In the chapter entitled The Entrepreneurial Mafia and the Heroin Economy author Pino Arrlachi described the detailed steps that are required to get heroin from Middle East to the United States and once here what is required to distribute it efficiently.

    The heroin production starts in the middle east or in Southern  Asia as an opium that must be made from the poppy plant. The value of this step in the gradual production into heroin is incredibly low considering what can ultimately be obtained as revenue for fully processed heroin. The author gives the details of prices for both the poppy plant and then the fully processed morphine and shows how the value of the morphine increases as one moves closer to the United States. From Afghanistan to Milan the price of Morphine can increase six fold.

    In the next section the author deals with the market for heroine which , he describes as essentially the perfect sellers market with an almost completely inelastic product. In this section the mafia or organinized crime plays its necessary role. According to the author, there are three things that are necessary for the successful sale of opium, they are capital, physical violence, and insurance of inaction from law enforcement. With these established, the returns to heroine sale are enormous and can be anwhere from 10 to twenty times cost of morphine purchase.

    In “The Godfather”, the main conflict centers around the character of Sollozzo who brings the possibility of drug trade to Don Vito Corrleone. Sollozzo offers the Don three hundred percent return on his investment inside of a month. The Don intelligently refuse because as was shown in this section Sollozzo was asking the Vito to put up to of the essential factors for the drug trade capital and political connections. Understnading these elements of the drug trade helps to provide some insight into the decisions that were made in the film.