What’s 200 lbs. of marijuana worth? SC police confiscate that stash in traffic stop

More than 200 pounds of marijuana was confiscated during a drug bust in South Carolina Wednesday, according to multiple reports.

The bust occurred during a routine traffic stop around 8:30 a.m. on I-95, near mile marker 176, according to counton2.com. During the stop, Florence County Sheriff’s Office deputies found roughly 200 pounds of marijuana inside the vehicle.

Two people were arrested, wpde.com reported.

To put the amount of marijuana in perspective, the average American man over age 20 weighs 195.7 pounds, according to healthline.com.

Two hundred pounds of marijuana is worth a considerable amount of money. According to narcoticnews.com’s drug prices scale, a pound of marijuana in Columbia is valued between $900-$1,700. Multiply that by 200 and you’ve got the value ranging from $180,000 to $340,000.

According to narcoticnews.com the same amount of marijuana in Charleston or Greenville would be less valuable. It would range from $140,000-$200,00 in the former, and $150,000-$300,000 in the latter.

But 200 pounds is far from the biggest amount of marijuana smuggled into South Carolina. In the early 1980s, the Palmetto State’s “gentlemen smugglers” would use a dock in Hilton Head to unload 24,000 pounds of marijuana in three separate shipments by sailboat.

The kingpins were from good families, earning the name “gentlemen smugglers” because they never used violence in their murky trade, and never trafficked in hard drugs.

A 2011 book, “Jackpot: High Times, High Seas and the Sting That Launched the War on Drugs,” was written about them by Jason Ryan, a former reporter for The State newspaper.

But much has changed since then.

The legalization of recreational marijuana use in many states has driven its cost across the country, according to bloomberg.com. In Colorado, the average price sought by wholesalers has fallen 48 percent to about $1,300 a pound since legal sales to all adults started in January 2014.

As of January 2018, recreational marijuana will be legal in Alaska, California, Colorado, the District of Columbia, Nevada, Oregon and Washington state. It will become legal in Massachusetts in July.

It’s possible the cost could get high again. Attorney General Jeff Sessions hinted Wednesday that the Justice Department might take a tougher stance on recreational marijuana in the near future.

“It’s my view that the use of marijuana is detrimental, and we should not give encouragement in any way to it, and it represents a federal violation, which is in the law and is subject to being enforced,” Sessions said.

This story was originally published November 30, 2017 at 9:00 AM.