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Its purity? As in, the purity of the cocaine? Is that a metric, and hence a goal here? “We’ll still have cocaine, but it’ll be really shitty.”
Or does that refer to the purity of the pentagon?
It's not actually a bad metric. Basically the demand for cocaine is going to be more or less constant over something like a 6 month window, but the supply is going to fluctuate, so the dealers are going to cut what they have until it's enough to meet demand. That means you can basically use the purity as a good proxy for available supply; when it goes down, the dealers are feeling the squeeze and having to stretch their limited supply, when it goes up the dealers aren't having a hard time getting the goods so they can afford to adulterate it less.
The way I read it is that the drug trade has an expected demand. If the supply channels were interrupted, they might cut what did make it into the country, in order to keep a consistent volume.
Law enforcement may assume a certain purity coming in, but can only track the change in what actually makes it to the street.