Sat 10 May 2008
What was the price of cocaine at Williams 30 years ago? Good question.
Ninety-six students were arrested in a San Diego State University drug bust.
Where’s Captain Renault when you need him? I’m shocked, shocked, to learn that drug dealing is rampant at fraternities at San Diego State (one of Playboy’s top 10 party schools). Actually, what shocks me is the price the student dealers were charging for cocaine: $35 a gram. In my college days almost 30 years ago, at a small, northeastern liberal-arts school with a less illustrious party heritage, a gram cost $100. So in constant dollars, the price of cocaine has fallen by 85 percent, to about $16 a gram — imagine how many more coke-fueled novels Jay McInerney could have written at that price!
Despite the shout out to Jay McInerney ‘76, the author, James Gibney, does not seem to be an Eph.
1) We need to know the history of drug prices at Williams. Comments welcome!
2) Still looking for feedback on my (genius!) simple plan for accomplishing drug legalization.
May 10th, 2008 at 6:52 am
I don’t think most drugs are popular enough at Williams to have a particularly stable market. How many students do cocaine? There can’t be very many, and I’d bet most of them probably buy it in their home cities - I’d be surprised if there were more than a couple people who actually sell cocaine at Williams on a regular basis. Thus the “market price” is probably pretty volatile, based on where a particular dealer got their current stash and how much they paid for it, the quality/purity of the substance in question, how much they’ve got left and how eager/reluctant they are to get rid of it, how much they like you, etc.
For an example, weed has probably the largest market of any drug at Williams, and yet in the past year I’ve heard prices quoted anywhere from $10-$80 per eighth (with obviously widely varying quality, but even at a constant quality level prices vary quite a bit). It’d be pretty much impossible to arrive at any sort of meaningful conclusion on a single “price of marijuana at Williams College”, and I suspect that’s even more true for other, less visible drugs.
(oh, and in case the WPD is reading this, this information is, of course, all second-hand. I have never bought or sold weed or any other drugs in Williamstown. :-)