Ice, ice, baby

Although I’m a hip Californian, I guess in some ways I’m a fuddy duddy, and the “ice” phenomenon is a case in point. When I moved to this fair island, I caught a few words about kids “smoking ice.” I thought “ice” meant, well, ice, as in the solid form of water. While the tropical heat was squeezing the sweat from my brow, smoking ice seemed like a great idea; I had visions of a nice, frosty chunk of clear ice being pulled from the freezer, leaving a wisp of cool fog in its wake, and then being put in a Briar pipe of some sort and somehow cooling the smoker.

Stupid me, eh? I still don’t know exactly what ice is, but I gather it’s related to the drugs the bikers in San Berdoo would take to crank themselves up and turbo-charge their sprees of felonious misbehavior.

Ice once again made the news, of course, when some sharp-eyed Customs agents here busted some dude who was allegedly carrying a million dollars worth of the stuff. I’ve never figured out how such prices are placed on the value of illicit goods, since, absent a legitimate market, there wouldn’t exactly be much credible data on price levels.

Is the market for street drugs so well established and so efficient that prices are reliable? Would a dose of ice cost the same if Mr. A in Kagman were the vendor, or if Mrs. B. in Marpi was? It would be an interesting study to chart out these prices and see how their variances compare to those of goods on the legitimate market.

How is the market price of ice related to changes in prices of other goods here? Hotel rooms are coming down in price, for example.
Would this affect the value of ice? Would the declining state of our economy in general reduce the value of ice, since overall demand by consumers falls when their paychecks also fall?

Or are the consumers of ice even linked to paychecks? That’s not such a nutty question to pose. It would be interesting to study exactly where each $100 put into a retail ice purchase comes from; I suspect a lot of it is not from private sector paychecks. In that case, then, we can not assume that the demand for ice will necessarily fall with demand for other goods as the economy slides.

There may, then, be an entrenched element of society that is insulated from normal economic reality, and that prefers to indulge a taste for ice. There may not be any formal economic incentive to use the drug, but there may not be much economic disincentive, either. Laws are passed that create criminal penalties, which are, of course, a disincentive, but such “top down” authority isn’t as powerful as the “bottom up” ethic of how people make personal decisions in their lives.

And that, folks, is my conclusion. But this being Friday and all, I’d like to offer a anecdote that comes to mind whenever the drug topic boils to the fore:

My high school history teacher, Steve Ruiz, was once tasked with delivering an anti-drug speech to us. He was smart and poised enough not to deliver some sanctimonious and preachy lecture, so he delivered a very elegant, one sentence line. “There are two kind of drugs: those that make you well when you are sick, and those that make you sick when you are well.”

Instead of insulting the collective intelligence of the class with superfluous elaboration on the topic, he then picked up the text book and commenced the history lesson for the day. Brevity itself is, indeed, a form of wisdom.