The peeconomy

Washington, DC is a god forsaken Maryland county which houses a good chunk of the administrative apparatus and assorted bureaucracy of the US government.

As one'd expect, this makes it a prime magnet for all the good for nothing scum an entire continent produces : the honest, good looking teen-aged whore will flock to Las Vegas to suck cock and make a fortune (which she will indeed make) ; the dishonest yet good looking teen-aged whore will instead flock to Los Angeles, to "become a star", be it music or video but in any case cum sextape and obviously also make a fortune (which she will in general not make, except for the lottery-based extraction mechanismⁱ) ; the dishonest, ugly teenager with delusions of intelligence will flock to New York instead to "become a writer". So what of the dishonest, ugly teenager that knows it's dumb as rocks ? Why! Washington, DC awaits.

There's about a million of them, collected over the decades, of which about half are employed at any given moment, from cocksucking Senatorial pages to mass-market pizza and garbage manipulators (the distinction being minute). A good chunk, perhaps as many as three quarters of those employed also have to pass drug tests as part of their employment. A good chunk, perhaps as many as three quarters of the population does drugs.

The average lifespan of the average whore is about ten years, after which either death or retirement scour her from the profession. So numerically speaking : about 375k heads of cattle need clean pee about four times a year ; about 750k heads of cattle actually do drugs. Obviously this means that no matter what at the very least 125k heads of cattle will need clean pee they don't have. Meanwhile about 100k heads of young cattle arrive into the city each year and for perhaps as long as on average two quarters can provide clean pee.

While this simple transfer of drugs for pee probably underpins the entire dating scene of Washington DC, you have to consider the beauty of the drug freebie.

The drug freebie is the ultimate in product sample : while the sorta-almost hot chicks in sorta-almost revealing garb passing out cheese cubes and tiny perfume bottles in supermarkets proceed on their masters' mostly vain hope that the general public may be so persuaded to in the future actually part with money in exchange for that particular cheese or perfume, the drug samples offer an absolute guarantee : of ten innocents trying them, at least nine will end up junkies. The average lifetime value of a junkie to his new owners is in the twenty to thirty thousand range (indicentally : the average college debt in the us is ~25k, figure that one out!) whereas the average cost for a sample is in the five to ten dollars range.

Consequently, drug samples are the best business idea ever (and actually the way that product does all its marketing : word of... mouth, so to speak), provided of course that they find their way in the hands of the innocent, rather than end up with the junkies (where they merely function as habit discounts). And what better means of virtually ensuring that the samples reach their intended destination than to trade them for clean pee ?

Obviously the only people who can provide clean pee are the exact people you want to be reached by your free samples, and so this'd be a match made in heaven if there ever was one.

My readers, who are probably a lot better connected than me, are cordially invited to inform in the comments section as to how well this economic theory maps on the economic reality in the field. Pee or no pee ?

1. If you need one-in-a-million looks to make your movies work but can't afford to pay the whole million minimum wage, it's always a good idea to pay one in a million a million and spend another ten cents per capita on advertising the million. For $1.10 cents you will thus obtain the million heads of cattle that'd have normally cost minimum wage/hour and hated you for it. [↩]