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Frisbees and Okra: The New Gateway Drugs
The national attitude towards pot has been evolving for some time now. Marijuana has now officially been decriminalized in a number of states, and even legalized in two: Oregon and Washington. But even as our national view towards marijuana changes, our misperceptions don’t necessarily follow suit. This split has led to a couple funny stories making the national news this week.
One directly relates to those aforementioned stereotypes. A video in Ankeny, Iowa has been making its rounds on the internet. In it, a police officer tries to search a driver’s car, because apparently, people who play disc golf also smoke weed.
Basically, the driver was stopped for an equipment violation, and the officer warns the driver about headlight use. Then he saw something horrifying and totally weed-related in the car. It wasn’t drugs, it wasn’t paraphernalia, it was…a disc golf bag!
The officer goes on to interrogate the stopped driver about the relationship between disc golf and pot. After that exchange goes back and forth for a few minutes, the officer says, “you understand you’re free to go and everything but you wouldn’t have a problem with me looking through your car?” The man, of course, replies no, because that’s both unreasonable and illegal. The officer then tries to imply that because he won’t let his car be searched, the driver in question does have weed in the car. Throughout the entire exchange both men involved stayed relatively calm and pleasant, despite their clear disagreement and frustration. Most importantly, the driver was right to refuse the car search–according to Drake Law Professor Robert Rigg:
The Iowa Supreme Court has held that under the Iowa constitution you can’t convert an equipment violation stop into a general search. and any consent that would have been given would have been invalid in any event.
The video footage really is worth a full listen, if for hilarity purposes only:
In a completely separate incident, but definitely equally amusing story, a man in Georgia had his garden raided last week because he was growing something almost as deadly as disc golf–okra. Police were using helicopters to survey for marijuana, when they saw what they thought was pot in the Atlanta man’s garden. They showed up at his door, heavily armed and with a K-9 unit. They eventually discovered that the plants were not marijuana, apologized, and left.
It turned out to be okra, which like marijuana is a green plant, with leaves. Unlike marijuana, okra is really delicious when deep fried, and a popular vegetable in many dishes in the southern United States.
Obviously, these are both totally silly stories. But they also are telling, at least in the sense that in these two cases, police resources were used for what ended up being kind of ridiculous incidences. Yes, marijuana use should not be encouraged in places where it is illegal, but there’s also something to be said for making mountains out of molehills. Interrogating a man for carrying a bag of frisbees, or bringing a K-9 unit to deal with a man who was just growing veggies seems like a bit of overkill. As our nation changes its views on marijuana, seemingly state by state, it seems more and more likely that these kinds of disconnects and misperceptions will happen. So the moral of these stories: hide your frisbees and okra, they may not be worth the trouble.
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Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.
Featured image courtesy of [Taber Andrew Bain via Flickr]
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