Have Illegal Drug Prices Increased Since the Military Started Blowing Up Boats?

Now that Trump has “closed the border” and blown up “drug boats,” are there fewer illegal drugs available? Have illegal drug prices increased? —Just Curious

I’m sure you will be stunned to learn, Curious, that the Trump administration—normally so careful in its research and planning—appears to have no strategy in the Caribbean beyond “reach new heights in dickishness.” That might win you a Republican primary, but it won’t have much effect on the drug trade beyond making Latin American authorities less inclined to help us stop it.

There are two tiny mitigating factors, however—nothing that will keep Pete Hegseth from burning in hell, but worth noting. The first is that, shockingly, drugs from Colombia really do leave Venezuela in small boats bound for distribution hubs in the lesser Antilles. It’s cocaine, not fentanyl, and it’s mostly bound for Europe, not America, but by Trump administration standards, getting even this much right is an intelligence coup to rival the cracking of the Enigma code in World War II. If the military were to interdict these boats rather than blowing them up, they might even find drugs. Too bad we’ll never know!

The second caveat is that even if U.S. drug policy weren’t being created by people with the analytical skills of a meth-addled raccoon, it probably still wouldn’t make much of a dent. Drugs are kicking ass—if cocaine were a person, it would probably act so arrogantly you’d think it had just snorted a massive rail of itself. Over the past decade, the yield of coca per acre has doubled, while the number of acres devoted to the plant in Colombia increased by two-thirds. The fact that U.S. officials seized a record amount of cocaine last year almost certainly reflects a bigger crop rather than better policing.

Mind you, the Trump administration is still finding ways to make things even worse. In spite of those record seizures, drug prosecutions are down 10%, thanks to the pivot from drug enforcement to immigration. And the fact that federal prosecutors have been leaving the reeling Justice Department in droves will only accelerate this trend.

Meanwhile, back here on the home front, two young people at the hippest bar I can get into confirmed that retail prices for blow are still holding steady at around $100 a gram, with no recent supply or quality shocks. Further evidence that drugs won the drug war: It didn’t even occur to them to worry I might be a narc.

Questions? Send them to dr.know@wweek.com.