During the pandemic I've hopped around between different creative pursuits cause I'm a noncommittal dweeb. One thing I tried my hand at was making youtube videos, and while researching coffee production I was surprised by just how fucked it really is. Everyone knows that coffee is produced with slavery, but the global economy's relationship with coffee is terrifying. People are not addicted to coffee, society is. In fact, coffee shops are the fastest growing part of the restaurant business. The West is so addicted to coffee that it is the second most in-demand commodity behind only crude oil. It is also (disputed) the second most popular drink in the world behind water, though this fluctuates with soft drinks and tea. We produce so much fucking coffee. Here are some numbers. All data is from 2020.
3 key figures: 1 coffee bean is ~.1325g, 1 cup of coffee is 10g of beans, 1 bag of coffee (unit of measure for international production) is 60kg.
Consumption: In 2020 the world produced 168.5 million bags of coffee, weighing 10,110,000 metric tons of fresh beans. That's the same as:
MASS
- Blue Whales: Average mass is 110 metric tons= 91,909 Blue Whales (Second level of abstraction that's not as helpful as it is funny: Average whale length is 27m x 91,909 = 2,481.5km Burj Khalifa is .8298km at the tip x 91,909 = 2,990.5 Burj Khalifa’s American football field: .9144km x 91,909 = 2,713.8 football fields)
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Heaviest recorded Elephant: Mass of 1.22 tons 8,286,885.25 Fat Fucking Elephants
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Nimitz class aircraft carrier: Mass of 100,000 tons 101.1 Aircraft carriers
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Great Pyramid of Giza: Estimated 5.3 million metric tons 1.91 Great Pyramids
VOLUME
- Coffee Beans: Density of beans: 561kg/m^3 10,110,000,000kg/(561kg/m3)=18,021,390.37m3=18,021.39km^3 of beans produced in 2020
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Great Pyramid 18,021.39km3/2,583.283km3=~7 Great Pyramids
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Lake Tanganyika (3rd largest lake on earth by volume) 18,900 km3/18,021.39km^3=about the same.
What horrifies me is the shear number of beans that slaves had to pick by hand. 60kg per bag/.1325g (mass of 1 bean) x 168.5 mil bags = 76,301,886,792,452.83 beans
Thank you NeverGoOutside for pointing out that I used the total population of the US and EU. I did the math again using the 15-64 demographics because they're the biggest coffee drinkers and it's a pain in the ass to factor in the elderly. Here's the revised population data:
EU:
Coffee drinking population (15-64): 286.62 million
Imported bags: 49 million
49,000,000*6000=294,000,000,000 cups
294,000,000,000 cups/ 286,620,000 drinkers= 1025.75 per year or 2.8 cups per day
USA:
Coffee drinking population (15-64): 218.8 million
Imported bags: 26 million
26,000,000*6000=156,000,000,000/218.8 million = 713 (rounded from 712.98) cups per year or 2 cups per day (rounded from 1.95)
In short, I'm sick of doing math, stop buying coffee. I'm probably gonna do chocolate next week.
I hope I didn't fuck up the formatting of this post. Edit: I fucked up the formatting
Honestly it's pretty fucked up that there are socially acceptable drugs to be addicted to such as coffee or nicotine, yet people who are addicted to other drugs, say meth or heroin, are treated like absolute trash. Everything is set up to completely dehumanize people who are addicted to an arbitrary selection of drugs so the prison industry can get more slaves.
It's cultural class distinction and nothing else. How addictive something is varies so fucking much person to person. And then you have to decide if you're targetting addiction or societal effect as well. You just let a junkie have their dope and they are no threat to anyone. Stimulants are their own thing, an opiate addict will go to extremes to get money to buy dope but a crackhead will do the same and can easily be a problem to others as a result of getting high as well as I've seen all too often, stimulants make you go crazy cause you need to sleep to not go crazy... I personally don't know what to do with that. But opiate addiction with a steady medical fix will kill you way slower and hurt your life way less than alcohol addiction which is just a free for all.
I don't mean this in a judgemental way at all, I do all the drugs bit have only ever managed to get hooked on smokes and booze. There are also plenty of perfectly reasonable crackheads and tweeters but it's a tougher battle there.
I had a pretty serious opiate addiction a little while ago. Thankfully I'm four years clean now! And yeah, what you say about opioid addiction is absolutely true. The largest reason opioid addiction is so harmful is because of criminalization.
The black market charges ridiculous prices for Heroin that could be produced for pennies on the gram if it were legal. This causes people to steal to fund their habits.
Dealers, looking for ways to stretch their product, cut all kinds of disgusting shit into it. Baking soda, sugars, talcum powder, antihistamines... But the worst of it is fentanyl. When you buy heroin, you're basically getting a new product with varying potency each time. This varying potency kills people all the time when they get a more potent batch than they were used to. This is exponentially worse when the product is cut with fentanyl, an absolutely vile drug that is a hundred fold more potent than morphine. The vast majority of fentanyl use happens nonconsensually when it is cut into heroin unknown to the user. Since it is so potent, dealers often are unable to mix it with the rest of the product homogenously enough. This leaves hotspots in the powder where the fentanyl concentration is insanely high, and these kill. All of this is a result of the unregulated nature of the black market.
The solution is to end the war on drugs, allow people with a history of opioid addiction to have their drug of choice prescribed to them by a doctor. Methadone clinics almost get this right, but they have so many rules and hoops to jump through that often it's easier to just get back on heroin. We need to stop with this patronizing attitude toward people who suffer from addiction, let them decide how they want to live their lives. The current system dehumanizes us at every stop and often kills or enslaves us. It needs to end.
I have very little experience with stimulants and people who are addicted to them, so I can't comment on what you say about that, but you are right on the mark with regards to opioid addiction.
I got a lot of my info from my roommate who has been addicted for a good twenty years or so. He's on methadone now and I guess doctors here will fucking up your dose of the pharma reports you've missed doses (you have to drink it at the counter, you could cheek but still no reason to up the dose) requests for lower doses are always denied and usually met with a later upside. It's clearly not meant to get people off opiates but keep em on methadone.
I had to stop drinking coffee because of a medical condition (seizures, absolutely no fun) and fuck that was rough. Still is, I relapse every once in a while when I'm stressed.
Quitting caffeine is definitely not the best experience, especially when you have responsibilities such as school or a job. I take it occasionally now too, usually in the form of black tea. Caffeine is just so ubiquitous, it's hard to stay away from.