- April 26, 2024
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A 43-year-old Palm Coast woman got a surprise when she opened an unexpected package at her home and found almost a pound of marijuana.
The woman and her two sons were away from their home most of the day Oct. 10 and got back at about 7 p.m. to notice the package on their doorstep.
It was a USPS Priority Mail box, and the older son passed it along to his mother. She began opening it without much thought and without noticing the label, assuming it was for her.
But as soon as she tore the packaging open, she noticed that the contents were odd: two bundles, wrapped in bubble wrap and black cellophane.
She found that suspicious, and took a closer look at the box — and realized the package had been addressed to someone else, although the address was hers.
She didn't recognize the name, and later told a deputy that she'd been living at her current home for several years, and that in that time, no one by that name had ever lived there.
As she looked a little deeper into the box, she "observed what appeared to narcotics in the package," according to a deputy's report.
She put the package down and called the Flagler County Sheriff's Office, telling a deputy that she was alarmed to have a package containing drugs show up at her home, where she had two children.
A deputy wrote in a case report that the box had a tracking number and a return address of "COCO Clothing Inc., at 275 N. 1st St., San Jose, California 95112." (There is no such business at that location.)
The package held about 444 grams of a "leafy green substance" the deputy identified as raw cannabis. That's a bit less than a pound, which would be 453.592 grams.
The marijuana was wrapped in two bundles in vacuum sealed plastic bags, which were themselves wrapped in cellophane and bubble wrap and surrounded by packing peanuts.
A 2016 study published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence found that the typical joint in America holds about 0.32 grams of marijuana, and that loose marijuana sold for a median price of $7.05 per gram. By those numbers, the marijuana in the mystery package would have been worth about $3,130 if sold by the gram and could have produced approximately 1,387 joints.
