a kilo of pure heroin is about $5,000 in Afghanistan. After it's cut with milk sugar, that's about $300K

Question

street value...recent headlines show heroin deaths on the rise, among a younger crowd..."cheese" heroin, costing 2 bucks a hit, is killing grade school kids in Dallas; Boston is seeing a series of deaths from heroin cut with fentanyl. Heroin is getting so cheap tha dealers are working overtime thinking of ways to process and re-package it the way coke was repackaged as crack in the 80s.

Wherever our armies go, that determines the drugs we see on our streets...heroin when we were in southeast asia, then coke and crack when we were busy in central america, now we're in Afghanistan and heroin is making new inroads...my question:
Should we include the societal costs of the drug scourge as part of the cost of war?

Will, I can't imagine a way to make my meaning clearer, but I'll try. Wherever our armies are stationed, there are a lot of goods transported to support them. That means a lot of cargo transport going there full, and returning empty. Empty transport moving from a place where heroin is $5k/kilo, to the US where it's well over $100k/kilo street value. If you know anything about free market economics, you know it just isn't natural for that transport to return empty.

Chucky, I've not been a drug user for decades. But if you do a bit of research you'll find news stories from 5 years ago, where Colin Powell formally thanked Afghanistan's Taliban leaders for eradicating the cultivation of poppies in that country....we paid them $43 million for that favor. Now word is that Afghanistqan is producing more opium thsan ever, in a country that is militarily sealed off, has no remaining operable airfields their land borders sealed by the U.S. military.But we all know that the opium is not staying in Afghanistan.
Terrorists are profiting from the opium crop, certainly. But they are not the only ones.

Answer 1

thanks for the info.very interesting.

Answer 2

Viet Nam turned many of our soldiers into heroin addicts and it sounds like Afghanistan may be doing the same thing. The only way to fight drugs is to kill the appetite. This is done by teaching our very youngest children to say no. Drugs have been around for centuries....people are forever given a choice and when armed with knowledge....they will say no. The supply and demand problem is that there is a demand. It is quite unfortunate. The cost should be incurred by the user and not the taxpayer. Thanks for an interesting question.

Answer 3

Hmmm. This is the first time I'm hearing about 'cheese' heroin. Do you know of this coming to San Francisco?

Answer 4

"Wherever our armies go, that determines the drugs we see on our streets" - what exactly are you saying there ?