The least believable thing about Ozark is that someone could cultivate opium poppies in the middle of Missouri and have any prayer of being competitive in the global heroin market

And yes I’ve been up most of the night thinking about this

First a giant field of opium flowers is gonna stand out. And well - you can’t grow them in the shade. So your already in trouble.

Second you’re competing against massive production in regions that have harvested opium for generations and where the average wage is 2 dollars a day.

In Afghanistan poppies are subsistence level farming.

In mexico poppy farmers will get 1k a season for what they produce

But let’s do the math. Assuming somehow they don’t get caught - and can cultivate 100 hectares (about 1/4 square mile) of poppies - they COULD produce around 100 kg of heroin.

Sounds like a lot? It’s not.

Last year the US seized more than 4,000 kg of heroin. But that’s not all. World wide 91 tons of heroin were seized in 2016. And 400 tons of opiates total. And the US represents about half the worlds demand.

So whatever total US consumption is — 50 tons? 100 tons? Our potential 100 kg is nothing.

The labor costs alone to cultivate 100 hectares of opium would Sink us. (its a labor intensive process) it would take 15-20 people per hectare 4 weeks to harvest the opium.

At a hundred dollars a day that’s 3k a person for 2000 people. 6M dollars.

Now our max profit on 100 kg of heroin is around 5M.

So we are already in trouble. And we haven’t dealt with any of the other costs.

How do they do this in Afghanistan and Colombia? Mostly small family farms. And lots of kids. A family might harvest an acre or two, produce a few bricks of opium and net a few hundred dollars. If the crop is good.

It’s subsistence level farming.

But let’s say we get our labor costs way down.

We still need to acquire massive amounts of tightly controlled precursor chemicals - especially Acetic Anhydride- maybe half a ton worth

I have no idea what this costs on the black market. But you could buy it legally for ~ 250k

So double that.

Plus a host of other chemicals and lab equipment - optimistically 750k annually for lab/chemical costs.

But who is going to work in this lab? It doesn’t look like these characters are Walter white so you need someone to work in lab. Plus labor to move all this massive weight around. Plus security.

Plus folks to tend the fields. Year round. And security on your fields. 100 people year round between lab and fields?

Let’s say... 30k a year? Plus 100k for our chemist?

So around 4M in additional costs outside of harvesting.

And we haven’t even dealt with quality issues. Because this heroin is likely to be. Well. Shit.
Heroin has never been cheaper and more pure in the US than today
And we are going to go to market with low grade heroin from subpar opium. Which means our yield is probably a lot less.

And our purity much lower.

So is that 50k per kilo likely? Probably not.

And don’t forget that a lot of heroin today is cut with fentanyl which users have rapidly developed a taste for - so our stuff is worthless.

In conclusion:

best case circumstances it will cost 2-3M more to produce heroin on a mythical invisible 100 hectare poppy field than you could ever sell it for. Assuming a good crop, no loss, theft or seizures AND an accesible distribution network (I’ll spare you that thread)