Slight error in your maths:

1kg = 1000g
therefore 500kg = 500 000g
therefore 1g of resin = £2
therefore an eighth = £7

An eighth is typically £10 in London (if bought singly; £7 accounts for the bulk buy discount), if you know someone who can do it for £3 please pass on their details…

By the way, I thought that, when the Taliban was in power, they have almost completely suppressed the growing of opium. Is this true?

Surely the Taliban does not control all the opium profits in Afghanistan, and surely the Taliban has means of income other than opium?

After everything that has been written here, that’s the conclusion you came to?

The very most the opium seized would have been worth is £13m (actually, new thought, it’s less than that because no allowance has been made for seizures once it got out of Afghanistan) so £50m is an number dreamt up by the MOD to make sure the story gave them good PR.

I think they should just stick to the mass/quantity.

“Cannabis worth £1m seized at port

By Jennifer Cockerell, Press Association

Thursday, 26 February 2009

Cannabis with an estimated street value of £1 million was found in a lorry coming into the country on a ferry, the UK Border Agency said today.

During routine checks on unaccompanied freight arrivals at Ramsgate, Kent, customs officers seized an estimated 500kgs of cannabis resin from a vehicle which had arrived on a ferry from Ostend, Belgium.

The drugs were discovered within a mixed load on Tuesday and were manifested as a generator.

The concealment consisted of a large red box containing eight live car batteries wired so as to provide an electrical charge. Beneath the batteries was a quantity of sand and the cannabis resin was hidden under the sand.

The case has been passed to HM Revenue & Customs’ (HMRC) criminal investigators and enquiries are ongoing.

Bob Gaiger, HMRC spokesman for south-east England, said: “HMRC investigators and their UK Border Agency colleagues work closely to prevent drugs from entering the UK and harming our communities.

“Our investigations will not only focus on those transporting these deadly drugs, but also those who mastermind and finance this illegal activity.

“Anyone with information about illegal smuggling activities should call the Customs’ Hotline on 0800 59 5000.”
”

500 Kilos = 50,000 grams

an eighth is approx 3.5 grams

50,000/3.5 = 142,857 [eighths]

People used to buy it for £5 an eighth of resin when i went to college 9 years ago, but I remember reading reports about the price being much less, as far as i know it went down to about £3ish.

So:
142,857[eighths] x 5 = £714,285 much less than one million pounds the report states.

and if im correct if it has a street value of £3.50 per eighth then:

142,857 x 3.5 = £500,000

on the basis that the resin was sold as individual eighths, which of course never happens, as with any product people buy in bulk to save money. Which would bring the final street value down even further.

Sadly it’s hard to research the street values as I dont do it myself so slightly shaky sources, but I think the point remains the same

Maybe a remedy is the wrong term to use – but laudanum’s role in treating – OK ameliorating the symptoms – of the almost endemic enteric infection, effective pain relief and euphoric sedation must have been a boon to many!

They give us what we want.

And we can lock them up.

Perfect.

I notice that most people in the media like to use the ‘children as young as…’ argument to dramatise their story, as in ‘Children as young as five are being given sex education.’

Five and six year olds, those little kids with the developing malleable brains, are not on Facebook. Trust me. Any five year olds that are on Facebook would probably find that the brain-rotting properties of Facebook were more than balanced out by neural connections than granted them their truly astounding reading ages.

For heroin, the processing and smuggling organisations include Turkish Grey Wolves and Albanian KLA (or the mafia that funds it), Kurdish PKK and Serbian Red Berets. As the PKK link notes, ‘politics, intelligence gathering and serious crime can intersect’; gang leaders got asylum in Britain and gave intelligence in return.

Once the narcotics are in the market country, they fund coordinated criminal operations that also traffic people, arms, and art and antiquities.

They are long posts, but on my research blog, I have described the flow of drugs and antiquities from source through transit to market countries, and the mess of alliances, rivalries and conflicts between the paramilitary and extremist organisations that control that flow.

Since spoken Arabic isn’t standardised, that generally means that which short vowel you use depends on two things: which dialect of Arabic you choose to base your transliteration on, and what you think the nearest English sound to the Arabic vowel is.

So Ben can use either, and in an unsubbed blog article, probably will.

I think that’s it anyway.