We've all heard the reports; "$2 million in heroin intercepted" or "$650 thousand in pot found in warehouse." What kind of message does this language send? I know if I were cash-strapped, young and clueless, a headline like that would certainly catch my ear and I'm sure this style of reporting has attracted younger (or older) people to consider dealing!
After all, these drug dollar values are a guess at best so it's not really news and they have no value to many of us so in many cases it's completely false.
What's wrong with reporting on drugs and the capture of drugs by their weight or volume? This would be accurate and non-sensational. This may be a small point, but I'll bet that this idea would work to reduce the inclination of people on the edge.-- jon3, Oct 02 2002 Hmm, no street value here.. http://www.dea.gov/major/me3.html [Mr Burns, Oct 02 2002] Or here... http://www.dea.gov/major/triplex.html [Mr Burns, Oct 02 2002] Or here... http://www.dea.gov/major/sanctuary.html(this could go on all day...) [Mr Burns, Oct 02 2002] Anything that contributes to the idealism of the young is sufficient unto itself.-- reensure, Oct 02 2002 <not-the-nine-oclock-news>... which means the police are paying at least twice as much for it as the rest of us.</n-t-n-o-n>-- PeterSilly, Oct 02 2002 Yeah, I never heard a news report say they intercepted 800 pounds of marijuana, or 50 kilos of coke...-- Mr Burns, Oct 02 2002 Just ask Bill Bonds. If you don't know who he is, Google can scrounge up some rather hilarious off-air footage of him on drunken coked-up tieraids..-- Mr Burns, Oct 02 2002 Yeah but to your average drug-frearing TV glutton, "$50million" sounds waaay more impressive than "x kilograms." It's all about making the news seem interesting. The TV companies have to keep you watching to sell profitable ad space (to minimise the losses generated by making news programmes), so they're going to pitch every drug bust as a Miami Vice special.-- calum, Oct 03 2002 "Enough cocaine to keep 100,000 teens high for 30 days" (not scary enough)
"Enough pot to to cause 2,000,000 new highschool dropouts" (scarier)-- phundug, Feb 19 2004 The drug values they say are always insanely inflated. They always seem to take the highest price a drug would fetch in it's smallest quantity and multiply it by the total weight, which is completely wrong.-- SystemAdmin, Feb 19 2004 random, halfbakery