Connecting the Dots: ONDCP's Reluctant Update on Cocaine Price and ...

April 23, 2007

Key Points of WOLA's report, published April 23, 2007 and written by John Walsh:
• Preliminary U.S. government data, quietly disclosed by ONDCP, indicate that cocaine’s price per
pure gram on U.S. streets fell in 2006, while its purity increased.
• These latest estimates, continuing a 25-year trend, suggest that cocaine supplies are stable or even
increasing.
• This is so despite $31 billion spent on drug interdiction and crop control efforts since 1997,
including $5.4 billion spent in Colombia – the source of 90 percent of cocaine in the United States –
since “Plan Colombia” began in 2000.
• The updated cocaine data fully reverse a short-lived price increase that the White House drug czar’s
office heralded in late 2005. That rise in prices and decline in purity, which received much media
attention at the time, proved to be a less than impressive fluctuation, as skeptics at the time
suggested would be the case.
• The available evidence indicates that cocaine’s continued low and falling prices are driven largely by
ongoing robust cocaine supply, rather than by a slackening or collapse in demand.
• The new cocaine price and purity estimates offer further evidence that the continued U.S. emphasis
on forced crop eradication, with “Plan Colombia” as its most visible and costly centerpiece, has
failed to affect drug supplies at home.

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