Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
Why? Who is buying all the poppies and then producing heroin - which is placed in storage?
The problem for large traffickers is keeping the global price of their heroin product propped up; just like the DeBeers corporation will keep diamonds off of the market to maintain the high price of diamonds, so too do drug cartels (there is a reason why they are called "cartels" after all).

Heroin has a long shelf life; there are caches of heroin all around the world, just to keep the price inflated.

The raw material costs (of opium) are nothing compared to what the final product (heroin) sells for, its peanuts – the ROI is huge.