I find it funny how many people email me and ask me what a good sack should weigh, without even telling me the state or country that they live in, as though there is a government agency that publishes a national price guide for dealers.

But when I think back to my early days of dealing, I realize I didn't quite know how dramatically prices and quality could vary just going from one town to the next. However, having a grasp on fair weights is very important to a beginning drug dealer. It's best to ask people. Get a few different perspectives from people who have sold or bought pot in your area.

In the United States, pot is usually bought in ounces and pounds. (I imagine Canada and every other country in the world uses the metric system.) One of the most common quantities to purchase is a quarter pound or "Q.P." A Q.P. is obviously the same as four ounces (sixteen ounces in a pound, remember?) and weighs 112 grams. In my area, a Q.P. runs about $800-$1000 for decent British Columbian hydroponic weed, and less for the occasional time when we have Mexican ditch weed.

An ounce should weigh 28 grams, in my area running about $260. An eighth of an ounce, usually just called an "eighth", should be 3.5 grams. In my area, an eighth costs $40. $40 and $20 (sometimes called a "Dub") sacks sometimes are not weighed to their technical weight. If you plan on under-weighing an eighth at 3.3 grams, for example, it's not appropriate to call it an eighth, because technically it's not. This comes back to ethics and honesty. I suggest telling the customer and apologizing every time you sell an under-weighed sack. As with $5 sacks ("nickel bag") and $10 sacks ("dime bag"), their weights vary greatly from person to person as well as city to city.

When you first start figuring out how you're going to run your business, sit down with a calculator and figure out all the mathematics of it, and how much you need to weigh your sacks in order to make the amount of profit you wish to make, and how much you expect to make per deal. If you suck at math, get another dealer to help you. This sounds elementary, but I've seen people get confused and lose money because they didn't have a confident grasp of the mathematics of drug dealing. Obviously, if you weigh your sacks too light, people will start shopping somewhere they can get a fair deal (unless you hassle tourists day in and day out) but if they're too heavy, you won't make much money.

In my area, an ounce runs around $240-$280. At $40 for eight eighths, that comes out to $320 with a profit of $40-$80. I usually figure a %10-%20 profit is reasonable, depending on how many deals you had to make.

For most professional dealers, a twenty sack is not worth the time or the risk in order to sell it. At 1.7 grams (approximately half an eighth), your profit is usually going to be less than $5 or $6. Since every deal you make is possible to attract the cops (especially if you deal out of your home), the more sales you make, the more risk you're taking, so obviously, the larger sales are more important than the smaller ones. Once you get to the point where you're making more than a couple sales a day, my recommendation is to start refusing to sell anything less than $40.