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How Alabama weighs drugs in Drug Trafficking or "Strange Weights and Measures"

Alabama has rather unusual ways of weighing things in drug trafficking cases. In other words, it's not what you would commonly think of with your regular math. Let me explain. Let's say we have a friend and his name is "Hard Luck Harry.". He goes to his dealer and says "hey, dealer sell me some cocaine, I want to buy 20 g." 

Well, the dealer says "well  I only have 30-gram packages, tell you what, since your good customer, I will sell you 30 ounces for the price 0f 20.

Hard Luck Harry says "Great". 

He buys the cocaine.

Harry doesn't know his dealer has cut that cocaine and he's really bought  28 grams of baking soda with 2 grams of cocaine. Harry also does know that his dealer has been working as an informant. 

The dealer calls the cops and says Harry just got some drugs. The cops bust  Harry. Harry finds himself in court charged with Trafficking in Cocaine. 

He is charged with trafficking because of the weight of cocaine. See section 13 A – 12 – 231 of the Alabama Code.

Harry says "Wait a minute, I only had 2 grams,  that's not fair". 

So how do you get 30 grams? You get that because Alabama Does Math the way Jethro, from the Beverly hillbillies, did math: "Readin, Rightin, Rithmatic!"

Alabama math is that if you have any drugs in a mixture and you can't separate the mixture you count the whole thing. 

So for Hard Luck Harry, even though he only got 2 grams of actual cocaine, and, 20 grams of baking soda; he is charged with all 30 grams. That's enough to get Harry a trafficking charge. If he's convicted of trafficking he's looking at in life in prison. 

So Alabama has a peculiar way of weighing things. When it comes to drug trafficking cases, if the mixture is separable then it doesn't count. 

Say we have another druggy guy named Lucky Larry. Lucky Larry decides to get cocaine. He goes to his dealer and says "I would like to buy a trafficking amount of crack rocks, 30 grams ". The drug dealer sells Lucky Larry 2 grams of real cocaine and crushes up some ivory soap so it looks like rocks of cocaine. He sells Lucky Larry 30 grams of this. 

Larry is arrested. Larry is not charged with trafficking. That's because this mixture of crack and "soap-rocks" is easily separable. Larry is only charged with possession of cocaine because it is easy to separate the actual rocks of cocaine from the fake rocks of cocaine that are soap. 

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