Missing In Iceland: Crack

Iceland, like many European countries, has a love-hate relationship with drugs. They love to take them, but enforce some pretty strict drug laws, even if sentencing is usually more focused on rehabilitation than incarceration. There are few drugs you can’t find in Iceland, if you look hard enough, but one that is conspicuously missing is crack cocaine.

For the unfamiliar, crack is incredibly easy to make. And anyone who has visited some of Iceland’s swankier nightclubs can attest that Icelanders do enjoy cocaine. And still, no crack. Why?

Cocaine is able to travel around continental Europe with relative ease, but getting it to Iceland is a whole other story. There’s only so much you can carry through the international airport, which is also the most heavily policed point of entry, so smugglers have to get creative. This includes trying to bring it into the country via the ferry over from Scandinavia, or even welding waterproof containers to the hulls of ships. This means Iceland gets proportionately less cocaine than most other European countries.

So if you’re an aspiring drug dealer in Iceland with a small quantity of coke, how do you get the most for your money? You cut it to death. Cocaine purity in Iceland, on average, is somewhere around 10%. That being the case, cooking it down to crack will greatly reduce the supply of product, and you might actually lose money.

Further, most Icelandic drug users have their standards. It’s why most cannabis users prefer joints over bongs, which are looked down upon as being too “junky” for the discriminating stoner. The same goes for crack. For these reasons, crack is yet another thing missing in Iceland – fortunately.