Steve Reads

I periodically see Mark A.R. Kleiman cite the price of heroin or cocaine, so it occurred to me that I should try to find historical statistics about those prices. If the drug war were succeeding, the price would have increased.

So I emailed Professor Kleiman, who very graciously pointed me to Jon Caulkins, who in turn suggested that I look at a White House report on drug price and purity (cached). Skip right ahead to Figure 1 (expected price of cocaine, 1981 to 2003), Figure 4 (cocaine purity, same time interval), Figure 8 (prices of one gram of cocaine in various U.S. cities), Figure 10 (price of crack), and perhaps most astonishingly Figure 17 (price of heroin; thumbnail of the chart at right — click to expand). I’ll give you the executive summary of that last chart, since it’s the most jaw-dropping: the real (inflation-adjusted) price of one gram of heroin has fallen 82% since 1981, and the trend has been continuous. Any betting person would look at that trend and expect another 82% drop in the next 20 years.

Meanwhile the DEA budget has risen fivefold over the same interval (tenfold in nominal dollars, deflated 2x for inflation). That doesn’t count military operations in South America, the costs of trying and imprisoning nonviolent offenders, the decimation of African-American communities, and on and on.

If there has been a war that’s been demonstrably less successful over the same span of time, I’d love to hear it.

None of this is to say, necessarily, that complete decriminalization is the answer. In fact Kleiman himself very patiently made the point in Against Excess that not all drugs are created equal: there is a cocaine problem, and there is a crack problem, and there is a heroin problem and an alcohol problem, but they are not all the same problem. Different drugs require different solutions. Like most sensible Americans, Kleiman advocates softer policies toward marijuana users.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like any of the presidential candidates will move to decriminalize what 1/3 of us have used.

P.S.: Stephanie mentioned that maybe it’s a good thing that heroin prices have gone down, because now people don’t need to steal in order to buy it. Whether that’s true depends on the price elasticity of heroin demand. It’s a point that Kleiman addresses somewhere in Against Excess. I believe he says in there that heroin is dangerous for a different reason than crack is dangerous, which is why the drug-control regimes for the one will have to be different from the other. Crack cocaine is dangerous because it will kill you quickly. Heroin is dangerous because it will cause you to commit crime.