I’ve recently been asked several variants of this question: If a suspect sells drugs to an undercover officer on multiple occasions over a few days or weeks, can the drug quantities involved in each sale be aggregated to reach the trafficking threshold? That led me to spend some time looking at the more general issue of when multiple caches of drugs can be combined. This post lays out the law. It is proper to combine multiple packages of drugs possessed at the same time. So, if a defendant has three bags of cocaine is his dresser drawer, it would be proper to add the weights of the bags together. In fact, the case law holds that it is even proper to mingle similar substances together before testing and weighing. There are many cases on point. See, e.g., State v. Huerta, 221 N.C. App. 436 (2012) (proper to combine white powder from multiple bags found in defendant’s attic into a single mixture exceeding the trafficking threshold prior to testing); State v. Worthington, 84 N.C. App. 150 (1987) (similar, and collecting cases). This is so even when the caches are in distinct locations. If the defendant has one bag of cocaine in his dresser and another in his truck, parked in the driveway outside his house, these quantities, too, may be added together. State v. Hazel, __ N.C. App. __, 739 S.E.2d 196 (2013) (proper for “heroin recovered from Defendant’s person to be combined with the heroin recovered from [his] apartment for the [...]
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