*Disclaimer: I have no personal experience with coke so all of the information in this post is taken from sources I’ve found on Google.*

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So /u/Mzxth has [claimed](https://old.reddit.com/r/belgium/comments/w1sz7p/philippe_close_ps_wishes_to_decriminalise/igmdgvv/) that in case coke gets legalized he will snort enough of it to fix the government’s budget deficit. So that got me wondering, just *how much* coke would he need to snort to actually do it?

First off, some basic assumptions and premises
– Tax rate: Since this is all hypothetical, we can only speculate on the tax rate that would be on legalized cocaine. There isn’t a single country in the world that has legalized cocaine so there is no comparison so we can only go by our knowledge of our own government. We know that our government likes taxes so let’s assume there would be a 100% tax rate on cocaine if it gets legalized.
– Purchase price: For this amount of cocaine, Mzxth would be a fool to not buy in bulk. This [Nieuwsblad article](https://www.nieuwsblad.be/cnt/dmf20190826_04575278) from 2019 claims that large-scale dealers pay between €22.000-25000 per kilo of cocaine. €25k is a nice and round number so that’s what we’ll be working with.
– Line per kilo: This [Dutch youth website](https://www.jellinek.nl/vraag-antwoord/hoeveel-kosten-drugs/) claims that a gram of cocaine is €50 while a line is €2.5. From this we can deduct that a gram of cocaine is roughly 20 lines meaning that a kilo is roughly 20000 lines.
– Length of a cocaine line: This is iffy. I found [this picture](https://bluelight.org/xf/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FHFQAer2.jpg&hash=186a1ac60be74dce7080f9bd35e30ae0) on a drug forum with comparisons to cigarettes. A 50mg line is roughly the length of a cigarette. A cigarette for it’s part is slightly less than 10cm, but let’s use 10cm because it’s an even number.
– The government’s budget deficit last year according to [this article](https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2022/02/10/begroting/) was €30 billion. It’s a round number so once again, I’m rolling with it.

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With all this information, we can calculate everything we need and some extra.

**At a taxable profit per kilo of €25k and a budget deficit of €30 billion, Mzxth would need to consume no less than 1.200.000 kilos of cocaine or 1200 tons. This is equivalent to 24 billion lines of coke which would have a combined length of 240.000 km of coke.**

For some comparisons that is enough coke to:
– Go roughly 60% of the distance between the earth and the moon
– Circumvent Belgium entirely roughly 171 times
– It’s the same height as roughly 2.4 million Atomiums stacked on top of each other
– Enough coke to keep the entirety of parliament satisfied for at least a week

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I don’t know why I did this. Just felt like it. But I feel like we are not spending enough time on debating why we’re not seizing this opportunity to fix our budget deficit. Mzxth has offered us a solution and we’re not taking it. Let’s spring into action folks!

30 comments

  1. You’re doing this all wrong.

    You need to consider how much more energetic everybody will be at work if they consume so much coke.

  2. Also, I am pretty sure there are a lot more people that would join in and why not get the guinness world record involved to have the longest coke line ever registered? Could get some extra moniez and attention!

  4. 1200tons of coke sounds like a year worth of parties for all users in our country. We would have a break even in a year.
    Next year we could buy another country.
    Except nobody will pay our tax and would just buy over the border.

  7. It’s a decent estimate but it requires some further fine tuning.

    100% tax rate would increase the price and thereby reduce the demand but as /u/Mzxth indicated he’s committed to snorting all of it, we can expect the demand to be perfectly price-inelastic. However, the demand that this will create on the market, will certainly further drive up the price, especially as (s)he’ll need to compete with all the ‘yogasnuivers’^(TM by BDW) , who have above average incomes. Those snorters will also help to fix the deficit, thereby taking some heat from /u/Mzxth ‘s nose.

    Therefore, I predict that the price would at least double, especially if all that demand needs to be purchased in Belgium, halving the length of the line required, some of which will be consumed by other parts of the population (although price-elasticities do apply here).

    Then there are other unknown factors which might further influence the deficit, such as increased tax revenues from the Horeca and whatever the (in the example legalized) dealers will spend their money on.

  8. What the actual fuck.

    > Mzxth would need to consume no less than 1.200.000 kilos of cocaine or 1200 tons.

    Someone buy me tickets to next year’s Tomorrowland and I will make it happen.

  13. The equation changes quite dramatically if we legally *produce* cocaine. Pharmaceutical production would slash the cost by orders of magnitude and increase the quality. This allows for quite a margin in taxes, perhaps up to 300%. Supply issues would be erased, but the price can be fixed as it would be a state monopoly.

  14. Nice quality effort post, just one small problem

    > – Enough coke to keep the entirety of parliament satisfied for at least a week

    No mathematical justification for this. How do you know they’ll last a week? Show your work please.

  19. If you want to make 20lines with a gram of coke, unfortunately you’ll have to reduce the length by half or even more. 10cms lines would finish your gram in 5-6 lines

  20. I fear this will only increase spending. Not saying it’s a bad idea. Just saying they’d waste it regardless of how much more money comes in.

  21. Border control confiscated about 90 ton of cocaine last year. That is basically 13% of the 1200 needed for our national deficit. If we properly sold it, we’d be debt free in 8 years.

    Or we could have /u/Mzxth snort it. Whatever we as a democratic society deem preferable.

  22. This is gone crazy, I don’t know if it is satire anymore but cocaine kills. It is very dangerous and neurotoxic (cannabis is not if vaporized or eaten edibles).

    Cannabis never ever killed any human being since 10.000 years of history with this plant. There are no sources available and you cannot find any.

    Just cannabis should be legalized only in my opinion. Stop mixing cannabis that lead to less addiction than caffeine with hard drugs with physical dependencies like heroin and cocaine.

    Seriously folks, the cannabis legalisation in Europe would have a strong domino effect and I support it ! We have a group at the European parliament right now.

  24. I know it’s unrelated but I get real /r/nba off-season shitposting vibes from this post, and that is very much a compliment.

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