Dr. Walter E. Williams and Dennis Hopper Explain the Cocaine Craze

The book Easy Riders Raging Bulls, the author quotes Dennis Hopper thus:

The cocaine problem in the United States is really because of me. There was no cocaine before Easy Rider on the street. After Easy Rider it was everywhere.

Sadly, I cannot find the television interview where he combines that statement with what he said on Inside The Actor's Studio (skip to 27:14):

In the interview I was thinking about, Hopper said that the original idea Peter Fonda had for Easy Rider involved a marijuana sale.  Hopper thought the pot too bulky for a couple of guys on motorcycles.  He thought of and rejected heroin, because he did not want to promote that drug.  So he went with cocaine because it was expensive in small quantities.

The Dennis Hopper interview was the first thing I thought of when I read this passage in Dr. Walter E. Williams' essay Drugs, Economics, and Liberty.

Which is easier to conceal and transport—a million dollars’ worth of marijuana or a million dollars’ worth of cocaine? Obviously, it’s cocaine because there is far less bulk per dollar of value. Thus one effect of prohibition is the tendency toward increased sales and use of more-concentrated forms of drugs that can include products such as crack cocaine, ice, and meth.

Read more: http://www.fee.org/the_freeman/detail/drugs-economics-and-liberty#comment-739840010#ixzz2FRzZRNw7

Well, in the case of illicit drugs, the more things change, the more things change.  Particularly the price.  In 1969, when Easy Rider was released, cocaine was apparently a very pricey powder which did become more popular from that point forward.  In the early 1980s, the typical price I heard from people I knew who knew about this stuff (usually bragging to others about how financially flush they were) spoke of "$1,200 coke", which I am pretty sure they must have been talking grams.  If it were ounces, that comes out to only $42.33/gram and does not sound like a sum to brag about.

Michael Corbin reported in his story Cocaine Economics in July, 2012 this price regression:

I recently asked a group of ex-offenders who had served time for drug possession or drug distribution about historical trends in the price of cocaine in Baltimore. Those who had sold drugs in the early 1990s agreed that, depending on purity, you could get (or have to pay) as much as $300-$500 for a gram of cocaine.

When I talked to and observed some street level dealers for an Urbanite story last year, it was not uncommon to hear of a gram being sold for $75-$100. There was no way to know about levels of adulteration of the product, which is common, but the price trend was clear nonetheless.

He also quotes a New York Times article:

If there is one number that embodies the seemingly intractable challenge imposed by the illegal drug trade on the relationship between the United States and Mexico, it is $177.26. That is the retail price, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data, of one gram of pure cocaine from your typical local pusher. That is 74 percent cheaper than it was 30 years ago.

As I have written about in the previous two posts, the prices of marijuana, and heroin, especially heroin, have been dropping like a car from Marina Towers into the Chicago River since the 1970s.  Now I discover, the same thing has been going on with cocaine.

If government prohibition enforcement efforts are doing anything at all to the price of these prohibited products, I would like to see where that affect shows up.

If the common sense, perfectly logical, theory that prohibition enforcement elevates prices, then without it heroin would be free, or cheaper.  Perhaps given away with every gram of cocaine and both would be thrown in with every pound of high-grade marijuana.

William F. Buckley, Jr. was right about this in one way: The only measurable result of the drug war, as of this writing, is a big bill and thousands of very special people in jail.  The price has been too great.  I disagree with him about the freedom aspect (he did not believe that people were free to put whatever they like into their bodies), but any way, his, mine, or a combination, this drug war has proven to be a fool's errand.