WHOLESALE buyers of illegal drugs in Cyprus might expect to pay up to €45,000 per kilo for cocaine, about €10,000 euros per kilo for cannabis, and up to €5,000 for a thousand ecstasy pills, a recent study shows.
The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) has done a pilot study done with the European law enforcement agency, Europol, on wholesale drug prices in Europe.
The drugs squad YKAN started gathering wholesale price data in Cyprus last year with the help the Cyprus monitoring centre for drugs and drug addiction (CMCDDA) which has recently published its study.
So far, wholesale prices for 2011 have been collected for ecstasy pills, cocaine, and cannabis which is believed to be the most commonly used illegal drug – the CMCDDA said.
Cannabis usually went for €10,000 per kilo but prices ranged from €4,000 to €14,000. Cocaine cost between €35,000 and €45,000 per kilo and ecstasy pills cost between €4,000 and €5,000 per 1,000 pills. Skunk cannabis cost between €8,000 and €10,000 per kilo.
A recreational cocaine user told the Cyprus Mail that a gramme of cocaine might cost €100, at least twice as costly as the wholesale rate.
Skunk cannabis might cost €20 per gramme (at least twice the wholesale cost), the same user said adding however that it was cheaper to buy bigger quantities.
Data collection in Cyprus is still incomplete because of the need to train officers and set up an integrated IT system, CMCDDA said.
Researchers across Europe have defined wholesale drug prices as at least 1.0 kilo or 1,000 pills or doses as appropriate, traded for distribution to other wholesalers or retailers.
Retailers sell small amounts to end users. “Wholesale prices will result from the interaction between demand and supply,” the EMCDDA said in the study.
If there are more drugs than willing buyers, prices drop and if there are more willing buyers than available drugs prices go up. Also, if there are more wholesalers who can provide a product, they will compete with each other and prices will drop, the researchers said.
The data has been collected to help with law enforcement, policy making and research.
Europol and the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) made a template for wholesale drug price collection in 2009, later improved for a second round of data collection in 2010.
Cyprus was among the 23 EU member states and candidate countries who gave information on wholesale prices for illegal drugs including cocaine, cannabis, and ecstasy. The information was mostly collected by undercover police officers, by using informants, or by questioning people arrested by the police.
About 80 per cent of participating countries said they regularly got information from interviews with people arrested in relation to illegal drugs’ cases. Over half said they used evidence from crime scenes and confiscated materials. Almost no one used academic studies that interviewed drugs’ users.
Cyprus did not look at substance purity when looking at wholesale prices because it is considered expensive and time consuming, the CMCDDA said.
In addition to Cyprus, a number of countries including Germany, France and the UK participated in the study.
Visit www.emcdda.europa.eu to see statistics on those and other European countries.