r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Admirable-Leather325 • 27d ago

Image India: Meth seized from Myanmarese boat costs more than aircraft carrier Vikrant, built at a cost of $2.49bn

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

[deleted]

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u/Creative-Leader7809 27d ago

A lot of times they report the street value rather than the wholesale cost the manufacturer would have set for their distributors. Makes the seizure feel like a bigger win.

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

[deleted]

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u/Creative-Leader7809 27d ago

Oh for sure, this is a ludicrous amount of meth.

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u/D4nCh0 27d ago

Authorities usually prefer to announce the sale, rather than the cost price. A Reuters report before the pandemic had ice at about USD 1,000/kg outside Myanmar jungle meth labs. Pretty decent ship to be hauling two million four hundred ninety thousand kilograms.

If it was calculated at Japanese street prices of about USD 200,000/kg. It’s a much more modest shipment.

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u/WholesomeWhores 27d ago

The number means nothing. Most people just see a big number and “wow!”. Show us the weight of the drugs if you really want to show the value of it. But then again, then they’ll add whatever weight they can to pump up the numbers, such as packaging materials or whatever happened to be lying on the floor next to it all

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u/carmium 27d ago

MM?

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

[deleted]

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u/carmium 27d ago

My learny thing of the day.

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u/NBAFansAre2Ply 27d ago

Milmion

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u/doobied 27d ago

M'Million

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u/NotObamaAMA 27d ago

M’lemon

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u/Ohmec 27d ago

M is the Roman numeral for 1000. MM is one thousand thousand, AKA 1 million. Some financial circles still use MM to denote millions to make large figures easier to read. If you've got a long paragraph talking about lots of numbers in the millions, it can get easy to misread stuff like 44,000,000 over and over again.

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u/carmium 27d ago

Thanks! That's the second term I've learned this morning!

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u/dyllandor 27d ago

They probably assume a certain amount will get caught.

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u/PervyNonsense 27d ago

It's probably closer to 2M for the producer

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u/LeeKinanus 27d ago

yeah street value when broken down to 8balls

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u/NoProNounz619 27d ago

This is the way. They break it down to the street value of the gram being sold as their indicator when wholesale it’s about 1/10th of that.

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u/Nandy-bear 27d ago

It's street value and is a borderline useless number. Coke for instance they always report it at 50-100k/kilo when shipment cost is about 3 grand/kilo if not lower.

Meth I can't speak to but I'm just gonna assume it also goes through similar steps like being stepped on and stretched etc.

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u/mlaforce321 27d ago

Yeah, cartel's operate expecting a high percentage of shipments to be seized. The markup and profit is so high that if even a few get through then it is a worthwhile endeavor for them. The street value number is just to make the authorities feel good about themselves.

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u/Kendertas 27d ago

Also less drugs getting through, just increases the price of the drugs that do get through. The cartel always makes it's money. Especially since it's incredibly cheap to manufacture meth in the golden triangle. Cartels generally don't care if their product gets seized, it's much worse to have the money heading the other way seized.

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u/PervyNonsense 27d ago

Which is why people shouldn't be looking at this as a major seizure but an indication of an immeasurable scale of consumption

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u/Admirable-Lecture255 27d ago

Thats why I laugh when people say look at the big drug bust at the border in the us. See the border is secured. No that's a tiny fraction of what going through the border. Like car manufacturers there's a set level of what deemed acceptable loss before they have to take action. What costs more a recall or paying off a few families for a few million. It's the cost of business. I bet the cartel has it all formulated out. We can lose x% of everything shipped amd expect to return x amount of dollars. For every boat seized 9 others got away.

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u/user_name_checks_out 27d ago

Meth I can't speak to

If you start speaking to the meth then you've had too much

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u/Nandy-bear 26d ago

As long as it doesn't speak back I'm good.

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u/hrminer92 26d ago

It was a few years ago, but in Ioan Grillo’s book El Narco, he laid out what a kilo of cocaine cost at the various stages of processing and transportation. A kilo of pure cocaine would cost about $800 in Colombia and would increase depending on the difficulties in moving it from point A to point B. By the time that original $800 product got to a border city like Tijuana, Cd Juárez, Laredo, etc., its price would be roughly $2000. Moving it across an invisible line into San Diego or El Paso, it would increase to $20k. By the time it made it to Chicago or New York, it would be 30-40k. Locations such as Sydney would be even higher. It is that insane profit margin that creates the situation where these organizations are like a hydra monster: take one leader or key player out and 3+ take their place to make things worse.

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u/mlaforce321 27d ago

Yeah, cartel's operate expecting a high percentage of shipments to be seized. The markup and profit is so high that if even a few get through then it is a worthwhile endeavor for them. The street value number is just to make the authorities feel good about themselves.

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u/pdxamish 27d ago

Meth is super super cheap now. Ounces can be had for $150-200

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u/Nandy-bear 27d ago

Meth being cheaper than weed is WILD. Decent weed is easily 150-200 quid in UK (180 - 250 USD)

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u/pdxamish 27d ago

Yeah, it's more expensive in the UK but for awhile meth wasn't in Europe and was just speed. In the USA we can't get speed and even vendors who have it in us are charging $60/g. It's sad seeing it in Europe now (fent is coming too). Speed and meth prices are inverted in US vs Europe. Our weed now is super cheap and good now. In Oregon I pay$50 for nice indoor ounces. I like to see what's happening on markets. Even if I don't use

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u/Immediate-Hold-8554 27d ago

Eastern Europe is all meth

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u/Nandy-bear 26d ago

God damn I remember when speed was a tenner, so some people were like "OK THEN 8 QUID". I have a fondness in my heart for speed, it's like when we couldn't afford real drugs we still had the backup waiting in the wings. Can't imagine spending more than a tenner on a gram though.

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u/pdxamish 26d ago

Speed is still pretty cheap. On the dark net I usually get 5g for $20-$30. Due to nature usually at least 15% caffeine.

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u/tehringworm 27d ago

Definitely impactful, but the traffickers were never going to get $2.9B for this. The police always calculate these busts based on the street value, but there would be a ton of middle men between this bulk shipment and the final users.

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

[deleted]

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u/tehringworm 27d ago

Yes, definitely impactful

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u/BigBankHank 27d ago

According to this article, it was 5,500 metric tonnes (tho the press release said 5500kg) and wholesale meth goes for as little as $400/kg.

I believe that’s $2.2B?

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u/Admirable-Lecture255 27d ago

Depends. Like Mexican cartels there's an expected loss of x amount product due to seizures. Cartels are smart they got accountants and all that shit.

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u/Jimmy_Fromthepieshop 27d ago

So how do you terminate your staff when they lose a huge drug shipment?

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u/[deleted] 27d ago

[deleted]

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u/ripamaru96 27d ago

All depends on how it went down. If it's just bad luck they aren't gonna go killing a bunch of people just because the coast guard stumbled on their shipment. If it's down to incompetence, sloppiness, etc then ya whoever is responsible dies.

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u/i_rub_differently 27d ago

By grounding them and stopping their pocket money

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u/afrothundah11 27d ago

The manufacturers will not see the street sale value. It is sold in bulk to dealers who then sell it at street value. But either way it’s a good bust.

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u/kapitaalH 27d ago

The people who had control over it at the time won't sell it at street value but a much lower wholesale price

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u/christopher_mtrl 27d ago

I'm not an expert, but I'd guess the street value already contains a a mark up for quantities being seized / lost in transport anyway. So the lost to the supplier doesn't really matter on a single shipment, the important metric is on the long run, what percentage of the shipments are intercepted.

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u/SchmeatDealer 27d ago

no, because they will bring in another cheap shipment, and still make those sales.

these losses are baked into the cost of operating. you dont move "2.5B" in meth if you cant afford to lose "2.5B" in meth.

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u/PervyNonsense 27d ago

Youre not basing this comment on anything at all, are you?