Prohibition of any type of drug is always an exercise in stupidity!

The war on drugs is an abject failure on every conceivable level...
God job, you misguided dickbombs!

Wavels

Apr 28, 2007 12:00 am US/Eastern
Cocaine Purer And Cheaper Despite Drug War

(AP) BOGOTA, Colombia Cocaine prices in the United States have dropped and the drug's purity increased, despite years of effort and nearly $5 billion spent by the U.S. government to combat Colombia's drug industry, the White House drug czar acknowledged in a letter to a key senator.

The drug czar, John Walters, wrote Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, that retail cocaine prices fell by 11 percent from February 2005 to October 2006, to about $135 per gram of pure cocaine — hovering near the same levels since the early 1990s. In 1981, when the U.S. government began collecting data, a gram of pure cocaine fetched $600.

The purity of this cocaine, meanwhile, has “trended somewhat toward former levels,” as well, Walters said in the letter, citing data from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Colombia supplies 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States. Declining prices and rising purity could also suggest weakening demand, but several household and school-based surveys show that America's cocaine consumption has barely budged since 2000, and demand in Europe has increased.

Colombia's president, Alvaro Uribe, is set to meet with President Bush at the White House on Wednesday to discuss U.S. support for Plan Colombia, the anti-narcotics and counterinsurgency program that has cost American taxpayers more than $4 billion since 2000.

Walters' letter to Grassley, the Republican co-chair of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, was sent in January in response to a request from the senator. It was made available to The Associated Press by the Washington Office on Latin America, a liberal lobby group.

U.S. officials have insisted repeatedly that Plan Colombia is reducing the quality and availability of to American users.

But Grassley, in an e-mailed statement to the AP, said the new data is “all the proof that anybody needs” that the White House drug office “has gotten quite good at spinning the numbers, but cooking the books doesn't help our efforts to curb cocaine and heroin production and consumption.”

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said senior U.S. Embassy officials gave him older, more encouraging data during a visit to Bogota in March — two months after the drug czar quietly released his more downbeat appraisal.

“We've given this program a chance to work and clearly this is not producing the results we were promised,” McGovern said. “Cocaine is priced as low and purity is as high as it was before Plan Colombia began six years and $5 billion ago.”

Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told the AP that Walters would not comment on the letter but Lemaitre described it as “an accurate reflection of our agency's thoughts on the issue.”

In November 2005, Walters announced that cocaine prices had risen by 19 percent and purity had dropped by about the same. He touted the development as a sign that the United States had turned the corner in the drug war. Drug policy experts rejected his assertions at the time, and Grassley called for his dismissal.

“When the data show a brief rise in cocaine prices, the drug czar holds a high-profile press conference,” said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington-based Center for International Policy. “But when the trend goes back down again, the drug czar sends it in a letter to one senator. Why is that?”

wjz.com - Cocaine Purer And Cheaper Despite Drug War

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If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.
~ Frank Zappa ~

Liberty means responsibility, that is why most men dread it.
~George Bernard Shaw~

Wavels, I don't normally agree with your posts, but the drug war is as bad as the Iraq war, maybe a few thousand less killed but many more in prison.

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Wow, only $40 a gram here =\

That computes to over 1100 an oz. 140 an 1/8th, I guess that's not too steep. In my heyday I was getting Kilos for 12,000 and making bank. I was selling Oz.s for 700 and that was without stepping on them more than 25%. I let my Oz salesmen do the foxtrot and everyone was happy. Sometimes I never touched them, only when I'd had a few large partys, but mostly I just passed on the pure. That blue tinted cristaline from columbia was the best, Aahh, the good old days. Everything you read here is a figment of my imagination and never happened. There, a disclaimer! are you happy now?

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Life is good, the water is sweet. The ground keeps moving beneath my feet.

Every totalitarian government has had to create an internal enemy in order for the people to willingly give up thier liberties. In Nazi Germany, the enternal enemy was the Jew. America's "Jew" is the drug user.

Vi

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Liberals are people that will believe anything twice.

There is a lot of truth in your analogy of convenient scapegoats, Vi!

Med, I guess I should say welcome back?
I enjoy serious debate and, IMO, about half of the time your posts do not appear to be serious....I have no interest in name calling contests!

But of course I totally reject your notion of the Iraq war in comparison with the WOD! One is morally justifiable, and the other is morally hollow!

__________________
If you wind up with a boring, miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest or some guy on TV telling you how to do your shit, then YOU DESERVE IT.
~ Frank Zappa ~

Liberty means responsibility, that is why most men dread it.
~George Bernard Shaw~