Sorry, I misread your original post. You can only be convicted of possession with intent to sell if the little baggie says “cocaine”.
If you do actually sell it you can be convicted of “sale of a substance in lieu of a controlled substance” under F.S. 817.563.
Both carry identical penalties to the actual sale of the equivalent drugs, though, so grude is correct.
What a dumb ass law. I’ve never seen a package of real coke labeled “coke”. I have to wonder whether anyone in the history of the world has been dumb enough to be convicted because of sticking a label on a bag of flour.
I’m here in the U.S.
I recently met someone who tried coke here in the U.K, than again here in the U.S.
He said that it’s unanimously known that cocaine is much stronger here in the U.S than in UK.
Apparently it’s because we’re much closer here in California to the Cartels so there are fewer middle men cutting the product.
Made sense to me.
So, kinky now passes for jurisprudence?
Kiddie porn makers?
I once knew somebody who bought a vial full of mint leaves, thinking they were getting pot.
Help me out here.
Not being terribly experienced with many recreational drugs, I have no idea how big a gram is. Are we talking the size of a marble? A grape? A golf ball? A grapefruit? How many lines in a gram?
Don’t need answer fast, I’m just trying to visualize it.
Smaller than a marble. A cubic centimeter (or milliliter) of water (which is denser than most powdered things) weighs exactly one gram.
A paperclip usually weighs at or a little over a gram. So, it’s really a minute amount of stuff. Remember, a kilogram is about 2.2 pounds so a gram is equal to a thousandth of that if that helps visualize it.
As for the thread title, I think it’s obvious that she knew people would get hurt before she got found out and now she’s just trying to scrounge up some pity.
Wow. And that’s considered enough for a night of partying?
But this lightly compacted powder when you buy it. A gram, I’d say, is about the size of a marble maybe a bit bigger. Much smaller then a golf ball though.
As for how many lines, that depends on the person. I’ve seen people say “OMG, my friend got a gram and made two giant lines out of it and him and his girlfriend each did it in one giant snort.” It’s also going to go further if you chop it up finer.
Chopped up really fine, 1.5-2 inches long, maybe a big bigger around then an ink tube from a pen, kinda like this (which I don’t think is actually coke, looks like baking soda), maybe, what, 20-30 lines. Basically, it’s enough to get to casual users though a week OR weekend or a not so casual user though a heavy night of partying.
On preview, your partying comment wasn’t there when I typed this. I should probably point out that a gram, when I was in college was between 60 and 90 dollars.
When you chop it up as fine as possible, there is more there than you would think. Yet, no, not enough for a night of partying non-stop. From what I’ve heard, people drink, dance, chat, and occasionally toot.
ETA: Yeah, what Joey P said.
OK, that looks like a lot. I could make a lot of biscuits with that.
That’s a razor blade in that picture, to give you the proper proportion… 
In her defense, according to noted legal scholar Edwin Meese they wouldn’t be suspects if they weren’t already guilty.
Bring your child sex slave to work day!
In principle, I’m annoyed that this kind of corruption was unchecked for so long. Pragmatically speaking though I can’t bring myself to feel badly about drug cases being thrown out.
What I’m most surprised about is that defense did not do their own tests.
I rather doubt an attorney would be allowed to possess a sample of illegal narcotics for testing purposes.
There would also be the whole chain of custody thing to deal with.
She could, actually. The most time-consuming aspect of testing tends to be the prep work – weighing samples, dissolving, mixing and diluted them – that kind of stuff – and that’s probably what she wanted to skip. I could envision her taking 20 samples to test, but only actually preparing five of them, for instance, then putting vials in the HPLC or whatever as if they had come from all 20 solutions when they had only come from five.
Such a scenario would be relatively difficult to detect and could go some way to explaining why it took so long for her to be found out.
Right. Now here’s the thing. Especially with samples of presumed controlled substances, all samples should be weight controlled, double and triple checked. In other words, she should not be able to get away with pretending to take 1.5234 g of sample B25 without actually doing so, because there should be someone else coming along later to re-weigh the bulk sample and determine that yes, in fact, there is 1.5 or so grams less of it now than there was earlier. And if the technician is provided a pre-weighed sample of about 1.5 grams in its own little labelled vial, then there has to be some kind of direct supervision to ensure the sample is all consumed in the testing the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the part, to me, where I assume there must be some severe problem with how the lab itself is being run.
Yeah, that was something I always found awful about working in quality control, even with a much better controlled environment than this woman must have worked in. I remember when they installed a new time-auditing system in one lab I worked in – it depended on the first analysts doing a particular test to set the standard for the system, so this one guy who was incredibly slow just guarded “his” product jealously without letting anyone else do any testing on it (or ever working on anything else), so the system never picked up that he was taking twice as long to do each test as anyone else would have done. It was incredibly obvious to the other technicians, though.
What a vile woman. She’s sent many innocent people to jail. Doubtless some of them suffered assaults while they were there. Possibly got raped. Possibly killed. Definitely scarred for life.
I’m usually not one to say that the law should make an example of someone, but in this case I’ll join the “lock her up and throw away the key” crowd.
What a depressing and outrageous story.
