U.S. cocaine supplies flatten out 11 years after Plan Colombia, 3 years after Mérida
For the first time in a couple of years, the U.S. government has come up with new estimates of the average price and purity of a gram of cocaine sold on U.S. streets.
Since 2007, Bush and Obama administration officials had been hailing a spike in U.S. cocaine prices. According to the law of supply and demand, a price increase, or purity decrease, means that the illegal drug has become scarcer. Officials attributed this scarcity to Plan Colombia and the Mexican government’s U.S.-supported campaign against drug cartels.
Unfortunately, though, the new data show that the progress of three years ago has stalled, or even reversed slightly. The average price of $164.91 per gram recorded in July-September 2010 was the lowest recorded since the spike began in mid-2008.
It is not clear what caused prices to shoot up between the second and third quarters of 2008, nor is it clear what has caused prices since then to settle more or less at their current levels.
This chart comes from the Justice Department’s National Drug Intelligence Center, which just released its latest annual report (PDF).