How much would Cocaine cost if it was fully legal ?

How much would fully legal cocaine cost? Well:

Cocaine is licensed for medical use in the UK, so it is legally supplied, and can be legally bought, for that purpose. (You can't buy it in a chemist's shop; it's only administered in hospitals under supervision. But it is sold by suppliers to the NHS and to private sector medical providers, so it does have a market price unconstrained by any issues of of illegality or smuggling.)

The white powder that you snort — well, not you, obviously, but those other people over there — is cocaine hydrochloride. Happily, that's also the form of cocaine used for medical purposes, usually in the form of a 10% solution, so we can directly price-compare.

In the UK you can buy 250g of cocaine hydrochloride solution for about £625, which is about €720. (Well, you can't, but a hospital can.) There's no VAT, excise or import duty, because this is a pharmacuetical product. This cost is largely accounted for by the 25g of cocaine in the solution — the rest of the solution is normal saline, which is very cheap. So that suggests that in a legalised market the wholesale price of 1g of medical grade cocaine would about €29, before VAT or other taxes.

Obviously, it would be politically impossible to allow cocaine to be sold free of the taxes that other recreational drugs — alcohol, tobacco — attract. The publicans would go beserk. Assuming cocaine would attract VAT and excise at rates similar to beer, that would bring the wholesale price to about €41. (More, if you align tax rates to spirits or tobacco.) Then add the retailer's markup — which is, what, 50%? So you're looking at somewhere north of €60.

But that's medical grade cocaine. Does recreational cocaine have to be medical grade? Arguably not, but it does have to be fit for human consumption, so there will still be regulatory standards, and costs of meeting them, and demonstrating compliance with them.

Why is the cost so high? Partly, because cocaine production and trafficking is normally illegal. When you're doing it legally, there are significant costs in demonstrating that you're doing it legally — you need licences and permits and whatnot, and there are audits and inspections, and other compliance costs, all along the supply chain.

This wouldn't change if we fully legalised cocaine; because coca doesn't grow here we'd have to import the cocaine (just as the UK curently does for its medical cocaine) so it would still have to be produced in countries where that is generally illegal, with all the associated costs.

It's an effective local anaesthetic and vasoconstrictor (narrows the veins), which makes it useful for doing minor surgical procedures — reduces pain and also reduces bleeding. It's not much used because there are other alternatives that do the same thing, but it is an option that's available.

For this purpose it's applied directly to the affected tissues in a solution or paste. I don't know whether it has any psychotropic effects when used like this.