“Street value $500 million. What street is that? You show me how to get there just once.”
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This happened in the US, so if we’re going to use foreign currency, why not the Vietnamese dong? The exchange rate is roughly 22,717 dong to the dollar. (And 500M dong is probably closer to - but still more than - the real value.)
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And some quick research tells me that one poppy produces, on average, about 80mg of opium, and we’re talking about 4000 plants, maybe. Which roughly tallies with numbers I’m seeing of 10-13 kilos of dried opium per hectare for experienced growers (i.e. 4 to 5 kilos per acre). This is one acre, so not even enough to make a kilo of actual heroin, then. We’re talking closer to $50K dollars (as an over-estimate) than $500M. That’s… quite a difference.
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The weight also depends upon which planet (if any) one happens to be on at the time.
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oooo that flower is so pretty!
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If you’re lucky.
I was involved in the trial of a bloke done for growing weed. He’d thrown a handful of seeds into a planter box, planning to prune out all but the healthiest seedlings; just wanted a couple of home use plants.
The cops got to him before he has a chance to prune. About thirty inch-high seedlings, each rated by the cops as “cannabis plant, street value $2,000”.
So they charged him as a commercial grower nabbed with $60,000 worth of gear.
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I’m not even sure an acre of crocus sativus (aka saffron flower) would be worth that much.
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Is that through a scanner, darkly? I have very positive and incredibly vague memories of that film.
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That’s why I stopped buying from them.
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The irony is it’s legal to grow papaver somniferum in the US, just not legal to cut the pods to produce and harvest latex. If he’d just have shut up he’d still be fine at this point.
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That has a certain, twisted logic to it - they punished him, albeit unfairly, for the potential, future value of the plants in his possession. In this case, they seem to have taken the likely quantity of drugs that he could potentially have made from the plants, figured out the street value and then inexplicably multiplied that number by 10,000.
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Yes it is.
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Me, too! Let’s watch it again!
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Same in the UK and New Zealand. We used to have poppies in a decorative flowerbed in the UK. They’re pretty.
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And we’re back to cop logic. Ironically, my wife found the attached in the US national archive yesterday - federal public health officials freaking out at 200 overdose deaths a year in the US in 1962. Now we have ~40,000 deaths a year and the only thing that really changed between 1962 and 2017 is we shut public health out and handed over all responsibility for dealing with opioids to the cops. I went to a presentation at the ‘RX drug abuse and heroin summit’ in Atlanta a few weeks ago run by a prosecutor and a cop on how to turn overdose deaths into homicide cases, which sounds not entirely insane except in my own research with drug users says homicide prosecutions basically guarantees no-one at an overdose ever calls 911 again -> dead people. Almost everything cops have done in the last 60 years has increased the number of deaths.
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Not the red varieties, which are the strongest.
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