Cocaine Is Getting Pricier

John Walters, Head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, is thrilled to see the street price of cocaine creeping upward, even as it becomes less and less pure. He cites an expensive crop-spraying program in Columbia for the "success." While he has noted elsewhere that government spending to address demand for drugs outpaces the spending on these kinds of supply-side controls, doesn't a rising cost suggest--especially if he wants to claim credit for restricting supply--that demand is somewhere around static?

I'm not an economist or anything, or course, but this next part just doesn't make any sense to me at all:

"What we see on the streets of the United States is the clear and irrefutable evidence of a change in availability that will help us reduce demand and will change the profitability of the cocaine market for those who make money off the death and destruction of lives through addiction," Walters said in a telephone interview from Washington.

I'm not even sure that this is "clear and irrefutable evidence of a change in availibility." I mean, can't demand have increased? But let's say it is: it is assuredly not "clear and irrefutable evidence of a change in availability that will help us reduce demand and will change the profitability of the cocaine market." That's not clear. It is refutable. In fact, it's stupid: how does a change in supply or price help reduce demand? How does it change profitability?

Here's what it will change, short of any real success in limiting demand: we'll see continued, even increased, violence related to trafficking. Particularly in places like Nuevo Laredo. Great. Nice job, Walters.

What kinds of chemicals are they spraying all over Columbia, anyway?