The junkies in LA got a belated Christmas gift this year from the Afghan poppy farmers. According to the LA times, and various bloggers, grams of highly pure Afghan heroin are now trading at $90 in LA.
“That’s about a dime per pure milligram, compared with $2.50 a pure milligram in New York during the “French Connection” days. For a naive user, 5mg of heroin is a hefty dose, so your first heroin experience is now available for less than the price of a candy bar.”
That comes from Mark Kleiman’s blog.
Apart from the fact that this heroin is more potent than what was previously on the market, it also goes to show that international efforts to eradicate growth and to halt opium trafficking– narco-terrorism as some may say– has been far from successful.
It is a $2.3 billion business for Afghanistan, quite a hefty chunck of their GDP.
The political question is how to go about attempting to stabilize a country overtaken by Taliban, while not eliminating the sole source of income to the people barely scraping by… and this has not yet been answered.
