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Not the same here. The seized drugs are already processed and ready for sale to the public. There is no millions of dollars of labour required to split 2000kg i
by celticninja 6y ago
Not the same here. The seized drugs are already processed and ready for sale to the public. There is no millions of dollars of labour required to split 2000kg into smaller and smaller packages to end up with 2,000,000 x 1g amounts.
This is closer to entire wafers of chips being seized, which require some work to turn into a commodity for public consumption i.e single CPUs, but that is a lot less work, and less technical too, than creating the wafers in the first place.
- darawk 6y agoThere are millions of dollars of additional distribution risk, though.
- loeg 6y agoThese are just differences in degree rather than in kind. There is labor involved in processing the bulk powder: any cutting the seller wants to perform, partitioning into street sale sizes, and of course the actual sales, which is risky and time consuming. I think you are probably right that the ratio of labor and other costs favors Intel in this comparison, but I think arguing about the specific analogy here is an unhelpful tangent. The point is: published prices that ignore all of the costs involved in making the sales is a fiction.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoUm, why would cut your stuff at bulk level? It just becomes harder to transport. Cutting is mostly done by edge dealers rather than drug lords.
- loeg 6y agoI did not intend to imply that, just that it may happen somewhere between 2000 kgs and the end customer.
- jacquesm 6y agoIf the authorities wanted to inflate the numbers they could quote the weight of the cut product instead. This is a pointless discussion, the street value is what people can relate to, that's why it is mentioned.
- kingofpandora 6y agoThis is actually a great point ... How many readers can relate to wholesale drug prices vs how many know how much a hit of coke - at street prices - costs?
- jacquesm 6y agoUnfortunately, too many.
- Udik 6y agoThe substance in itself must be extremely cheap to produce. What you're paying is the mark-up at each additional step in the logistics chain; and the mark-up is huge because instead of rewarding labour it's rewarding risk. You can imagine that each intermediary might multiply the price by a factor of 5, and you can imagine how many steps there are between a container full of cocaine and the 1-gram doses sold on the street.
- celticninja 6y agoA factor of 5 seems too much. If a kg at retail is £50k, let's say £60k when cut to 80%, this would mean the dealer buying it at approx £12k per kg and that middle layer would be buying it at £2k per kg. The price rises at each level but not by the factor you suggest, it's more likely to be by a factor less than 1 for each level.
- colechristensen 6y agoThere are though. Layers and layers and layers of distribution adding huge markups to the next in line, with lots of overhead in idle time, transportation, legal, losses, territory defense, recruiting, etc. etc. The real value of the labor is what is actually getting paid, and most of that value comes up in distribution.
- celticninja 6y agoThis was a bust of 2000kg in the Netherlands, so this product was due to be sold in Europe. From there to end user I would estimate 3 to 4 levels of distribution. The first layer is splitting it into approx 10kg amounts, the next into 1kg amounts, then into ounces and the final stage is retail of between 0.5 and 3g. So yes there is labour and distribution to account for but there are not too many layers of it and actually the main bulk of the work in distribution has been done by the time it is in the Netherlands, at which point, in the Schengen zone, the danger/difficulty with transport over country borders is significantly reduced.