Dan Savage wrote a book about adopting a kid. After adding up all the costs and fees and hassle, he wanted to title the book “$238 an ounce” or some such. The publishers talked him out of it, and the book was titled “The Kid”.
This author was a bit more candid: http://www.amazon.com/64-Tomato-Fortune-Endured-Existential/dp/B002PJ4IW0/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258740830&sr=1-4
Sofis is right, it’s $20,000 per kilogram = $9000 per pound. I multiplied by two when I should have divided by two (in my defense, I was writing that at 2 am and I should have been in bed). That does seem low, and maybe it’s wrong - I have no idea how accurate the data was but I did check multiple sites per drug and picked a number they all seemed to agree on.
The first number is the original (from random websites). The pounds I converted for comparison (and why I chose pounds, I don’t know, metric IS superior even if the French did invent it).
Also remember with illegal drugs you dont actually pay the per gram price when you buy larger quantities. The friendly neighborhood drug dealers see fit to give us a discount.
Possibly because of the risk of having a pound as compared to a gram.
A friend of my friend told me this. 
And all this time I thought it was printer ink…
Well, in that line I noticed this while surfing Wikipedia about moon rocks:
That’s pretty expensive for what when you get right down to it is a fleck of rock with sentimental value.
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide has a street value of $ 100,000 per gram.
LOL beat me to it, though if you are getting 300mics of LSD for 15 you're getting a pretty good deal. Generally around 100 mics for 10 bucks is what I see average or 300 for 20 unless you get higher concentration stuff. But I think standard for one hit of blotter is 100 mics. Obviously it is such an insanely profitable chemical at every point in the chain it’s very easy to get it much cheaper if you buy in bulk. Buy 5000 hits of Acid or 50 sheets and you can get it for around $ 250-300 a piece with a high variable quality because of the nature of the solution and the paper you soak it up with. I think delivery amounts are generally fairly imprecise at the consumer level.
At my price it’s about 45m per pound at yours yea 50m per kilo.
So far, only antimatter seems to be beating out LSD. Of course, I have possessed LSD and can easily access its market, antimatter I wouldn’t even know who to buy it from.
Is it really fair to count street value though? Street value is grossly inflated due to the artificial rarity of a substance, not really due to any real difficulty in manufacture. Cocaine, for instance, would be priced similar to most other processed agricultural products if it were to be bought near the source or in a place without laws against it, and LSD surely cannot cost anywhere close to what its grossly inflated street value is.
Graphene has to be up there too, my understanding is that it would cost several billion dollars to produce a one-inch square piece of it. I’m not sure what the weight would be, but it’s pure carbon in a layer one atom thick, so it’s well below a gram in any case.
Just checking some things I buy for work, recombinent BMP-15 costs $295 per 5ug, making it $59,000 per gram, and I’m sure there are biological reagents more expensive than that; I just randomly picked one of the growth factor vendors. So, I bet if you could find a patented, particularly difficult to manufacture recombinant protein, you could find one that was more expensive than that.
Yes and no.
How many billions if not trillions did we spend to send men to the moon ? How many pounds of rock did we bring back ? A couple billion per pound might be on the low side cost wise.
Of course, now given the Russians desperation for cash and their space faring abilities, its kinda suprising to me they havent sent a robotic probe to gather a few pounds of lunar rock and then auction it off a few slivers at a time.
Yeah, there is a whole moons worth right next door, but very little has been brought back and it cost a fortune to go get it.
Fair point, but even still, LSD is probably a very expensive chemical outside of that artificial inflation. A pound of LSD could dose every hippy in North America. It’s just not produced in those quantities, even if you look at it from the perspective of the chemist directly to his immediate broker, where the price is probably much much less than it’s end-user value, it’s still an expensive commodity because they aren’t making pounds of it at a time and it’s unlikely that given different legal circumstances that they would make pounds of it at a time.
It might not be fair to count things that aren’t available as commodities. Do winning lottery tickets count? If you argue that it’s the ink in their numbers that makes the difference, does that count? What if adding a line segment to turn a 5 into a 6 makes it a winner - does one segment’s worth of ink count? What if erasing a line segment does it - does that mean the ink has an enormous negative value?
I just read an article in a computer magazine where they said that per liter, printer ink costs far more than either the most expensive champagne or expensive perfume, which costs tens of thousands of dollars/ Euros already. So while not the most expensive, it deserves a mention…
Well I thought we were talking about substances. Like LSD isn’t really available as a commodity but it IS a molecule. I mean as a commodity in the legal commodities market, I guess it is a black market commodity. Would LSD fall in or out of this thread’s purview based on your definition?
The most valuable substance on Earth?
That would be my son. He’s priceless.
However, I hear some scientist named Lex Luthor is willing to pay top dollar for something called kryptonite.
Then how is IVF affordable? 4.5 trillion per pound (I know an egg weighs less, but still).
I am not the OP, but I am going to suggest a definition of commodities for this thread anyway. Specifically, one based on divisibility:
Take the substance in an amount it would normally be sold in. Divide it into two equal halves. If the halves are each worth approximately half of what the original amount was worth, it is a commodity. If there is a significant difference in value between the two halves, or the total value is significantly different from the original value, it is not a commodity.
That would mean LSD is in, while diamonds, human eggs and winning lottery tickets are all out.
Yes fair enough, manufacturing price is probably only couple hundred dollars per litre if you had full access to all the needed precursors. Isn’t LSD legal in switzerland for psychiatric research? Anyone know how to find out the cost of the legal variety?