Drugs: Deflation Resitant

The DEA is reporting that the rises in the price of cocaine and meth that they first started seeing almost two years ago has been sustained throughout 2008, as well.

From January 2007 to September 2008, the price per pure gram of cocaine increased 89 percent, from $96.61 to $182.73, while purity decreased 32.1 percent, from 67 to 46 percent. During the same timeframe, the price per pure gram of methamphetamine increased over 23 percent, from $148.91 to $184.09, while the purity decreased 8.3 percent, from 57 percent to 52 percent.

I was skeptical of this rise being more than a brief hiatus in the decades-long decline in the price of drugs, but after two years it seems reasonable to attribute this to a more substantial shift in the industry. This also points to the ambiguity of success in the war on drugs: the DEA's findings are unprecedented, but are they a clear-cut sign of improvement? If the price of cocaine is your measure, than we are winning vital battles in the war on drugs. However, if you measure success by limiting the cartels' power to wreak havoc around the world, to take over city governments and cabinet agencies, then our failures have never been more evident, as the previous post suggests. For most of the non-cocaine-consuming public, the second measure is the far more relevant one.