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This Twaggie, inspired by a Tweet from @vonbunnie, made me giggle and then feel old. Do you realize Bob Marley died thirty years ago? Link
Police in Brandenburg, Germany found a plot of marijuana plants. Upon inquiry, they talked to an elderly woman who said she had been feeding the weeds to her pet rabbits.
“The rabbits really like it,” the woman told officers who called on her in the village of Golzow near Belzig, according to Saturday’s Tagesspiegel.
A police officer had seen the healthy, metre-high plants from the road while on his way to work and told his colleagues, who visited the plot’s owner – the elderly woman.
She told them that she had not grown the plants herself, but that they had simply started growing there, and had proven to be excellent rabbit food. Not only did the rabbits love eating the plants, they grew back very quickly after she cut them down, she told the investigating officers.
Officers did not charge the woman, but did cut the plants down. Link
(Unrelated image credit: Flickr member shesaleo)
Marijuana smugglers apparently have a problem with the US border fence near Tucson, Arizona -and those pesky border patrols. So they’ve turned to ancient technology to deliver the goods -a catapult!
On Friday evening, National Guard troops operating a remote video surveillance system at the Naco Border Patrol Station observed several people south of the International Boundary Fence preparing a catapult and launching packages over the International Border fence, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Border Patrol agents working with the National Guard contacted Mexican authorities, who went to the location and disrupted the catapult operation. The camera showed the individuals fleeing the area before they could be intercepted by Mexican authorities.
The Mexican officials seized about 45 pounds of marijuana, a sport utility vehicle, and the catapult device.
Link (with video) -via Boing Boing
James Gordon Watson was upset that someone had stolen one of his marijuana plants, so he called the RCMP to report the theft. The police responded by confiscating his other four plants. There is no word on any investigation into the theft. -via Arbroath
It was the perfect place to grow marijuana: a section of the rhinoceros pen that only one zookeeper had access to. A zookeeper in Austria thought he would never be caught.
Salzburg Hellbrunn Zoo director Sabine Grebner said today (Mon): “It’s horrible! We never thought such a thing was possible. We are here for families and kids – and we don’t have anything to do with drugs.”
Police said the 59-year-old rhinoceros carer kept 33 marijuana plants in a part of the enclosure which is hidden from visitors’ view, adding that they acted on an anonymous tip-off by “customer” of the offender.
(Image credit: Flickr user Martin Belam)
Police raided a farm in Christina Lake, British Columbia to find that black bears had been enlisted to scare intruders away from the premises. Two people were arrested for running a marijuana plantation. The ten or so bears did not pose a threat to police.
“They were tame, they just sat around watching. At one point one of the bears climbed onto the hood of a police car, sat there for a bit and then jumped off,” said Royal Canadian Mounted Police sergeant Fred Mansveld.
In Canada, feeding bears is illegal as it leads to bears associating food with humans and increases the likelihood of bears coming into towns and cities to look for food.
One has to wonder whether the bears were guarding the marijuana or helping themselves to it. Link -via Arbroath
What could be more innocuous than a hose reel in the back of a pick up truck full of gardening equipments? Obviously it’s a gardener going to work, right?
Would you have guessed that it’s a cleverly disguised bin used to smuggle marijuana across the border?
The Los Angeles Times has a gallery of some of the most unusual border busts ever, including pictures of people stuffed into engine compartments …
… secret hidey-hole under the car floor …
… and then there’s this beauty:
Yes, folks – that’s a man sewn into the upholstery of a van seat!
More at the Los Angeles Times: Link
(Photos: U.S. Customs and Border Protection)
What could you do in Minneapolis in 1969 if you couldn’t afford (or couldn’t find) marijuana? Smoke catnip, of course! Marijuana was $10 to $20 an ounce (gasp!), but catnip cost only about 30 cents an ounce.
“We couldn’t keep catnip on the shelf for a while,” said Richard Andersen, owner of four Twin Cities pet centers. “Lots of kids were buying a dozen or two dozen packages at a time. I knew something was abnormal. The cat population couldn’t have increased as much as the sales of catnip. Large-quantity sales have diminished, but they are still going on.”
The manager of a Downtown Minneapolis department store pet shop concurred. “We questioned some of the youthful big buyers of catnip and they admitted they were smoking it,” he said.
Another pet store owner said, “I refuse to sell large quantities of catnip to young people. I know they want to smoke it and I don’t think it’s right.”
Whether catnip smoking ever had any hallucinogenic effect on the user at all is debatable, but the fad didn’t last long. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
(image credit: Richard Olsenius)
That was the problem facing a gardener who was driving his pick-up truck and tools across the border from Tijuana. In this case customs agents made the diagnosis.
Link. Photo: Splash News.
The Czech government has revised and liberalized the criteria for what constitutes “small amounts” of recreational drugs for personal use.
The Czech government today approved the list of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms, including hemp, coca, mescaline cactus and magic mushrooms, and decided that people would be allowed to grow up to five pieces of such plants and keep 40 magic mushrooms at home…
Beginning January 1 Czechs may grow up to five marijuana plants without fear of criminal prosecution, although it apparently will still be a misdemeanor.
Oh, boy. College today sure is different than when I went to school. Case in point: Med Grow Cannabis College, a school in Michigan that teaches students on how to grow medical marijuana (legalized there by a referendum in 2008).
Med Grow opened Sept. 14. Students pay $475 for a six-week night-school course that includes classes in marijuana history, marijuana law, the basics of business and, of course, several courses in how to grow and cook marijuana — one taught by an anonymous professor who goes by the name "Nature." Two groups, each comprising 20 students, have graduated, and several other groups are on their way.
"The students are a mixed bag," says attorney Paul Youngs, who teaches Med Grow’s law class. "We have patients who want to grow for themselves. We have people who want to be caregivers and who approach it as a business opportunity. We even had a priest who works with AIDS patients. It’s a mix of races and a mix of ages from the 20s to the 60s. And I believe some of the students are not even users."
Peter Carlson of WaPo has the scoop on this different kind of "higher" education: Link (Photo: Gary Malerba for The Washington Post)
“J” is an autistic child who also has post-surgical and bowel-related chronic pain. His autism manifested itself as aggression rather than simple withdrawal, resulting in severe behavioral problems. Authorities in Rhode Island granted the parents a license to give their child medical marijuana (they opted to do so in the form of brownies). The results were dramatic:
Pre-pot, J. ate things that weren’t food… His pica become so uncontrollable we couldn’t let him sleep with a pajama top (it would be gone by morning) or a pillow (ditto the case and the stuffing)… The worst part was watching him scream in pain on the toilet, when what went in had to come out… Almost immediately after we started the cannabis, the pica stopped. Just stopped. J. now sleeps with his organic wool-and-cotton, hypoallergenic, temptingly chewable comforter.
Next, we started seeing changes in J.’s school reports… An aggression is defined as any attempt or instance of hitting, kicking, biting, or pinching another person. For the past year, he’d consistently had 30 to 50 aggressions in a school day, with a one-time high of 300. The charts for June through July, by contrast, showed he was actually having days—sometimes one after another—with zero aggressions.
This post is likely to elicit strong opinions; I would encourage everyone to at least browse the original source articles rather than basing judgments only on the excerpts above.
The article is written in two parts. Link for original article. Link for followup.
Via Metafilter. Photo credit Marie Lee.
While it’s debatable on whether marijuana will lead to harder drugs, it’s now fact that it can lead to laziness.
Here’s the story of a postman who got so lazy after smoking so much pot that he decided to burn mail instead of delivering it:
Neil Goddard, 32, was given a 12-month sentence after he set up a huge cannabis factory in his bedroom and managed to cultivate 8,000 pounds of the drug.
But he smoked so much of it over a year-old period that he was too high to bother delivering thousands of items of post.
So let’s revise that (unofficial) postal service motto: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds, but pot surely can!"
You thought a boy named Sue would have to grow up strong and tough? Try overcoming life’s obstacles as a girl named Marijuana Pepsi Jackson! Ms. Sawyer (her married name) is a schoolteacher who had parents with a sense of humor.
Sawyer’s aunt, Mayetta Jackson of Chicago, clearly remembers when the name was picked in 1972. The newborn’s mother and father were products of the post-Woodstock era when reefer was rampant.
“And they would cool off with a Pepsi,” she said, which makes you think it’s lucky for Sawyer that it wasn’t Coke instead. “I thought it was crazy,” her aunt said about the name, “but they were such fun-loving people that it suited them.”
Ms. Sawyer’s story does have some elements of the Johnny Cash song.
She gives a surprising amount of credit to her mother for making her resilient and resourceful. “She instilled in me that fighting attitude – never take no, you can do anything,” Sawyer said.
By high school, her name was cool to many. “They were like, ‘Oh yeah. Man, I wish I had your name. I love that. I’m going to name my kid after you.’ I hear that so much and I go, Lord, please don’t do that to that child.”
(image credit: Jeffrey Phelps)
While using Google Earth, Swiss police discovered that not all green masses on their screen are trees and jungles. In fact, they discovered a huge marijuana plantation hidden inside a corn field!
I don't know what I'm more suprised with: the weed farm or the police using rudimentary software available to any internet user to crack the case.
Officers discovered the hemp field in the northeastern canton (state) of Thurgau last year while investigating an alleged drug ring, said the head of Zurich police's specialist narcotics unit Norbert Klossner.
The plantation, measuring almost two acres (7,500 square meters), was hidden inside a field of corn. But officers using Google Earth to locate the address of two farmers suspected of involvement in the drug operation quickly spotted the illegal crop.
"It was an interesting chance discovery," said Klossner.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
A 2,700-year-old grave unearthed in the Gobi Desert near Turpan, China revealed the world’s oldest marijuana stash! The grave belonged to a blue-eyed Caucasian man buried with a number of valuable items.
Scientists originally thought the plant material in the grave was coriander, but microscopic botanical analysis of the bowl contents, along with genetic testing, revealed that it was cannabis.
The size of seeds mixed in with the leaves, along with their color and other characteristics, indicate the marijuana came from a cultivated strain. Before the burial, someone had carefully picked out all of the male plant parts, which are less psychoactive, so Russo and his team believe there is little doubt as to why the cannabis was grown.
Nearly two pounds of pot were found in the grave. No, it’s not fresh enough to get anyone high. Link -Thanks, Jorge Garcia!
(image credit: David Potter/Oxford University Press)
