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Big White Lines at Slate
Maia Szalavitz, May 25, 2007
How not to divide an eight ball

Jack Shafer mustn’t have looked over Slate’s latest “Explainer” piece on how the “street value” of drugs seized by the police is determined. Or, their resident drugs expert failed to spot a piece that mainly takes the government’s word on drugs as gospel and includes an error even the most casual cocaine user (or ex-user) would notice.

The piece claimed that an eight ball of cocaine is “about 10 lines.” An eight ball is an eighth of an ounce of cocaine. That’s 3.5 grams. The smallest amount most retail dealers will sell is a quarter gram, which can get a new user and a partner high for an evening. 

But according to Slate, that quantity doesn’t even make up one line! If an eight ball contains ten lines, each line is over a third of a gram – an enormous dose to consume in one snort, even for many addicts, especially if it’s relatively pure.

The rest of the piece is marred by the assumption that law enforcement officers announcing a bust check with the DEA to in order to correctly estimate the street price for the drugs seized.  While this may happen at times, both the media and the cops have a major incentive to go for the biggest number possible:  the cops because they look better if they “took more drugs off the street” and the media because it makes a bigger story. 

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