And you thought northeast Indiana was a staid, stick-in-the-mud region:
A man is being held without bond in the Allen County Lockup after police say they seized more than 6,000 pounds of marijuana from his rented home.
Sheriff Ken Fries says the drugs seized Thursday could have a street value of more than $6 million.
Twenty-nine-year-old Matthew McChesney was arrested after police stopped him for speeding Wednesday. Police say they found more than 10 pounds of marijuana and about $100,000 in cash in his car.
More than 6,000 pounds of marijuana -- the largest amount ever seized in the county -- in Harlan. Harlan, I tell you!
Since both the wholesale and retail price of marijuana vary widely from region to region and time to time and depending on the quality of the product, you might be wondering where that "street value" -- which breaks down to $1,000 a pound -- comes from. It's an arbitrary figure set by the federal DEA just so every police agency will be reporting under the same terms and we can thus have a general idea of how much marijuana has been taken in various parts of the country.
The rap used to be that police vastly inflated the value of the drugs to make the problems seem worse and themselves look good. But some people have other ideas:
The self-described "marijuana enthusiast" said the DEA's estimate of $1,000 seemed reasonable, but that $1,500 was more realistic. He said he thinks that police intentionally place a lower value on a drug to make others who dabble in the market question the higher prices they might be paying to dealers.
I wondered about that, so I did some Googling -- you can find the price of anything online. That $1,000 a pound does seem a tad on the conservative side.
