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In jurisdictions where certain drugs are illegal, they are generally supplied by criminal drug dealers who are often associated with organized criminals. Trade in illegal drugs is driven by the economics of greed and poverty, and in many cases by addiction.
Because of physical dependence, the high cost of illegal addictive drugs is one of the major causes of crime. Some estimates placed the value of the global trade in illegal drugs at around four hundred billion U.S. dollars in the year 2000.
Major consumer countries include the United States and European nations, although consumption is world-wide.
As with legal commerce, the illegal drug trade is multi-layered and often multi-national, with layers of manufacturers, processors, distributors, wholesalers and retailers. Financing is also important, generally involving money laundering to hide the source of the illegal profits. All of these are made more complex by their illegality, but the normal laws of economics still apply, with the efforts of law enforcement regarded by the drug trade as an extra business cost.
The drug trade is a very fragmented industry with the most popular product, cannabis, being grown locally by many individuals with little collaboration. Similarly, drugs like LSD with very low profit margins are sold more for philanthropic reasons than for profit. The main organized drug cartels deal with cocaine, heroin, and MDMA, and it is these that are the primary focus of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration. In places where alcohol is illegal, such as Saudi Arabia, it may also be the subject of illegal trading. In the United States during Prohibition, trade in alcohol was dominated by the Cosa Nostra.
Some prescription drugs are also available by illegal means, eliminating the need to manufacture and process the drugs. Prescription opiates for example, are sometimes much stronger than heroin found on the street. They are sold primarily via prescriptions from unscrupulous doctors and clinics. However, it is much easier to control traffic in prescription drugs than in illegal drugs.
Legal drugs like tobacco can be the subject of smuggling and illegal trading if the taxes are high enough to make it profitable.
Because disputes cannot be resolved through legal means, participants at every level of the illegal drugs industry are liable to compete with one another through violence. Some of the largest and most violent drug trafficking organizations are known as drug cartels. The most well known recent groups were the Cali Cartel and the Medellin Cartel in Colombia and the Juarez Cartel, Tijuana Cartel and Tamaulipas Cartel in Mexico.
Illegal drugs can be broken down into two major classes: those extracted from plants, and those synthesized from chemical precursors. For the first class, such as marijuana and cocaine, the growing area is important, and substantial farming is needed for mass production. For the second class, such as MDMA and methamphetamine, access to chemical precursors is most important.
Major drug farming and manufacturing countries include
Synthetic illegal drugs can either be manufactured in the country of consumption, or abroad.
"Street" selling is the bottom of the chain and is sometimes associated with prostitution. Many users sell in order to fund their own drug use.
Selling can be very profitable. For example, in the Northwestern USA (where cannabis is fairly common and therefore generally inexpensive when compared to other regions) an ounce of cannabis costs about $250. That ounce might be broken up into quarter ounces which usually sell for $80 each, eighths which might be sold for $40 each, or $20 bags which might contain 1.8 to 2.0 grams. Such a sale might yield as much as $70 in profit. Often, mainly for philanthropic reasons, a person might maintain low profits in order to facilitate wide-spread use of the plant.
Those who sell primarily to make profit (as opposed to philanthropic motives) might "pad" their prices in the following ways:
These "mark-ups" generally only work on unsespecting teens who are inexperienced at purchasing cannabis. More "seasoned" buyers would never, for instance, pay $20 for a single gram of cannabis.
Note also that these prices are for cannabis buds, or simply, "bud". "Shake" (leaves) is usually available in much greater quantities for much lower prices, but isn't nearly as potent.
Also note that in certain areas these "bud" prices may be much higher, as the Northwestern USA, specifically the state of Washington, probably has the highest import/export traffic of a wide variety of different strains of cannabis of any region in the world. Washington State is the primary importer of Alaskan, Thai, and British Columbian strains, imports massive amounts from California, Southern Mexico, and South and Central America (via Mexico), and is the home of the extremely potent and globally popular G-13 produced at Washington State University. Due to a constant influx of such massive quantities and types of cannabis, prices in this area are resultantly lower (and anti-cannabis laws in this area are also very much relaxed in comparison to the rest of the USA).
See also:
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