Imagine before every sexual encounter, thinking, “Shit, should I do this? I could feed myself for a whole day on the money I’m spending on this condom, or buy a case of beer.”
Would you still go for it? Do you love sex that much? Would you buy condoms if they were $20 a pop?
Well, you don’t have to think about it, since you don’t live in Venezuela. But if you did, man, what would you do? Risk STDs and possible pregnancies just to get off? That’s a decision many in the country have to worry about now, thanks to tremendous scarcity. From Bloomberg.
On the auction website MercadoLibre, used by Venezuelans to obtain scarce goods, a 36-pack of Trojans sells for 4,760 bolivars ($755 at the official exchange rate), close to the country’s minimum monthly wage of 5,600 bolivars. At the unofficial black-market rate used by people with access to dollars, the cost is about $25, compared to $21 in the U.S.
Imagine having to spend your entire monthly salary on one box of condoms? That is insane. And I might buy a lot of black market items, but black market johnnies is not one of them. Or discount ones, which are all that’s left in the country.
In the town of Los Teques on the outskirts of Caracas, Ramo Verde pharmacy manager Katherine Munoz stood by a contraceptive shelf filled with Asian-made condoms. No Durex or Duo, a Beiersdorf AG product, have arrived in her shop since October, with stocks depleting last month, she said, adding that customers “don’t trust” the brands she has left.
“People ask me whether I have used them myself and can recommend them,” Munoz said. “I can’t say I have.”
Sadly, this just isn’t an ‘LOL Venezuelans can’t fuck safe’ situation. The country has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the South America. Without access to cheap contraceptives, that could skyrocket.
Venezuela had the third-fastest rate of HIV infections per capita in South America, after Paraguay and Brazil in 2013, United Nations data shows. The country also has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies on the continent after Guyana, at 83 per 1,000, according to 2012 data from the World Bank. This compares to just 4 per 1,000 in Germany and 31 in the U.S.
“Without condoms we can’t do anything,” Jhonatan Rodriguez, general director at the not-for-profit health group StopVIH, said by phone Jan. 28 from Venezuela’s Margarita Island. “This shortage threatens all the prevention programs we have been working on across the country.”
Things aren’t likely to get better. Venezuela’s economy is petroleum-based. With the price of oil exports plummeting, the country is scrambling to stay afloat.
A collapse in oil prices has deepened shortages of consumer products from diapers to deodorant in the OPEC country that imports most of what it consumes, with crude exports accounting for about 95 percent of its foreign currency earnings. As the price the country receives for its oil exports fell 60 percent in the past seven months, the economy is being pushed to the brink with a three-in-four chance of default in the next 12 months if oil prices don’t recover.
So be thankful for cheap jimmies, Bros. You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.