Right? Drug cartels, how do they work?
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I’ve always heard the term “DEA Math” used to describe this upstanding branch of accounting.
What happens if you combine it with Hollywood Accounting?
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The drugs are worth eleventy-billion dollars; but Because Expenses every minion who is being paid on a net-profit basis ends up owing the cartel more money after the job is done than they did when they started?
That’s my layman’s impression, in any case.
Do fortified compounds and private militias count as ‘infrastructure’?
There are at least 200,000 hectares of poppy field in Afghanistan at present. Multiply that by 2.471 acres per hectare, and $500M per acre, and you have nearly $250 Trillion from opium alone. That’s $7.5 Million for every man, woman, and child in Afghanistan… if true 
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Kind of my point. The people making money off the drug trade are not investing in Afghanistan.
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But if the Cop Math ™ is to be believed,* there is such a ridiculous amount of money to be made in Afghanistan from poppies alone. If everyone benefits from it, Afghanistan will be a very prosperous nation. If not everyone benefits, then there will be insanely opulent wealth amidst poverty. For example, if only 10% of the country benefited, those 10% would make $75M from opium alone on average. If it’s 1%, then $750M. If a certain number of people averaged an unassuming $1B each, then there would be several hundred thousand billionaires from opium alone. Money like that, if it exists,** can’t be easily hidden.
*it isn’t. It really isn’t.
**it doesn’t
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Back to the original post: the farmer in question, might, if he was lucky, have been paid $5,000 or so by whichever bike gang or cartel of bent coppers it was that hired him to grow the crop.
They’re likely to have similar deals with a few dozen other farmers scattered across the region; losing one field will have minimal impact on their business.
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