Demand curves are downward sloping, meaning people tend to buy more of something as the price falls. Conversely, they buy less as prices rise. The War on Drugs, which began in the 1970s, was largely an attempt to raise the price of illicit drugs by restricting the supply. The War on Drugs also made supplying drugs risky, thus more expensive. That was the official strategy: make street drugs as costly as possibly. While good in theory, it did not work in practice. The following is from The New York Times:
A key way “we measured success was getting the price up,” said Robert DuPont, who served as the White House drug czar from 1973 to 1977. “It meant we got the job done.”
For a few years, prices did rise. But then they started dropping — and kept dropping. Over the last two decades, the cost of getting high on opioids has fallen more than 90 percent, and the prices of other illicit drug experiences have dropped precipitously, too.
People sometimes forget that overdose deaths were relatively rare 50 years ago. In 1970 singer Janis Joplin died of a heroin overdose, while guitarist Jimi Hendrix died in London of a barbiturate overdose that same year. Yet, they were the outliers. There were only about 6,700 overdose deaths in the United States in 1972. Fifty years later in 2022 there were 111,029 overdose deaths, according to the CDC. There were around 70,000 overdose deaths last year and roughly 80,000 in 2024. Death rates have been falling in recent years largely due to public awareness and naloxone, a drug to reverse an opioid overdose. It was not because illegal drugs are getting more expensive.
The U.S. government began tracking the price of street drugs forty years ago. In the 1980s a “dime bag” dose of heroin on the street cost $10. By 2025 that same $10 – unadjusted for inflation – could buy five (5) fentanyl pills with the potency of 20 dime bags of 1980s heroin.
The price of heroin began dropping long before the emergence of synthetic drugs. During the roughly two dozen year period, beginning in the early 1980s through 2007, the price of heroin (per pure milligram) fell more than 50 percent, according to government data. Then synthetic opioids began to flood the market (both legal and illegal). More from the NYT:
In 2025, $2 could buy a pill containing two milligrams of fentanyl, according to law enforcement sources. Those two milligrams of fentanyl are the equivalent of 60 milligrams of heroin, according to Caulkins, which in 1983 cost $46. That represents a 96 percent drop in the price of an opioid high from the early 1980s to 2025, even without adjusting for inflation.
What changed? Why did it become cheaper to get high? The answer is mostly because street drugs are no longer an agricultural product. More from NYT:
Until a decade ago, drugs were largely grown on vast farms that were costly to operate and relatively easy for law enforcement to identify. Today, many are synthesized from cheap chemicals in labs across the globe. Fentanyl is the most infamous, but the United Nations has identified more than 1,500 novel psychoactive substances — opiates such as fentanyl but also stimulants, hallucinogens, cannabinoids and sedatives.
“The supply is diverse, gone away from agriculture, and synthetic drugs are all over the world,” Dr. DuPont said. “Because drugs are so cheap to make, they can price them very low.”
Illegal drug production is not unlike the Industrial Revolution of 300 years ago when peasants left the farm for factory jobs. Making street drugs is now an industrial process. It is easier to produce fentanyl than heroin or cocaine. The latter are both agricultural products. For instance, heroin requires land and a labor-intensive harvesting process (scoring the poppy plant bulb and collecting the juice, over and over). By contrast, fentanyl is made using an industrial process from precursors manufactured in China and finished in clandestine labs in Mexico and Latin America. Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin, and 100 times stronger than morphine. That means it is cheaper to transport standard doses of fentanyl than most other illicit drugs.
The New York Times: Why Getting High Has Only Gotten Cheaper
Has the fall in the street price of illicit drugs had an effect on the diversion of legal prescription drugs? I recall that was estimated at around one-third of legal manufacture, in the past. Many of these new street drugs mimic prescription drugs in appearance, I gather; but wouldn’t a discerning consumer want to buy from “Nurse Jackie” due to the additional risks, including deaths, from the knock-offs.