Why Drug Laws are Bad

Because drug research is worthless. You have academics who don't know shit about drugs writing crazy assertions about them. The following article is the dumbest things on Marijuana I've read in a long time.

Basically because East Coast weed sucks, people mail shit here all the time and someone lost a 33 pound shipment of weed. Here is the blurb from Planet Money's CHIEF DRUG CORRESPONDENT, this is the guy who is supposed to know the most about drugs:

"When undercover officers make wholesale buys, usually they pay about $1,000 a pound for medium-grade marijuana. So the 33 pounds that Anderson and Sloan received probably cost the local importer about $33,000. As a rule of thumb, a pound can be stretched into 360 $10 bags, meaning the shipment's retail value was nearly $120,000."

The above misinformation is exactly why drug laws are terrible because the people who write them don't know shit about drugs. I won't even point out that there are transportation costs as well as distribution costs associated with a sale that means he will definitely not net $120,000 even based on their erroneous numbers.

First off, why even mention the cost for medium grade weed? If someone is shipping weed by Fedex they are shipping quality weed. That's like saying, Pabst Blue Ribbon costs $5 a case, when you're estimating the cost of a case of Glen Livet (I realize that beer and scotch are different, but thats the disparity between quality weed from CA and the dog shit they have in DC).

The cost of quality weed in California is anywhere from $2500-5000 a pound direct from growers. How the fuck is this guy getting shit for $1000 a pound? At $1000 a pound and 16 ounces in a pound that means he's getting an ounce for $62.50. NOT BLOODY LIKELY. Obviously his information is based on DC fucking cops buy bullshit DC crap, which I'm not convinced is that cheap either. I feel like his information is from back in the day when dime bags cost a dime.

He goes on to claim that you can divide a pound into 360 bags. There are over 450 grams in pound so where the fuck does this 360 number come from? He claims its a rule of thumb, who's fucking thumb? He also claims that these 360 bags can be sold for $10 each. First, if you bag a pound into 360 bags you will have 1.25 gram bags. Where the fuck can you buy more than a gram for $10?

Full article available here

See if you can guess which one is my comment.