A group of scientists with too much time on their hands, over at the brilliant Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories website, have produced a guide to the monetary density of things, or in other words the value per pound of various commodities, from flour through to kobe beef, marijuana, human blood, gold, cocaine and antimatter. Are some drugs literally worth their weight in gold as Transform have claimed? - lets see....
| Item | Price per pound |
|---|---|
| All purpose flour | $0.52 |
| Zinc | $0.80 |
| Lead | $0.85 |
| Bottled water | $1.00 |
| Pennies | $1.81 |
| Copper | $3.50 |
| Nickels | $4.54 |
| Nickel | $9.00 |
| Bulk hemp fiber | $12 |
| Dimes | $20 |
| Quarters | $20 |
| Turkey feathers | $26 |
| Maine Coon Cat (Pet quality ~20 lbs) | $50 |
| Dollar coins | $56 |
| Uranium (as U3O8) | $65 |
| Kobe Beef Filet Mignon | $112 |
| Kopi Luwak | $160 |
| Human Blood | $181 |
| Silver | $197 |
| Printer Ink | $322 |
| Peacock feathers | $410 |
| One Dollar Bills | $454 |
| Two Dollar Bills | $907 |
| Lottery Tickets (California $1 scratch-offs) | $907 |
| Saffron | $1,000 |
| Marijuana | $2,000 |
| Five Dollar Bills | $2,268 |
| Industrial diamonds | $2,300 |
| LZR Swimsuit | $2,495 |
| Palladium | $4,287 |
| Ambergris | $4,500 |
| Ten Dollar Bills | $4,536 |
| Twenty Dollar Bills | $9,072 |
| Any object brought to ISS | At least $10,000 |
| Gold | $12,000 |
| Platinum | $20,679 |
| Fifty Dollar Bills | $22,680 |
| Cocaine | $22,680 |
| Hundred Dollar Bills | $45,359 |
| Rhodium | $77,292 |
| Good-quality, one-carat diamonds | $11.4 M |
| LSD | $55 M |
| Antimatter | $26 Quadrillion |
So there you have it. Cocaine is worth way more than gold, platinum or sending stuff into space by rocket, whilst LSD, a pound of which will set you back a cool $55 million dollars, is second only in cost to a pound of antimatter that, at $26 Quadrillion, will cost you more than all your pocket money (even if you save up for absolutely ages).
Marijuana/cannabis, it turns out, costs more that uranium, human blood, and saffron, as well being more than ten times as expensive as silver.
It should, of course, be pointed out that the ridiculously inflated prices of illegal drugs are specifically due to the fact that they are illegal rather than reflecting intrinsic value or production costs. The risks carried by the producers and suppliers are translated into inflated prices, their blatant profiteering pushing prices still higher - often by several 1000 percetange points. Unlike saffron, for example, which is laboriously produced from individual dried stigma of the saffron crocus, marijuana is laughably easy to produce in large quantities for almost no cost. Similarly, cocaine would probably cost no more than asprin to produce, were it a more conventional legally regulated product. This graphic reproduced in the recent UKDPC report on drug markets illustrates the point:
Going by these estimates, cocaine at its farmgate price (still arguably inflated over legal production) would be about $600 a pound, putting it just above peacock feathers, and somewhere between 1 and 2 dollar bills. To put this in perspective the mad scientists estimate that illicit cocaine currently costs the same, by weight, as 50 dollar bills. So curiously enough it turns out that one gram of cocaine costs $50, and a $50 bill weighs one gram. All the drug dealing gangsters will laugh at that; prohibition for them is quite simply a license to print money.
Lets just hope no-one finds a way of smoking antimatter.
Lets just hope no-one finds a way of smoking antimatter.
