Our bad-luck stoner of the week award goes to John Milligan of Salem, New Jersey. Apparently, instead of texting his local pot dealer, he rang the phone of off-duty officer Christopher Pew. Never missing an opportunity to chalk up a drug arrest, Officer Pew arranged to meet the texter at a local mall, where he arrested Milligan and his girlfriend for “loitering to commit a controlled-dangerous-substance offense.”
With some reluctance to add insult to injury, one might wonder why Mr. Milligan had failed to program his dealer’s name into his cell phone. And, if this was a first-time buy, is it possible that some mischievous type intentionally fed Milligan the policeman’s personal digits?
In the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi:
In my experience, there’s no such thing as luck.
Whether this was the result of foul-play, poor memory, dyslexia, or fate remains to be seen.
Two men in New York were arrested for drug charges on Thursday — one man paid for a $50 bag of crack with half a pig and $10.
An Oregon couple (medical marijuana patients) on the run for a year who were mistakenly released after being arrested for manufacturing marijuana, faced sentencing Friday.
A 32-year veteran Police Chief from a northern town in New Jersey was suspended after hinting at a public meeting that a town official was under investigation for drug use.
Ever heard the old saying, ‘You can make statistics say anything you want?’ A new federal drug study is vainly hoping to do just that. In interviewing and urine testing ‘random’ arrestees from 10 major cities, half of the results came up positive for at least one type of drug.
The study [Warning: .pdf], conducted by the Arresting Drug Use Monitoring Program (ADAM), maintained that marijuana was the most common drug found in respondents (between a third and a half of the men tested positive) in all the cities except for Atlanta. It also found high rates of cocaine, crack use, and methamphetamines, among the arestees.
Newly minted drug czar Gil Kerlikowski noted that the study,
…shows a clear link between drugs and crime
Really, Gil? Does it? The word ‘link’ here is incredibly misleading. As any statistician knows, there is a universe of difference between correlation and causality. In other words, just because there is a ‘link’ between drugs and crime, doesn’t mean that using drugs causes crime, or that criminals are more likely to use drugs than non-criminals. For example, one could correctly say that 85% of US criminals have brown eyes. There is definitely a link between brown eyes and crime. If this were a causal link, we might have to start putting Lojack bracelets on all brown-eyed people.
Even outside the misleaing semantics, the study fails on several other levels. First of all, any arrestee who tested positive for pot smoked at least once in the last six weeks. There is absolutely no way to know whether the person was high at the time of the crime, arrest, or booking. Given that 42% of Americans have tried pot at some point or other, there’s a very good chance you’ll be able to get a positive test from a significant number of them.
The kicker though, can be found in the study itself. Some poor ADAM intern forgot to expunge the following passage from the study:
In all sites, a minimum of one in five arrestees had a drug crime amongst the charges on the current arrest, with larger percentages in Sacramento and Washington… and Chicago having the highest percentage (60%).
In other words, these federal researchers went out of their way to disproportionately interview people arrested on DRUG CHARGES. Hmmm, do you think it’s possible that people arrested for possessing drugs might be pretty likely to test positively for them?
Poor Chicagoans. National newspapers today are rife with stories of the throngs of addict criminals in their prison system, and no one thought it fitting to mention that of the few hundred Chicago men surveyed, 60% of them had been arrested for possessing or selling drugs.
Apparently the original executive summary: ”People Arrested for Ingesting Drugs Tend to Test Positive for Them,” didn’t fly with the higher ups. Congratulations to the ONDCP on another mountain of taxpayer dollars well spent.
A Barnstable, Massachusetts man called the local police this week when his cocaine wasn’t delivered in a timely fashion. Apparently, the man had given a friend $150 to purchase some blow, and the friend wasn’t even courteous enough to return with a baby powder-filled Ziploc bag.
The Barnstable police are considering instituting an automated customer service line with the following options:
If you’d like to report your cocaine as lost or stolen, press ‘1′
If you’ve snorted your entire stash and would like to request a refill, press ‘2′
If your hooker appears to have stopped breathing, press ‘3′
A 50-year old South Carolina man found a crack pipe in his bag and tried to arrest himself.
Drunk Man Smuggles Sock o’ Pot into Jail
A drunk man in Georgia was arrested after being found passed out in someone’s car and taken to jail, where he became more belligerent as guards found a bag of weed in his sock.
Fake Piss Lands 4 in Jail
Four Texas men go to jail for being idiots actually. Yes, it’s a crime. Read more here.
Man Arrested for Pot Possession and Fleeing
A man in South Carolina tried to evade police through two cities and winds up crashing into a SUV.
Armed Robbery Leads to 100g of Pot
Two men in Illinois were arrested and charged with armed robbery, felony marijuana possession and possession of marijuana with intent to distribute after being pulled over for being suspects to a mugging.
Indiana Drug Task Force Called in After Wreck
A man in Indiana dies after colliding with a semi — his Nissan is smashed to pieces, $20 bills were floating in the air and a small amount of marijuana was found.
200 Immature Pot Plants Seized After Traffic Stop
A man in Florida was arrested and charged with multiple drug charges after he initially ran a stop sign.
Looks like the folks at Partnership for a Drug-Free America are having a hard time finding effective ammo for the war machine on marijuana.
Since learning that pot doesn’t kill brain cells or cause any of the other atrocities once tied to it, drug warriors have resorted to increasingly desperate measures to deter people from using it. The result? Gems like the one seen above, that provide nothing more than a hearty laugh for stoners and others with common sense.
But it’s not all fun and games. Between 1998 and 2006, taxpayers spent $1.4 billion on America’s anti-marijuana ad campaign. That’s billion, with a ‘b.’ Quite a hefty sum considering that a 5-year study released in 2006 by the Government Accountability Office concluded the campaign was not only ineffective but even encouraged drug use in some cases.
Now I’m no scientist, but I’d like to see the evidence linking overzealous text messaging to marijuana use. There’s already a name for that — it’s called drunk dialing. All the other so-called “achievements” in the ad are things teenagers do anyway and could be blamed on underage drinking or prescription painkiller abuse for that matter. Good luck getting an organization funded by the alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical industries to mention any of that.
Oh well, at least the background music is catchy, “The Hustle.” Keeping up with the times I see.
A word to the wise; regardless of whether you live in a state that has some form of legal marijuana, it’s never a good idea to smoke it while you’re being pulled over. It’s an especially bad idea if you’re dealing with Midwest law enforcement, although there are very few scenarios where the smoker in this case wouldn’t be arrested.
While the trooper was talking to the driver, Knight obtained the trooper’s permission to smoke. Police said Perkins then asked to see the cigarette, which contained marijuana, not tobacco.
Honesty Knight, 32, was arrested, charged with possession of paraphernalia and then released on bail. She couldn’t be reached for comment due to no home phone number.
The ironic part is that Honesty was true to her name, she did ask for permission first… it’s just that she got arrested after.
I mean, really. This kid shouldn’t even be on trial. His parents should be dragged before the judge and asked if they saw a crack possession charge coming when they named their bundle of joy “Dalcapone Alpaccino.”
I would pay a serious chunk of change to hear just a piece of the conversation about how Dalcapone got named…
Mom: Let’s name this thing Lucciano Pescci Denirogotti. Dad: Nah woman, Dalcapone Alpaccino. Mom: Nailed it!
Hmmm, I wonder if anyone else was unlucky enough to be named Dalcapone? Yep, thisdouche was.
Back to Dalcapone Alpaccino, his whole docket’s available online, but you shouldn’t be able to charge anyone with parents as stupid as this. No matter what he allegedly did, it’s not all his fault, he didn’t even get a fair start.
The freshest periodical on earth; a new take from tFS filled with photography, opinions, events, special deals, behind-the-scenes updates and much more.
Advertise on theFreshScent - Our users buy stuff, smoke stuff, and read stuff. They also donate to charity and are actively working on the cure to cancer. Think about it!
theFreshScent is exactly what it sounds like - a breath of fresh air. It exists to blow that stale smell out of your time zone and instead, fill your mind with unique takes on the news, events, products, and people involved with today's Counter-Culture.
To put it bluntly, tFS is the place to wear your thinking cap and smoking jacket both at the same time.
