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Analyzing Silk Road 2.0
An anonymous reader writes: After a recent article about breaking the CAPTCHA on the latest incarnation of Silk Road (the darknet-enabled drug market place), Darryl Lau decided to investigate exactly what narcotics people were buying and selling online. He found roughly 13,000 separate listings. Some sellers identify the country they're in, and the top six are the U.S., Australia, England, Germany, and the Netherlands, and Canada. The site also has a bunch of product reviews. If you assume that each review comes from a sale, and multiply that by the listed prices, reviewed items alone represent $20 million worth of business. Lau also has some interesting charts, graphs, and assorted stats. MDMA is the most listed and reviewed drug, and sellers are offering it in quantities of up to a kilogram at a time. The average price for the top 1000 items is $236. Prescription drugs represent a huge portion of the total listings, though no individual prescription drugs have high volume on their own.
I'd suggest that the order size is determined by to competing factors:
a) Reduce the risk of being caught by making fewer large orders
b) Reduce the loss when a delivery goes astray by making smaller orders
Which leads to the unexpected conclusion that when the police get better at intercepting orders and the drug dealers become more reliable the size of the orders increases.
Aspirin still costs money, even in generic store brands.
My understanding is that total synthesis of opiates is possible but remains complicated and low yield, so you still need to obtain raw opium for it to be cost effective to produce opiate derivitives like morphine. Factor in a global supply chain, FDA-certified production and the price you pay at the pharmacy for generic oxycodone is probably priced accurately.
If it was available retail I would probably expect raw material excise taxes and consumption taxes to double the current pharmacy pricing.
In theory pot should be cheap like most agricultural commodities if produced at industrial scale but AFAIK in Colorado it remains curiously expensive. Not sure if this is due to taxes, the legal-but-not-federally legal status that results in all kinds of extra transaction costs for businesses involved in its production and sale or due to the demand and associated costs with producing many varities of a premium product through "artisinal" production methods.
Drugs are an evil scourge upon humanity!
Drugs are destroying the moral fiber of our citizens!
Yeah right.. I've been hooked on opiates for 15 years now. I work 65 hours a week, I pay my taxes, I keep to myself, and my morals are still intact last time I checked. I do it legally by going to my local Methadone clinic. You see, I love pain killers and I don't want or need help and nobody is going to stop me from taking them.
I don't blame you for your opinion. You just like many others are the result of years of drugs are evil propaganda spread by the cartels. They do this because legal drugs are bad for business.