You guys have an entire country that is like 80% desert that is completely empty. No one makes a meth lab out there?! I mean that just seems like the perfect place/opportunity ;)
Why is meth so expensive in Australia?
You guys have an entire country that is like 80% desert that is completely empty. No one makes a meth lab out there?! I mean that just seems like the perfect place/opportunity ;)
[3 Points] Trappy_Pandora:
[2 Points] SarahSweetHeart756:
There's a few contributing factors. In the 80's and 90's we had fairly cheap meth - $25 a point, $200 a gram. It was the typical 'base' style product in all the colors of the meth rainbow (red, yellow, brown, pink, white). This product did not smoke very well (with the exception of white product, but that was rare). Most of the meth was probably made via pseudoephedrine, which used to be readily available over the counter in chemists.
When smokeable meth (and the media slang 'ice') arrived in the early noughts, it took off rapidly and perhaps to a higher degree than other countries due to us not having cheap access to crack or cocaine. Since injecting is still very much taboo, the fastest onset most stimulant users had experienced was from snorting lines. Smokable meth provided many users with the first true "rush" from it's much more sudden onset, and this gave it a unique calling-card that no other substance here could compete with.
This resulted in a mad rush by users to obtain the limited amounts of meth on the market pure enough to be smoked. Since this was only a small percentage of the overall product at the time, users became willing to part with exuberant amounts of cash (up to 4x the price of base) in order to secure the product.
The initial high purity batches were most probably imported from Asia, as they certainly didn't look like the kind of thing made in someone back shed. This probably also explains the relative scarcity of said product.
Eventually local cooks did manage to up their game and produce high purity smokable meth domestically, but by then the new price standard had already been set, and with users willing to pay it, dealers were happy to oblige.
As the media became more and more fixated on sensationalizing meth, pseudoephedrine was placed under much harsher restrictions. And ephedrine itself has been banned here for quite some time, so this again led to a larger amount of the meth here being imported.
And that leads us to where we are now - paying up to a thousand dollars a gram.
[1 Points] caterina_lothair:
The solution seems obvious to me: cartels + submarines. You'll be balls deep in MX super-meth!
[1 Points] dikkkhead:
I have never understood why such a spread out, developed country cannot find a spread out country cant learn to produce it's own drugs?
The irony is that Australians seem to particularly like drugs in my experience.
[1 Points] AustralianFraudster:
Cause people don't import meth into Australia, people import the chemicals to produce it here and sell it here.
Bikkies