Philadelphia Police Say Marijuana Costs $100 Per Joint
Exaggerating the value of drug seizures is an age-old tactic in the drug war. Fuzzy math can turn a routine bust into a career-making front page news story, so it's no surprise that narcotics officers frequently miscalculate the value of their scores. But when a major paper like The Philadelphia Inquirer inadvertently values marijuana at $100 per joint, you know things have gotten out of hand:
Today, police laid out 16 pounds of the stuff they said they confiscated from a high-level dealer who supplied the suburbs…Police put the value of the marijuana at $812,000. On Tuesday, as the probe continued, investigators seized 12 pounds of hallucinogenic mushrooms worth $614,000 and more than $439,000 in cash, police said. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
Really?!? Let's do the math. $812,000 / 16 pounds / 16 ounces / 28.3 grams = $112.08 per gram. That's a hearty marijuana joint for $112. The same formula finds them valuing the mushrooms at a whopping, and oddly similar, $113 per gram.
Just look at High Times Magazine's Market Quotes for marijuana to see that the highest street prices come nowhere close to these wildly false numbers. A gram of the very best pot can fetch $25-30, usually less. It is literally as though they calculated the value of the seizure and added a zero at the end (actually that's currently my best guess as to what happened here).
This is what we get when reporters simply pass along claims from police regarding drugs. Law-enforcement's lack of expertise on certain drug-related matters, combined with their incentive to exaggerate their own achievements, creates an obvious imperative that the press seek to substantiate such claims before offering them to the public.
This announcement from The Philadelphia Inquirer that marijuana costs $100 per joint is just a perfect example of the media's ongoing failure to provide responsible coverage of the war on drugs.
[Thanks, Irina]
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This is all true.
Comment posted by smorgan on Tue, 01/15/2008 - 1:03pmUnfortunately, I rarely receive any response from reporters when I point out errors or request citations for dubious claims.
I typically wait a day before sending a link to a reporter, thus giving our readers a chance to point out any additional issues or errors I may have made. In this case, the story is over a month old, but I addressed it anyway because it so perfectly illustrates the absurdity of the popular drug bust press conference.
I doubt any reporter will be interested in responding at this point, but I'll try. The bust was widely covered throughout the Philadelphia press, with all stories erroneously valuing the seizure at 1.8 million, so it would be quite a chore to pursue all the guilty parties.
Our movement's most effective communications staffers achieve success by sending timely press releases and making media calls when a big story breaks. The resources this requires can only be brought to bear for major stories, while daily nonsense like this continues unchallenged.
In many cases, only a prompt public outcry can provoke a response from the authors of flawed drug war coverage. Numerous emails, LTE's and calls from citizens will get more attention than a clever correspondence from me.
Here's an example of what that can look like. It happened on its own, but if anyone has ideas for replicating it, I'm all ears.