<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 3:08 PM, spike <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:spike66@att.net">spike66@att.net</a>></span> wrote:</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">
>Wiki says annual world cocaine consumption is about 600 tons per year. This<br>can likely get us an order of magnitude estimate. If we use the 1 murder<br>per gram ratio, that's 600 million murders per year or about a tenth of the<br>
world population murdered per year. This sounds high to me. My (admittedly<br>uneducated) estimate would run to somewhere in the order of 600 to 6000<br>murders per year over cocaine, so that for every 100 to 1000 kilos of<br>
cocaine you hold in your hand, someone has been killed, even if we ignore<br>the practical difficulty of holding a ton of cocaine in one's hand.<</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">My bad. That was a bit of info (and I now see propaganda) that I bought into in treatment and never really analyzed. Makes sense. Humble apologies and another warning to self to number crunch and check facts before I post. But it would be nice to know how many drug-related deaths occur each year across the planet. Difficult to guess, I suppose. From originating drug-country wars, mafia and biker hits, over-doses, suicides, car accidents. And if you count alcohol, the numbers would seriously spike. (Not you spike.)</div>
<div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">Darren</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">Darren</div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">Darren</div><div class="gmail_quote">
<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#1F497D" face="arial, sans-serif" size="4"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 15px;"><br></span></font><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
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-----Original Message-----<br>
From: <a href="mailto:extropy-chat-bounces@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat-bounces@lists.extropy.org</a><br>
[mailto:<a href="mailto:extropy-chat-bounces@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat-bounces@lists.extropy.org</a>] On Behalf Of Stefano Vaj<br>
...<br>
<br>
>> For every gram of cocaine you hold in your hand, someone has likely been<br>
killed to get it there.<br>
<br>
Mmhhh. As much as I am against prohibitionism, this sounds a little<br>
emphatic, and likely to overestimate the number of murders, or to<br>
underestimate the number of cocaine grams in circulation.<br>
<br>
Any hard data in this respect?<br>
<br>
--<br>
Stefano Vaj<br>
<br>
Wiki says annual world cocaine consumption is about 600 tons per year. This<br>
can likely get us an order of magnitude estimate. If we use the 1 murder<br>
per gram ratio, that's 600 million murders per year or about a tenth of the<br>
world population murdered per year. This sounds high to me. My (admittedly<br>
uneducated) estimate would run to somewhere in the order of 600 to 6000<br>
murders per year over cocaine, so that for every 100 to 1000 kilos of<br>
cocaine you hold in your hand, someone has been killed, even if we ignore<br>
the practical difficulty of holding a ton of cocaine in one's hand.<br>
<br>
If we use that criterion to tackle the difficult ethical question regarding<br>
the dollar value of a human life, I would start with the estimate that<br>
cocaine is worth (well it was when I was a teenager) about 100 bucks a gram,<br>
and there has been inflation but simultaneously far more new suppliers from<br>
what I hear, so let me use 100 US bucks a gram, so a human life is worth<br>
between 10 million and 100 million bucks.<br>
<br>
spike<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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