The United Nations Is Overpaying for Cocaine
Today’s top news story emanates from the 320-page, UN World Drug Report 2009. It’s pretty dense, boring, run of the mill stuff, but one graphic caught my eye. The UN is overpaying for cocaine.
Who at the UN Office of Drugs and Crime is paying $120 a gram for yayo? Is that a government salary thing? TDR wouldn’t blow more than, like $45 a gram. Admittedly, it’s stepped-on Craigslist baby laxative, but you have to have some scruples.
Does San Francisco just pay wholesale prices? Please raise your hand if you paid $120 for a gram in 2008.
The UN’s source is America’s largely discredited Office of National Drug Control Policy, and their paper The Price and Purity of Illicit Drugs: 1981-2007. Washington, DC, July 2008 as well as something called STRIDE data.
STRIDE data comes from a program run by the DEA and subject to numerous sampling errors. When a cop overpays for blow during some sting, it shows up in STRIDE data, if it shows up at all. Here’s the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education paper on STRIDE’s data problem. Shocker!
[UNODC World Drug Report 2009] (9 meg .pdf)
