
What’s the story, some pot grower in the early 2000’s with two plants was busted with $10m+ of street value product? After they weighed the plants, soil, roots and container of course. Minimum life sentence too, probably.
Sorry it was a long time ago. I think it was on reddit. Guessing Colorado as early days of legalisation but this is news article from years ago. It might have been a state not fed thing too as I was thinking about it after and that makes more sense logically.
I also tried to find/link when I wrote comment but I couldn't find it again. But 100% read about this some years back and the weight/value cops used as damages used in court.
Sure, and the taxpayers pay the bill every time a victim successfully sues or settles with a police department, too. So what?
At the end of the day cops get away with all this shit because the taxpayers support them, whether tacitly or explicitly. Hitting them in the pocketbook is a perfectly valid tactic. Maybe once they have no money left for high school football, they'll wake up and demand that their government reign in the out of control cops. And if they don't, well, they fully deserve to pay every single victim.
It’s simple, get rid of qualified immunity. Set reasonable standards and hold them personably and financially responsible when they deviate. And while I’m on my internet soapbox, civil asset forfeiture laws gotta go too. That shit is plain theft and violates the 4th.
What were they sued for? The feds illegally taking their contraband?
You can't get contraband returned, even if it was illegally seized, and I don't think you could sue for the value of it?
Who knows though? I was in jail with someone who was there because he bought some heroin off a dealer and only handed over $20 instead of $40, and then ran off. The dealer then phoned the police to report his stolen heroin and the buyer got busted.
I think a Kilo in Mexico is $5K, less in bulk Kilos. Selling on the street in US that Kilo stretches to $80k or so.
So I would imagine the cartels running the actual coca production sites that sell to the people selling for $5k… is probably $1k or so, $2.5k at the very most.
There’s reasons Chapo and such had literally billions in cash just sitting in warehouses being eaten by rats. They make a looot of money
"The Accountant's Story: Inside the Violent World of the Medellín Cartel", Roberto Escobar.
> I know that Pablo was earning so much cash that each year we would simply write off approximately 10 percent of our money because the rats would eat it or it would be damaged beyond use by water and dampness.
Oh Ill one up that. Escobar in a rough spot literally burned millions of dollars to stay warm. "In addition, while his family was on the run in 1992–93, Escobar reportedly burned $2 million in order to keep his daughter warm."
I really just can’t believe they didn’t invest in some… cats…
Like, if there’s ever a description of zero fucks given, I think it would have something to do with letting that much money get ruined by rats.
I see multiple other replies of the citations so I won’t repost
@jdavis703 I’m doubtful. I don’t think you’re aware of the sheer ruthlessness of high level narcos… they will brutally kill a lot of people over the smallest grievances, theft of petty cash included. Nobody is stealing %’s of billions of stored money & getting away with it.
Eaten by rats sounds like an excuse thieves would tell their narco-terrorist boss. It’s like kids having their homework eaten by a dog right before the deadline. That’s to say, it’s likely a euphemism turned urban legend.
I dont want to disclose my background exactly here, suffice to say I was not involved in any illegal activity, but others I knew were, and rats and just rotting cash really are genuine concerns affecting large sums of stored or buried money.
Pay $20 for a Rubbermaid tub to protect hundreds of thousands of $$ seems like a reasonable tradeoff, except maybe it's hard to come by that many where they're hiding the money?
I confess I'm extremely ignorant in terms of what it takes to actually store money in bulk. But it seems like literally anything would be better than just letting it rot.
They often do actually! The pelican cases are quite popular for that purpose. But, like all things, they aren't totally fool-proof. Leaks happen. Even a small air-leak means moisture has an opportunity to condense and penetrate into the container and accumulate. Cracks happen, debris along the gasket, etc. etc.
Actually, a more common failure mode than rotting or rats is... simply forgetting where you buried it!
In Narcos, something similar happens. Some money that was buried was found by a farmer, some was lost, some rotted... Escobar preceded to violently murder the people that brought him the excuse.
Location matters, cocaine in Miami is cheaper (some might say on a multiple of 20+) than cocaine in NYC or SF. I only know this because my uncle and cousins used to run drugs for the Columbians.
Yeah, I was going to say Miami and Texas are likely the lowest. The Texas border smuggling is pretty real, as is the various ways of quickly getting to South Florida/Miami. Southern California border is nowhere near as bad as Texas in terms of smuggling
LA is roughly $80/g, or it was 3ish years ago. I’d say it’s still around that.
Going into the MidWest of Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philly, & North into Seattle, Portland & co is where it’s heading North of $80/g. $150/g in some of the mostly dead middle of nowhere but still metro cities then becomes a thing.
I can imagine if you know a guy in NYC you could get $40/g or cheaper as massive loads come in private yachts and stuff… but average bloke is paying somewhat high
Right now a kilo (bird) is 20k. Ounces are $2000, 8balls are $200-250. Grams are $100.
So a kilo stretching to 80k through the supply chain makes sense. That would put the final street dealer of that kilo buying on average a half ounce. That sounds about right to me.
Imagine if they were dumped into the ocean how good of a headline that would be.
"The drugs were dumped into the ocean. The ocean, weighing 4.9x10E21 pounds, according to Google, means we just stopped 4.9x10E21 (plus a few) pounds of drugs from reaching the public. As we all know, this is the official standard measurement procedure used by police in the US.
Cocaine has a street price estimate of $120 per gram on average according to Google. Because of how averages and math work (no source needed), we can just double that to $240 per gram to get the highest price out of the average.
To convert grams to pounds, we just multiply by 453.59237. This means 1 pound of cocaine costs $108,862.17.
4.9x10E21 pounds, multiplied by $108,862.17 per pound means we just stopped $533,424,633,000,000,000,000,000,000 worth of cocaine from going to the general public. This is the low estimate, because it does not even include the weight and price of the original drugs or the shipping container it was in. We truly are godly and just heroes on this day."
So twenty tons (the amount of coke they stole) is one container since this was on a container ship [1] since a 40' container is registered at 26.5 to 30 tons. [2]
This article mentions the extensive use of "narco phones". Because the seizure happened in 2019, it's likely that this is related to Operation Trojan Shield/Ironside and the "ANOM" honeypot phones. These operations took place from 2018-2021. [1]
Should definitely be legalized and heavily regulated. Can’t really believe it’s the year 2022 and we’re still treating drugs with the 20th Century morals.
However I suspect the drug dealers won’t just disappear, but move on to other substances. Hopefully the market for those will be smaller but I have no idea. Thinking of synthetic drugs.
Ending alcohol prohibition effectively ended bootlegging I believe.
And for the most part, synthetic drugs are a reaction to prohibition, either to stay ahead of substances that have been scheduled as illegal or to provide drugs that can be made in-region to avoid the risk of smuggling. There is little organic demand for such drugs, and it would be much safer if people had access to pure forms of their drug of choice, i.e. cocaine and heroin
The newer "synthetic" (not all are actually fully synthetic) are partially a reaction to prohibition, at least most of the underground availability is a reaction. Some of these compounds have genuinely unique and interesting effects such as the auditory hallucinations of DiPT.
We really need to be able to explore these compounds and their pharmacodynamics, they can teach us so much about the brain
Synthetics should be legal too. There won't be anything for them to move to if we actually move forward with legalization and regulation of psychoactives.
I'm pretty well versed about hearts. My ticker probably has a couple to maybe five years left at the current rate. It kind of makes you read a lot about them
Isn't crack made from cocaine? Didn't crack destroy many communities, neighborhoods, cities, families, etc...? Aren't we as a society still struggling with the long term effects of this crisis?
What's to stop a similar kind of crisis if cocaine was legalized? Why wouldn't a significant number of users turn to its more formidable (my assumption) and potent form if cocaine was legalized?
Just to clarify, I'm not arguing that cocaine shouldn't be legalized, just genuinely curious.
Crack is a form of cocaine that survives heating so you can vaporize it. Chemically, the freebase rather than a salt compound. As with other drugs, the inhalation route is probably more addictive. It's certainly faster onset and more euphoric. You could very easily make crack cocaine from regular cocaine in your kitchen with cheap supplies. One would have to truly enforce a cocaine ban to effectively prohibit crack availability.
So what happened to crack? That's a fair question. It's much less commonly used today than 30 years ago. My impression is that the American legal changes probably had some influence in suppressing it. Laws which make it much cheaper and safer to hold cocaine rather than crack obviously dis-incentivize producing the freebase form until the final consumer. And a new user is unlikely to go through the hassle of attempting to perfect cooking crack with their first gram of coke. So a simple influence there about the method of consuming the drug may have done a lot of the work. Here in Canada, we had no legal changes in the 80s/90s during the so-called crack epidemic. (We treat crack cocaine like cocaine, legally.) Crack's use waxed and waned with its popularity in American culture. The crack epidemic is also part of a much larger story about North American urban decay and shifting economic patterns. The conditions that gave birth to it are no longer true, so one wouldn't expect it to necessarily repeat.
At least not in the same form. The epidemic of cheap inhaled stimulant abuse you are worried about is arguably happening right now with methamphetamine, anyway.
Proper legalization and regulation would mean it wouldn’t be sold as crack and wouldn’t have the potential to contain fentanyl, eliminating much of the physiological risk. Proper drug legalization would also divert funds currently used for drug enforcement (swat teams, dea, private prisons, etc) to drug treatment facilities accessible to those who need it.
In general the negative effects of most any drug are best fought with education, regulation, and treatment, not prohibition. Cocaine and crack were illegal in the 80s and 90s when the crack epidemic raged, so obviously legal status was not preventing such crises in the first place. The important factors there were more around support of impoverished communities than tepid laws that serve only to further the cycle of social disruption caused by petty arrests and adversarial tension between police and downtrodden communities and the empowerment of gangs by creating a thriving black market.
The struggles we’re having related to crack or other drugs are related to a great many things aside from the drug itself, prohibition itself causing some of the largest problems on a global scale. What if Mexico could have cocaine as a legitimate export? Would we have violent cartels or legitimate businesses that improve the community (though surely they’d also leach as businesses are wont to do, but surely less violently than illegal organizations)? I’d posit the latter, though the transition from one to the other won’t be smooth.
> Proper legalization and regulation would mean it wouldn’t be sold as crack
I didn't mean to imply that it would. But from what I "know", crack is very easy to "cook" from cocaine, and is much more potent and addictive in this form. Throw cocaine in the microwave, something, something, and you have crack... So what's to stop anyone with a microwave from producing their own crack from legally regulated and obtained cocaine, and why would they want to do that instead of just using the cocaine as is? Were you suggesting that bc it's purer crack (nothing added to increase potency or mass), it's not an issue?
I also understand how crack was weaponized against certain communities, minorities, vulnerable and "undesirable" groups of citizens...
but again, I just wonder why and if individuals would start to synthesize their own crack if cocaine was legalized.
The main motivator for doing so would be to sell it more cheaply to those who can’t afford the cocaine sold elsewhere as crack requires lower dosages for effect. You’ll find this in patterns of cocaine use already, the affluent use cocaine and the impoverished are more likely to use crack. I don’t think anything changes on that front with legalization except you trade arrests for outreach. I don’t see why we should expect demand for crack would suddenly grow and become more rampant with legalization, I’d expect the opposite, but in either case the solution is outreach not prohibition.
Thanks for taking the time to explain... I have no doubt that prohibition, after demonstrating years of failure on a catastrophic scale, will not continue to work. However I wanting to get an idea of some of the consequences we might expect to see if cocaine were to be legalized/regulated.
> Coca-Cola includes a coca leaf extract as an ingredient prepared by a Stepan Company plant in Maywood, New Jersey. The facility, which had been known as the Maywood Chemical Works, was purchased by Stepan in 1959. The plant is the only commercial entity in the United States authorized by the Drug Enforcement Administration to import coca leaves, which come primarily from Peru via the National Coca Company. Approximately 100 metric tons of dried coca leaf are imported each year. The cocaine-free extract is sold to The Coca-Cola Company for use in soft drinks, while the cocaine is sold to Mallinckrodt, a pharmaceutical firm, for medicinal purposes.
Bloodletting was a common therapeutic meassure for a millenia, until a few centuries ago. In other words, something being considered adquate in the past says nothing about its safety by modern standards.
I think research has already shown that the benefits of legalization outweigh those of criminalization. When something is legal, then people can be presented with treatment options and be given safe unaltered drugs. There are groups that literally go around passing out needles to drug addicts because it has been found to actually prevent more deaths than those caused by harm of using dirty needles.
Before legalization, maybe consider decriminalization, like in Portugal.
It is not the same thing. Drugs are still illegal in Portugal, and trafficking is a crime, but personal use is not a criminal offense anymore. If you get caught, you can get fined, especially if you are uncooperative, but you won't face a criminal trial and you won't go to jail. But more importantly, they can suggest treatment options if you are addicted.
You won't get safe unadulterated drugs but you can get testing kits. In festivals, you can find booths where they will check your drugs for free.
I don't know how I feel about legalizing all drugs. Heroin is nasty stuff, even if you get the good one, and I would rather not encourage using stimulants stronger than caffeine in our overworked society.
10-20 years ago you could get adderall from any kid on the block, it was similar to the opioid situation where the markets were flooded and overprescribed.
Made me wonder what the real length would be. Per this random website [0], a 5/8th inch rubber-vinyl hose weighs 2.52 oz/foot, A.K.A. 234.39 g/m. Therefore, 19.76 tons of cocaine (or, you know, whatever) in hose-equivalent would measure 76.48 km.
It's my understanding that the arrival port usually does inspections and stuff.
From that, it would seem it's probably easy to get anything onto a cargo ship - simply buy a container and put whatever you like into it. Why did they have to bother with the speedboats and nets?
And at the same time... How did they plan to land these drugs? Their whole scheme doesn't cover inspections at the arrival port.
First part of your question, the loading ports in S. America are watched very closely according to at least one documentary I watched.
Second part, I wondered that myself and this is what I came up with: I'm assuming since this was a Euro operation and they were busted in Philadelphia on their way to Europe, the plan was to unload onto speed boats before pulling into port in Europe.
Yea it does, I knew a guy at my last job (Charter) who would drive stuff from Chicago to Denver, twice a year and get paid $20k each time. It was always with a one way u-haul rental and the cash was delivered to him weeks after the drive. He asked if I wanted to ride along and I couldn't say no quick enough.
Persecuting people for the substances they decide to consume is what harms people more than drugs themselves.
If people had a place they could easily purchase tested and regulated drugs we wouldn't have so many overdoses. In the past most overdoses were produced by changes in potency of the supply due to differences in cutting or manufacture. Now alongside that issue is the one of fentanyl and analogs being added to the supply.
Regulation would solve these issues instead of ruining people's lives with punishment based on puritanical ideals
Yep I’ve always thought it quite silly that the USA is spending/has spent something like billions to keep drugs away from Americans.
Yet if you go to any high school or college across the country you can still buy whatever drug you want lol.
If a pimply 16 year old skater kid can get drugs after all this effort maybe we should give up. It’s not like anyone who wants to do them can’t… look at all the overdoses
Most drugs are highly addictive, and when theoretical legal supplies deny addicts access to them, they'll turn to illegal means. No matter how clean the substance is.
Okay so if its legal why are they getting denied? We already have extremely addictive substances that are legal (ethanol and nicotine) and nobody is really being denied those but people still smuggle them across state lines from places with lower prices (sometimes to sell for profit)
And of course then if someone is attempting to obtain something which they are denied by law, it is no longer legal so by definition it is illegal
The statement you make is rather circular and doesn't say much.
This is an assumption about a system that does not exist. There is no framework for evaluating people like this and we don't know what a legal system would look like. We can't analyze a system that does not exist, but we can look at our current framework for alcohol and tobacco. I'm not saying these are optimal either, the current system does have issues but making things entirely illegal/prohibited would not solve these issues in any way. (Cannabis is usually readily available in most high schools in the US)
There will always be the risk of kids going through an intermediary for substances like what happens with alcohol and tobacco now, but basically never do you see people being denied their purchases. There are circumstances in our current system where an adult goes I to a store and is not allowed to purchase because they have a minor with them in the store. In these cases there are many more stores they can go to, usually within walking distance. This is essentially a non issue.
For mental health on the other hand its the same way, you can overdose on alcohol and there are depressed people who attempt suicide using alcohol (usually combined with other substances) and these people I have never heard of being denied their purchases. The only way I could see a denial happen is if they got a little too personal with the cashier and told them how they feel or what they plan to do.
There's not much reason to smuggle it because you can just set up a legal business to buy or grow and sell tobacco or make liquor or other alcohol products. There is some smuggling that happens to get around high prices or local bans but this isn't anywhere close to the scale of the legal market.
Tobacco smuggling is big business in Australia. Mostly because a regular pack of cigarettes costs $40 these days, compared to $15 for a pack of bootlegged Indonesian Marlboros.
For the 2020 financial year, Australia imported 11,064 tonnes of legally cleared (taxed) tobacco. The government estimates there was 770 tonnes of untaxed tobacco successfully grown/imported, or 6.2% of all tobacco smoked in Australia. [1]
Recently a guy was handed almost 2 years of house arrest for importing 10 million cigarettes [2], which is roughly 10 tonnes, give or take. There's plenty more cases where entire containers full of cigarettes have been seized.
Which are a substantial part of the cost for both alcohol and tobacco.
When I was an undergrad in Virginia (home of Phillip Morris), a pack of cigarettes was selling for about $3.50 in today’s dollars - and that's for a brand like Marlboro or Camel. IIRC retail in NYC is about $20 these days. That’s a huge incentive.
Corrupt cops pay off the high level traffickers to get the occasional tip off, take out a few annoying lower level idiots they’re sick of dealing with.
Also undercover agents, but they’re only picking off these intermediaries too, not the manufacturers.
