Assign or invent. law enforcement typically talks that up, to a high degree. e.g. a truck full of cocaine? Estimate the value as a per-gram street price, not what a wholesale truckload would change hands for to the next middleman who will break bulk.

There was a funny case some time back, local cops where a relative lives were estimating utterly nutty "street values" for busting college students with pot plants. A journalist starts asking questions, and finally figured out they were calculating value by weighing the live plants - dirt, pot and all.

There was a whole thing about how, legally, LSD for personal use landed you in more trouble than LSD for trafficking, because the penalties are by weight, and that include the carrier paper for personal use, but only the crystals for trafficking.

EDIT: This was specifically addressed in 1993, in amendment 488 to the US sentencing guidelines. https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines/amendment/488.

This 1992 article from the LA Times details some of the consequences — https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-07-27-mn-4335-s...

> they were calculating value by weighing the live plants - dirt, pot and all.

You can forbid that specific corrupt practice; but as long as the incentives are to produce a high value, then ways will be found to inflate it to an unrealistic number.

That seems like a reasonable thing to do. I don’t really see the problem, don’t they generally refer to that as ‘street value’ anyway?

Besides, what could they have done similarly in this case? Why would they not just be referring to the current spot value of the currencies?

Even then, its usually overpriced. I remember some years ago there was a cannabis bust where I am and they announced that they seized X amount and it had a street value of Y and I was just thinking those guys are getting seriously ripped off if that's what they're paying because anyone I knew selling it was charging a lot lot less.

"Street value" per gram goes down significantly as the weight of the transaction goes up. If someone has 100 pounds of weed the cops go by the absolute highest street price for the absolute smallest unit sizes (~$20/g) and call it a $1M haul.

In reality, it's not really feasible to move 45,000 individual grams in a timely manner (especially with products like cannabis that noticeably degrade fairly quickly), not to mention that you'd be opening yourself up to 10,000x the necessary risk to do so.

So while it's true on a certain level that 100 pounds of weed can eventually be worth about a million dollars once it makes its way through a distribution network, in reality it'll only ever probably net maybe 1/4 of that and the majority of that profit won't ever make it back up the chain even in an organized criminal network.

But when the pigs inflate their numbers by pulling these kinds of disingenuous tricks it makes them look good, and they know they'll never get in trouble for doing it.