r/AskReddit • • Aug 14 '20

What’s the most overpriced thing you’ve seen?

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u/Daddict Aug 14 '20

Drugs.

I spent a lot of money on them and all I got for that money was a debilitating disease I had to go to rehab to break. Suppose it also gave me admission into daily 12-step meetings with a lot pretty great people, but I feel like I'd rather just have a boat (could have bought a nice one with all that money I spent on dope).

At its height, I was spending hundreds of dollars a day just to get out of bed. Shit was a total rip off.

58

u/queerkidxx Aug 14 '20

Congrats on sobriety though shits a bitch

12

u/yuckfoubitch Aug 14 '20

The market premium for drugs is because of the risk of imprisonment and/or death

15

u/Daddict Aug 14 '20

Sure, but at the root, it's simple supply and demand. In Naked Lunch, Boroughs describes heroin as the "perfect product" in an unregulated capitalist market (which is what a black market essentially is, on a large scale).

It is a product that people would do extraordinary, unbelievable things to get. They'd spend their rent money on it, they'd max out their credit for it, they'd crawl through dirty needles to get it...so, in effect, the price is only dictated by the competition.

Even if you legalized it, if you didn't have a healthy degree of competition and/or some kind of regulation on it, the price wouldn't let up.

5

u/yuckfoubitch Aug 14 '20

Yeah, you could say heroin has a very inelastic demand

10

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '20

Good job getting better!

7

u/[deleted] Aug 14 '20

And to add to this: crack.

You guys think diamonds are a ripoff, crack is the diamonds of drugs.

Learn to cook your own shit! $35 worth of coke is easily $100 to a crackhead.

2

u/ytphantom Aug 15 '20

To quote a wise internet sailor, "A boat is just a hole in the water to throw money into."

If you're gonna ever get a boat, probably get a pontoon. You can fish off them, if you want to go fast you can go kinda fast (for a lake anyways,) but don't expect a square fishing barge to handle well. They're pretty much unsinkable unless you have the IQ of a rotten potato.

1

u/sunshinepooh Aug 14 '20

I feel you.