Pot Dealing Woes

Well, this morning, Feb 23, there was a story in the NY Daily News about a 72-year old guy from Harlem, NYC who was busted in Maryland with about 65 kilos of pot. The story notes that Rodell Cole, a retired city painter on a pension and social security, was enroute from NYC to the Carolinas when he had a fender bender in a 7-Eleven parking lot. A cop happened to see it and asked Cole for his driver’s license. It turned out to be suspended and the police who came to the scene told Cole they’d have to impound the car, but that he could take his personal belongings out. Cole, who has such a bad cataract in his left eye that he’s virtually blind in that eye, then tried to remove two large duffel bags from the trunk. The cops smelled pot, brought in a K-9 and Cole was busted.
The kicker to the story is that the local police estimated the pot’s worth at $1.3 million. But the pictures accompanying the story clearly show that it’s Mexican brick weed, which sells for maybe $600 a kilo by the time it reaches New York. Which means it hits maybe $1,000 a kilo when it’s finally distributed. But the police, DEA and FBI have always liked to figure the numbers high. In this case the police figured that if each individual gram of pot—there would be 65,000 in 65 kilos—was eventually sold for $20, the going rate for the best marijuana in the world, it could be worth the $1.3 million. Cole, who said he was simply told to deliver the goods for $500, had his bail set at $1 million.
In fact, Mexican brickweed, the cheapest and most plentiful pot on the market, is rarely, if ever, sold by the gram. And if it is, it runs maybe $5 a gram on its best day. But mostly it’s sold in larger quantities because the quality is so poor that you need a lot to get high. So a better figure would have been to assess the value at $600 a kilo and call it a $39,000 bust. Of course, that wouldn’t have looked as good on the local television stations or in the NY Daily News. There’s no headline in "Grandpa with one eye paid $500 to deliver cheap pot gets busted after fender bender."
Of course, I'm thinking of the Keystone of it all: Who the hell hires a one-eyed 72-year-old with a suspended license to be their long distance dope driver? What were those boys in NYC thinking? They didn't do a license check on their driver? They didn't have him get a ticket in NYC to make sure the police ran a check on him so that they'd know if he had a good license or not, or whether he had any outstanding warrants or not? Jeez, Louise, those boys near deserve to lose their dope if that's how dumb they are.
Anyway, they're dumb. But the local cops who told the press it was a $1.3 million haul, now they're just flat-out liars. And they know it and knew it and said it anyway. And the local press didn't call them on it. Shame on the sheepish press, just printing what they're told without regard to looking for the truth in it. Makes me embarrassed to be a journalist sometimes.