I am always intrigued about the quoted price of illicit products when they are sized.
Today, we have a new piece from the Royal Navy that 680kg of cocaine (that they recently seized) was worth an estimated street value of £100m
http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/News-and-Events/Latest-News/2013/August/14/130814-Lancaster-drug-haul
So how is that price derived, is it based on the value per gram to an end user or the wholesale price before adulteration and on which streets are we talking about?
A recent haul of the same amount in the Dominican Republic was quoted as having a value of £40m, was this UK street prices or something else?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2299316/40million-cocaine-aboard-private-jet-owned-London-based-French-tycoon.html
That is some difference and of course £100m sounds better than £40m
Frank reckons that the UK street price of cocaine is £43 per gram which would put a 680kg load at about £28.5m, certainly less than £40 and most very definitely less than £100m.
What purity though, is that at 50-70% pure or so far, adulterated that it is down to 10%
The United Nations has the UK street price (2010) at just under £40 per gram which would seem to be roughly on par with the Government sponsored Frank website.
Wholesale trans-shipment, where the Royal Navy intercepted the supply chain, will, of course, have a lower price but likely higher purity.
Generally speaking, more questions than answers but when quoting the financial benefit of drugs interdiction perhaps the MoD should be a little more circumspect because on face value, it looks like someone is over egging the pudding**
** Accepting I know four fifths on nothing about how the figure was derived!
@TD
None, Iron Duke and Fort George left at the end of 2009 and were not immediately replaced. The decision was made as the Hurricane season had ended and assets were as usual in short supply. Talk about getting it wrong.
Prohibition can’t work. In fantasy land, even if the RN was 100% effective at preventing any of the stuff from being imported there is still the domestic production in the UK so the best that could be done is make it more expensive.
The absolute easiest way of preventing this and destroying the drugs trade would be to destroy the trade through economics. Make those drugs available on the NHS at a pharmacy, and watch the distributors rapidly go out of business as they can’t profitably compete with either very low cost/free.
Organised crime would get a nasty budget cut, and crime fuelled by people robbing for their fix would be quite significantly reduced.
Then the government could slowly creep up taxes on it like they do with fuel…
Here is a question for you dark blue types.
Did you read the post on Haiti?
What RN/RFA ship was on APT(N)?
Largs Bay doesn’t count, that was after
Surely we build out fleet depending on what we need for a) war, and b) to service our military requirements in peacetime.
What any extra ships are used for in peacetime is then just best use of resources.
So, for example:
a) The fleet requires 6 escorts (with 6 more able to relieve them every two months at 10,000nm reach) so requires 18-19 escorts (say).
b) We need to service a response force (consisting of the FRE and TAPS along with various capital ships) we need to field a presence in the Gulf, a presence in the South Atlantic and a presence in the North Atlantic. We also need to field a ship to NATO (say).
Now, the number of ships required for b) may be less than those required for a), but it would be a waste to not use the extras for something useful. Furthermore it would be madness to “size” the fleet based on our peacetime taskings (e.g. chasing pirates and drug lords) and not have enough high-capability ships when the balloon goes up.
It is only when the requirements for b) get higher than those for a) that the extra ships can be “specced” specifically for their peacetime military role (e.g. OPVs, corvettes, humanitarian logistics ships).
As it stands the size and number of our ships is defined by our requirement to field a credible escort force for our carriers and amphibious shipping.
NAB
OF COURSE an OPV is not as capable as a T23. I understand that. The thread is all about the costs and benefits of APT(N) CN task and using a T23 to fulfil it. If you equate 3 of these OPV (or even just 3 crews for 2 craft) instead of a T23 each OPV doesn’t need to be as capable. Let’s not bring HA into it as the most capable option for that is probably an RFA.
But you are presenting a circular argument in any case. If you use less capable craft for less demanding tasks they don’t need to be retasked for contingency ops; that’s what your escorts are for. If you need to find jobs for T23s at any moment they aren’t required for contingency ops don’t call it a Standing Task.
The main trouble with West Indies Station (ha! pre-WIGS… :) ) is the MoD(N) doesn’t have a HNLMS Pelikaan or BATRAL class in place with disaster relief equipment onboard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BATRAL_class_landing_ship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HNLMS_Pelikaan_(A804)
Imagine the RLC taking delivery of a class of 4 2,500t LST a la Go Jun Bung. Too exciting for a Thursday I know. Seeing as hurricane damage is on land surely it is a job for the Wedgeheads and for the RLC to support them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_Jun_Bong-class_LST
@ Brian Black
I know what you are saying. But it is a bit hypothetical. I could equally say with no proof that an OPV for APT(N) could lead to that being the base standard for the Fleet. The Dutch send proper ships. The Holland class aren’t an OPV in the same way as our River class are OPV; the former are more sophisticated corvettes. If we had a T23 or even a T45 on APT(N) and it was needed elsewhere at short notice it could move. Remember Clyde isn’t tasked with APT(S). Frigates and upwards are self deploying assets with near global reach. Tying up a RFA is probably worse than using a frigate; RFA’s are force multipliers that are the foundation of the Fleet. APT(N) is reinforcing UK sovereignty, sustaining Commonwealth ties, and contributing to the UK’s international relations effort in a region that may be relatively benign but is complex in terms of actors both state and non-state all within a complex maritime environment. A secondary fleet of OPVs is a luxury we choose not to afford; a clutch of BAM would be wonderful. A frigate can do everything an OPV can do, but the reverse isn’t true It is a good training opportunity. A frigate is a better fit for the job than a squadron of FJ in the COIN role. I know we laugh at the cocktail party but it is a tool of diplomacy; it sells Britain just at the Red Arrows sell Britain. A frigate in a distant corner of the world may not be as glamourous as Hawks tearing around the sky. But at the end of the day the frigate is probably better value and more worth. Purely in terms of population APT(N) as a garrison afloat is a lot smaller and cheaper than the others.
And of course you still end up with a ship that you can’t deploy anywhere where there is a significant threat if you needed to, as opposed to being able to take a capable ship off task to go warfighting when needed.
The direct analogy is that you don’t actually need Typhoon for UK QRA. You could do the job just as well with a larger number of Mosquito/Mustang/Skyraider/Sea Fury to get over the supersonic/coverage issue.
Except that neither River or Holland can sustain MIO and boarding ops to the same degree (great for fishery patrol, less so for more demanding tasks), nor can they provide anything like the capability when you’re doing disaster relief. The future benchmark is going to be T26 with 120 bods, not T23 with 180.
NAB
OK – so it’s all about the fixed manpower pool.
A Duke Class T23 has a complement of 185. A River Class OPV has 30 (perhaps more realistically the Dutch Holland class has 54), So forgetting the build costs you can have 3 or 4 of them within the same manpower pool.
Now I never said you could/should have OPVs as well as the current number of escorts. What i said was that UK MOD needs to start making a better case for why we use highly capable escorts for APT(N) when a less capable vessel can (and does) fulfil the task. I am still waiting for a good argument (n #ot counting rhubarb)
For what it is worth, this is my view on the “War on Drugs”, not what you might expect from a Coast Guard officer:
http://chuckhillscgblog.net/2010/09/29/war-on-drugs-time-for-a-different-strategy/
You’ve never had to deal with HMT, have you Brian?
Aside from anything else – you still have to man the vessel from a fixed manpower pool (because that’s where the costs really lie). It’s actually more demanding on manpower to be conducting MIO and boarding ops on a sustained basis than it is for some warfighting roles. So you still end up with less vessels rather than more.
That’s not paranoia – it’s empirical testing.
The assumption that a smaller, cheaper ship assigned to tasks in the Caribbean would necessarily mean the loss of a more warlike frigate or destroyer is wrong.
A ship designed for a non-combat role, and permanently assigned to a particular regional task would be so inappropriate for major war roles that it could not be considered to be filling the boots of a T26 or T45 in any way whatsoever. Any decision to have a permanent presence under those conditions would naturally mean an additional to other vessels, not a replacement. It’s just people’s paranoia speaking.
TD – I’d defer to no-one in my command of industrial english. There are other reasons why typing certain words online is not clever.
My point was not about what was clinging to the blanket, it was more to do with if you appreciated the value of presence, why did you have to wonder why MoD, RN. HMG think APT(N) is important.
x, I am seriously not trying to bait you but it’s not really me you will have to explain Seapower 101 to.
You say using a less capable ship for APT(N) :
… has two downsides – firstly, the overall capability of your fleet drops (and does not recover) and secondly, the ships companies that are constantly stuck in home waters with the odd deployment thrown in might not see that as seeing the world. Which might make your high capability ships, somewhat difficult to man. …
Now that IS rhubarb
What I see is a fairly regular flow of port visits, hurricane relief and drugs busts reported from the APT(N) . Without smart ways of showing how much more effectively these things are done by an escort than by an RFA then it will be hard to make a compelling case to treasury that RN needs the more expensive and capable vessel.
@ Twecky Splat
The assertion that an RFA or an OPV is enough is rhubarb.
@ TD re brevity.
Yes. :)
I do do brevity on occasion.
EDIT: I am just not in the right place to teach Seapower 101 today.
x
Apologies, I thought APT(N) had already been filled by RFA Argus and one of the Waves on separate occasions. Is that Rhubarb ?
Is that your attempt at brevity
Yes Mum
:)
PS
No need to replace shit with sh1t
We are all grown ups here
Transport and shipping cost per tasty portion of nose candy would be fairly negligible as a legally exported commodity – you can fit a few thousand kilos into a TEU
Now there’s a man who knows his audience :)
“The price of cocaine has been increased by one penny – Official”, to quote a David Low cartoon.
Pretty much the best summary of this story. I will never understand why it’s apparently a core mission for our (not very large) Royal Navy to try to make it ever so slightly more expensive for people to make themselves feel good in a certain very specific way. The whole War on Drugs concept is lunatic (original concept from the manic speed addict Richard Nixon, which says it all really), and at least this isn’t the most lunatic part of it, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. We’ve bought into this delusional American approach at the expense of our own people. British drug policy used to be relatively enlightened and sane, and as a result there were a few hundred hard drug users in the entire country in the early sixties, and now after forty years of the War On Drugs there are about 300,000.
(unadulterated) Cocaine apparently costs about 40pence per gram to produce, sells for £40 (with added crap).
If the treasury had any sense they’d get into the drugs trade. There’s an enormous mark-up on the cost of this illicit drug; with legalisation of the trade, Osborne could slash import costs and replace most of the street value with tax without customers noticing any change.
Transport and shipping cost per tasty portion of nose candy would be fairly negligible as a legally exported commodity – you can fit a few thousand kilos into a TEU, as opposed to a few grams in a stomach or up an arse’ole. There’d be some insurance costs necessary for such a valuable cargo, and you’d expect the South Americans to levy a not inconsiderable export tax, but UK tax revenue off each shipment would still be quite a hefty percentage.
Twecky Spat says “APT(N) task could be fulfilled by an OPV or RFA, the clever thing is to argue why it has to be a big warship. ”
Rhubarb.
Then clearly (if you appreciate the value), you shouldn’t use phrases like “It always makes me wonder about APT(N) and why the MoD, RN and Government seem to cling to the idea like sh1t to a blanket”.
More seriously, the comments re shortage of surface units tends to be couched in terms of how do we fill our MT and retain enough capacity to do contingency ops? What that means is that in the event we had to do a contingency op, we would have to either gap a task/commitment or send less than we would like on the contingent op. Don’t forget, Cougar 13 does not include an AAW ship in a task group deployment. Part of that is because the hulls are bieng worked harder (same tasks, more contingencies, fewer hulls) and are also aging (T45 excepted). In fact were we off to war, we’d gap the task, where able.
Those who advocate the hi/lo mix suggest that APT(N) (and indeed KIPION “pirate chasing”) could be better done by a light frigate, heavy OPV of some sort, but the reality is that said ship would not be an “additional” hull, but rather a lower capability substitute – the intention being that the “high” capability ship would be sitting in home waters ready to deploy at a moments notice for contingency ops.
That has two downsides – firstly, the overall capability of your fleet drops (and does not recover) and secondly, the ships companies that are constantly stuck in home waters with the odd deployment thrown in might not see that as seeing the world. Which might make your high capability ships, somewhat difficult to man. There is an obvious analogy here with what the proposed army restructuring looks like………
As for 5* hotels and SSI, I suspect you’ll find that the banging on about it is largely due to perceptions of how efficient that makes force structures in relative terms .
NAB
I like the idea of, early intervention presence and cooperating with allies too. The challenge is to demonstrate its benefit (either in absolute terms or compared to other options)
I don’t think the “marginal costs are low because we’ve got one already” argument works. APT(N) task could be fulfilled by an OPV or RFA, the clever thing is to argue why it has to be a big warship. Or why we do APT(N) instead of supporting NATO SNMGs.
I share TD’s concern that RN press office fixation on drugs seizures and notional street values isn’t helping to make the case for APT(N), especially as we know from te Home Office report that HMG finds these metrics unconvincing too…
NAB,
I too like the idea of presence. However, the difficulty is showing the benefit in terms the rest of Government understands.
The “we have one anyway so there’s minimal marginal cost in sending it to the caribbean/adventure training/norway/Royal Tournament” hasn’t worked in the past across Defence so I would be reluctant to rely on it in the future. If it was all about training why not support NATO SNMG 1 or SNMG 2 which we have not done for a while (in fact,, wasn’t that part of the rationale in using an RFA for APT(N) , to free up a warship ?)
I also don’t think that the MOD can unilaterally opt out of the metrics game. I share with TD a bit of unease that MOD press releases focus on seizures and street value when such methods have been so recently criticised by the Home Office. It’s time to be a bit smarter. For example, I was only half joking when I suggested in earlier post that the RN should make more of the pan-European benefit of the APT(N) drugs busters. Especially since on paper it looks like the RN are not supporting other alliance/partnership tasks and preferring to do APT(N)
Actually NaB, quite the opposite, I am a great advocate of going forth and getting amongst our allies, before you started commenting there was a whole series on just such a subject.
Twecky and I are just questioning the value of having a high value asset doing this in the area when the constant drip drip of complaint is of ‘not enough frigates’
In short, are there other ways of achieving the same end state that frees up valuable assets for other stuff
I dunno, maybe the RN isn’t as short of surface vessels as it makes out :)
The retention argument is an interesting one, will have to remember that one the next time you lot are banging on about 5* hotels and separated service intervals
“Does anyone know how much fuel, wages and other costs it takes to keep a ship like this in the area for x months?
It always makes me wonder about APT(N) and why the MoD, RN and Government seem to cling to the idea like sh1t to a blanket”
In that word you’ll probably hate – “presence”.
What do you get with presence? You tend to get influence – many of the places in the ATP(N) AOR are either overseas territories or part of the Commonwealth. In some cases, they like one of HMs war canoes to rock up for a visit – it makes them feel valued. Those governments and populations also remember a lot of the voluntary things that ships companies tend to do when on deployment in the area, never mind the assistance rendered if there is a natural disaster or similar. It reminds people that the UK has still got the reach to operate there and remains “interested”. You also tend to get on the ground/water intelligence on the attitudes of nations / organistions in the area – you certainly get intel on narcotics trafficking among other things.
In some ways, it’s also a retention issue. Matelots in general do not sign up to bimble around the UK exercise areas for a few weeks a year and the rest of the time indulging in the delights of Guz or Pompey. They join up to see the world – and APT(N) really does offer some fairly spectacular areas of the world to see. As an “independent” deployment, it’s also a test of the ships command and company – a sense of real responsibility, which you don’t necessarily get as part of a TG deployment.
Finally there is also tremendous training value, partly related to the “independent” element above, but also working with the navies and coastguards of disparate nations. The ships on that deployment are constantly practising surface and air picture compilation, target identification and tracking for real and are doing it in a real Combined environment. Remember that much of the UK exercise programme is just to get ships and their crews to a level where they can execute tasks. To keep the ship at that level and maintain those skills they have to be used on a regular basis, which is harder to do alongside or in UK ExAreas.
As for cost, it’s primarily marginal. Ship is paid for, crew is paid for, part of the fuel is paid for (you wouldn’t be alongside shut down all the time if you were in the UK). There will be marginal costs in additional fuel, food, stores, transport of people to the area etc and you’ll use more engine hours than you would alongside in the UK. Other than that, I can’t really think of many – you’d still need to refit your ship at Lloyds intervals (if in Class) so no real change there either. If the marginal cost is more than £1m per deployment, I’d be surprised.
It’s almost as if that’s what navies are for………..
I like Simons idea of reporting it in ‘lines’
Does anyone know how much fuel, wages and other costs it takes to keep a ship like this in the area for x months?
It always makes me wonder about APT(N) and why the MoD, RN and Government seem to cling to the idea like shit to a blanket.
One could understand if a standing task was withdrawn someone asking about the number of ships v tasks so equally understandable wanting to keep it resourced
sorry, bit late on this one. In fact, I wrote an essay but forgot to put my email address in the right box hence lost the lot. I have spent much more of the past 4 years than I would like trying to establish reliable metrics for assessing progress in some of these difficult areas….
Required reading is as follows:
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmhaff/74/74i.pdf is a 2010 Home Of report on Cocaine use which – apart from not mentioning the RN once in its discussion of interdiction – has some useful facts and figures on UK usage. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Addiction http://www.emcdda.europa.eu/attachements.cfm/att_190854_EN_TDAC12001ENC_.pdf gives the most recent Europe wide stats. UK SOCA annual report 2012 is at http://www.soca.gov.uk/about-soca/library/doc_download/506-annual-report-201213.pdf
The “northern route’ from the caribbean is estimated at providing 40% of the cocaine flowing into Europe (totalling 100-150T) The UK is estimated to be the 2nd biggest european market after Spain but SOCA estimates imports total only 25-30T per year so whatever RN is doing in the Caribbean is probably helping our european neighbours and not the UK. Strangely that didn’t make the press release.
According to EMCDDA In 2010, the mean purity of cocaine ranged between 27 % and 46 % in half of the reporting countries. The lowest values were reported in Hungary Denmark and theUK. The mean retail price of cocaine ranged from EUR 49 /gram and EUR 74 /gram in most reporting countries in 2010. Between 2005-10 the retail price of cocaine in the European Union declined by an estimated average of 18 %
SOCA estimates UK street purity at roughly 35% (ie higher than ECMDDA) while seizures at the border are at 75%. It also claims prices are stable at 45 GBP/g (although unclear whether wholesale or retail or adjusted for purity this is in line with EMCDDA above)
The 2012/13 report claims a tonne of cocaine at the point of importation could, depending on purity, equate to between seven and 14 million street deals of cocaine at 20-40 GBP a deal. That’s not a really helpful range of possibilities IMHO !
So using some of these figures let’s say 680kg of seized cocaine at 75% purity makes roughly 1500kg of street product. At 45 GBP/g this is 67.5M GBP.
If we use the “number of deals” rule of thumb we get at least 4.75M deals from our 680kg and this is almost 100M GBP if we assume 20GBP/deal
So overall as suggested by all the others you can make the figures add up to whatever you want. Whether this is effective use of high value UK assets is another question. Overall the evidence for efficacy UKs prevention / interdiction efforts is weak:
The Home Office report concluded that although upstream interdiction appears to be a sound policy it was almost impossible to establish how successful this strategic approach has been in practice. More nuanced metrics are needed; seizures alone do not adequately measure the success of ‘upstream’ disruption of trafficking networks.
On the other point of being suspicious about press releases I heartily agree. A recent excellent example is from ISAF where an assiduous journalist painstakingly compiled all the ISAF press releases which described senior level insurgents killed or captured in special forces missions. Over a period of time the totals claimed quickly became ludicrous and, once this was put to ISAF, required an embarrassing climb down along the lines of ‘ don’t believe the press releases, they are not intended to be entirely accurate’
RT I am a troll apparently because I dared to disagree with APATS on the Deep Strike thread a few days back.
I suppose I asked for that….. :)
X,
http://www.flickr.com/photos/73614187@N03/9509770231/
I do have one question. Why hasn’t this blog got an Outrage Bus?
If a third rate shonky outfit like Arrse can have one so should we. :)
APATS, that’s the one. I particularly liked the concept of a couple of old rusty steamers being covertly converted to contain a troop of SBS and Delta Force, and the fact that whenever a shipment was seized, there was deliberately no publicity, thus sowing seeds of doubt, distrust and feelings that someone was double-dealing within the Cartel when the shipments failed to get through, and eventually civil war within the Cartel itself. Quite cunning, even if no doubt improbable in reality.
@RT
Cobra by Frederick Forsyth :)
….there’s a book, can’t remember if by Freddy Forsyth or Giles Ambler in which a joint US/UK operation systematically takes out a cocaine cartel, at every stage along the supply chain. Read it on a beach somewhere – good trashy holiday reading, but it does contain a very thoughtful proposition.
@ Chris B,
I hope the bar owners were therefore arrested for fraud… (I suspect this conversation could become a bit NT9O’CN, with Rowan Atkinson berating Griff Rhys Jones for arresting a man for wearing a loud shirt in a built up area)
@ Twecky,
ignoring the self-awarded tag of troll (what did you say to be accused of that? I missed it), I think you are actually onto a good metric for defining the national value of the counter-narcotic operations. Street value up or down by X% as measured against the £Cash spent on all counter-narcotic operations across all departments. (NOTE – that is not saying these operations should not go on if the street value keeps going down, as that is an entirely different judgement). Sub-analysis would also indicate whether it is better value to try to stop it close inshore to the UK or at airports, or reach across to Colombia or wherever and send in the Hereford Hooligans, or even to double up the numbers of Guard Ships if they are doing a great job.
To make this a balanced analysis, the Government would need to settle on a single consistent measurement of value, as TD’s point about over-egging the pudding with a press release is very valid.
The “street price” is never going to be a set figure. There are people at the upper end of the market (celebs, rich kids etc) who are paying significantly more for what they believe is very pure cocaine (give you three guesses how likely it is they get what they’re paying for). Conversely, as APATS mentioned, on the street in Liverpool you might be getting as low as 10% purity or less.
Had a chat many years ago with some bobbys on the late night beat in Colchester. They were talking about the contents of one bars drug box. There were three bags of cocaine in it, none of which contained any cocaine whatsoever. So apparently Colchesters drug dealers are very, very tight with their product.
Christ on a bike, the dark blue are a bit touchy tonight :)
All I was pointing out was the danger of bandying around values that might be called into doubt because that diminishes the actual and real value
Wonder what would happen if this was an RAF story!
Remind me again how many deaths from heroin each year? The cost to the UK? From where does the majority of it come? And could we have done something about interdicting the supply chain? You know perhaps by having several thousand armed personnel and helicopters in the country?
Easy to play silly beggars with figures. As APATS says, BZ Lancaster!
“The price of cocaine has been increased by one penny – Official”, to quote a David Low cartoon.
TD,
Or the number of “lines” or “hits”?
It would sound pretty good if they said: “The Royal Navy have today stopped about 10-million lines of coke appearing on the UK streets”.
I have worked on 680kg being cut 50:50 (I think that would be good $h!t) into 1360kg of street grade coke and then 8 lines per gram.
…again, all figures are from the wondeful world of Google.
Simon, maybe the number of average street transactions would be a better analogy
Yep, but that was an average price across multiple countries in Europe, the UK being at the far cheap end of the span
TD
Apols for reposting the same link, it must be the useless troll in me again….
I note the purity adjusted weighted average is 190 eur/g in 2010 from the UNODC doc. This gives you >100M GBP for 680kg. I guess you could argue this is a reasonable thing to do given its unclear precisely which street /country a wholesale drugs bust was headed for….
From a national perspective the falling street price in UK should give cause for concern. If all this good CN work by RN is valuable in reducing cocaine flow to UK, then it is strange that the price has halved between 1990-2010
The 2 girls arrested in Peru were said to have Cocaine with a potential street value of £1.5 million. They had 11 kgs. Lancaster seized 61.81 times as much, 61.81 x 1.5 is 92.72. This however is higher than the 60kg of cocaine seized in Portsmouth in May which the BBC reported as having a street value of £60 million.
So the price reported does vary. The final street value would be affected by purity. Cocaine bought at £40 a gram can be as low as 10% pure whilst £90 a gram buys you a much higher purity. So the value of 680KG would depend upon how pure it was when seized. The average purity seized at the border is 60%.
The street price is for “cut” (impure) cocaine.
Anyway 680kg of cocaine represents about 600,000 lethal doses…
…that’s if you believe the Internet, of course ;-)
Dunno about how they do it now, but in the 1990s we used to calculate such numbers based on what the street value would be after it had been adulterated with what ever crap the dealers would dilute it at each stage, or to put it another way we would pluck a figure out of the air that might sound good on the BBC World Service. The £100m figure suggests that SOCA and the MoD are following the old practice.
The biggest shipment that I was involved in blocking was 6 tonnes of the muck. That was off of Tortola in December 1994 (they’d moved it up from St. Martin because the guards there wanted to go home for Christmas). Had to take chain saws to the bales before they would burn in the municipal incinerator, the stuff was so tightly packed, and the local Brit copper on secondment in charge of drugs enforcement got out of his head breathing in the dust.
Because in quoting values it allows comparisons to be made about the efficacy of spending money on interdiction this way.
I am not knocking the ship, but questioning the PR value which with 5 minutes idle googling seems to be a bit dodgy
As I said, am open to being corrected but it just smelled a bit cheese like
Who cares how much it is worth. it will now never be sold. 680kg of Coke that will not be ruining any lives. BZ Lancaster.
Yes, thats the document I linked to which puts 2010 UK street prices at $62 a gram, or about £40
£40 per gramme x 680kg = <£30m
A far cry from £100m
If we use the UN UK Wholesale prices then that 680kg haul would cost $52 million
Something to do with purity maybe
Either that or unless the prices have changed significantly since 2010 I smell Monsieur Bullshit at work :)
UNODC is another ‘authority” and I suspect the HMG numbers come from there. Street values roughly double wholesale (presumably partially reflects cutting down the purity) http://www.unodc.org/unodc/secured/wdr/Cocaine_Heroin_Prices.pdf So the answer is both !
Interestingly prices are falling so the RN need to intercept roughly 30% more cocaine than in 2008 to achieve same values