Several questions about the way the press reports drug seizures:
(a) How do they come up with these valuations? Is it wholesale, retail, or what?
(b) Why do they use dollar amounts instead of weight or volume? Often when I hear about one of these really humongous busts, my initial reaction is “Boy, that much money could fund a whole bunch of worthwhile things!”, but then I realize that they can’t sell the stuff, and to the government, its real value is absolutely zero. So why bother assigning a dollar figure at all?
They usually use “street value” ie the price of the drugs as purchased by their ultimate user. As for using dollars instead of grams or ounces, it’s often a more accurate measure. A kilogram of pure heroin and twenty kilograms of a 5%heroin/95%sugar mixture have an equal monetary value even though their weights are different. Plus, of course, the price sounds more dramatic than the weight.
They inflate the value as much as they possibly can, always using the street price instead of wholesale. Say, for example, a 1/4 oz of pot costs $25, but a full ounce costs $75 since you’re purchasing more. That ounce is worth $100 on the news. Extrapolate that to a few hundred pounds and you’ve got an awfully bloated figure.
Also, ever notice how they always seize “high-grade marijuana?” You never hear any reports of customs officials seizing 10 tons of nasty, dried-out, seedy, stemmy, funky Mexican brick weed.
Additionally, they sometimes inflate the weight of drug by including the container it is transported in (or on).
For example when Bob Jones gets busted with 1/2 oz of pot in a glass jar, it can weighed in the jar. Shenanigans! The jar itself weighs a couple ounces so the bust is much bigger charge.
This actually happened to a friend of mine in Denver, but the charges were dropped when the evidence dissappeared. He was essentially going to take it to jury trial and ask that it be weighed in the courtroom and hope the case got thrown out.
As for part (b) of your question, there’s a reason to note it’s value even if you can’t sell it. Sort of. The local government can use the drugs for various purposes, such as training drug-sniffing dogs, setting up busts, etc. So if the city needed 2 kilos of high-grade cocaine to set up a bust, it’s still worth a lot to have confiscated it.
This barely matters, however, since I’m sure most governments have more confiscated drugs than they can use, and it still doesn’t justify the inflated value reported to the press.
At least here in Chicago, in Cook County Circuit Court, I’ve seen judges at bond hearings use the street value of seized drugs as the amount of the defendant’s bond – “C” 100% cash bond, not the 10% “D” bond. I got the impression* that this was typical practice.
I can’t vouch for CF’s friend’s story but for LSD they charge the person based on the weight of the drug, regardless of medium. If you put the LSD on sugar cubes, prepare for stiffer penalties than if you had put it on blotter paper.
Theoretically, if you threw some liquid LSD into a tub full of water, you could be charged based on the weight of the tub of water, not the amount of LDS thrown in. http://www.ndsn.org/FEB96/LSD.html
I was pretty sure that this did not apply to marijuana- in fact I thought (but have no cites) that to properly get the weight, they were supposed to destem and deseed it, although I can’t picture the cops sitting there with an album cover and credit card after a bust.
He had a total of one half ounce of pot in a glass mason jar and the total weighed in at better than 1 ounce making the charge much more serious.
As I said, it’s moot, as they “lost” the evidence and the charges were dropped. However, I would concede that I may believe it to be common when it is, perhaps, not common at all.
That last sentence in the second paragraph should read “LSD”. I am not advocating throwing mormons into tubs.
On (another) a hijack note- during sentencing, the judge can use the total amount of drugs that the person had contemplated purchasing at any point in the past based on “relevant conduct”. So if you’re really high and tell a DEA agent that you’re thinking about buying a gazillion pounds of peyote right before you get busted with a nickel bag and the judge considers your statement to describe “relevant conduct”, you’re screwed. http://www.whitehorseinc.com/fsglaw/cases/sc%20Witte.htm
(note: why a site that provides federal sentencing materials is named “white horse” is beyond me)
On CNN’s website they’ve got a story about the FedEx marijuana busts where they say that “Officials estimated more than 121 tons of marijuana worth more than $140 million had been distributed by the traffickers”. That breaks down to $578+ a pound, or $36 an ounce which is far less than “street value” (according to the drug dealers that hang out on the street corner). What is the formula to arrive at that figure? I dunno.