ZeroZeroZero by Roberto Saviano

Author:Roberto Saviano
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

It’s the most vexing mathematical equation you’ll ever have to solve. More difficult than the twin prime conjecture or Landau’s Problems. And more mysterious than crop circles. All things considered, you’re really only being asked a simple question: the ratio of cocaine seized to cocaine produced. A fraction. Grammar school stuff. Well, let’s collect the data, you might say. Okay. Where do we start? With the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s “World Drug Report”? Okay, take a look at the graph. The difference between the amount of cocaine seized in 2010 and 2009 is 38 tons: 694 as opposed to 732. A mountain of cocaine but substantially irrelevant in the ocean of world drug trade. So you might deduce that cocaine seizures in recent years have not varied significantly. Go back a bit further. Look at the stats for 2001 to 2005. Do you see how seizures are on a rise then, reaching a peak in 2005? Interesting, isn’t it? Maybe something happened after 2005. Maybe the drug traffickers wised up, maybe they came up with new ways of exporting cocaine. Maybe. But there’s another variable: In recent years cocaine’s purity has decreased. Again according to the “World Drug Report”: The purity rate of cocaine seized in the United States over the four-year period 2006 to 2010 dropped from 85 percent to 73 percent. People are snorting tons of shit. But this consideration doesn’t throw off your calculations. Newly produced cocaine is 100 percent pure, but the stuff that ends up on the street outside your house is far less so. How do you compare the two? How can you have a fraction where the numerator refers to one thing and the denominator another? Can’t you just hear your teacher saying: “You can’t compare apples to oranges”? In other words, “You can’t compare pure coke with coke that’s been cut.” And besides, how much cocaine is actually being produced annually? Keep reading the report. The range varies from 788 tons to 1,060 tons. A pretty sizable difference, don’t you think? The difference corresponds to the total production of an entire country. And the purity percentage of seized cocaine isn’t always declared. I could also mention that some figures may in fact be doubled, the result of more than one police force being involved in an operation leading to the seizure’s being counted twice. If you’re okay with ignoring these last variables and do your own calculation, by using 694 tons of cocaine seized (knowing nothing about its purity) as your numerator and a figure that oscillates between 788 tons and 1,060 tons as your denominator, you’ll come up with between 65 percent and 88 percent. Isn’t a 23-point difference a bit too high to be reliable? I agree. Not that you’re the first to try such a calculation. The “World Drug Report” tried it in 2011. The result? From 46 percent to 60 percent. “Only” 14 points of uncertainty! But go back two more years and the percentage finally has a leg to stand on, and the number is 41.

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