Thirteen pound pot plant?

I wouldn't normally link to this one plant bust but the claim that it weighed 13 lbs. caught my eye. As Acidman would have said, I call bullshit on this. Look at that plant. They obviously weighed it wet, with the rootball attached.

For the non-consumers out there, let me explain how you weigh a plant for actual value. The height of the plant is meaningless. The stalk, the stems, the roots and the big leaves are useless. That accounts for at least half of the weight, probably more, right off the top.

Then there's the drying process. You can't sell or smoke wet pot. It has to be dried out to the point where you lose most of the weight of the plant. Looking at the rather bad photo, it appears to have a couple of pretty hefty center buds and some decent side ones, but the fact remains, once those buds -- which are the only commercially viable part of the plant -- are dried and trimmed, I doubt they would get more than a pound out of it. And that I think is a generous estimate.

The plant wasn't trimmed as it was grown, meaning it put a lot of energy in creating leaves instead of flowers and the buds don't look that dense. But the Apache Junction police will be hoping the citizens are dense enough to believe they just pulled off a major drug bust. The irony is, if law enforcement was really serious about eliminating the drug trade, instead of penalizing plant consumption, they would have realized that all they really did was create a new customer for some street dealer.