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The Police Blotter: It’s for Personal Use
From KATU News, Portland, Oregon:
EAGLE POINT, Ore. — During a traffic stop in Eagle Point, Oregon State Police found 8,850 lbs. of marijuana in a vehicle.
Around 3:00 p.m. last Wednesday, a trooper in the Central Point Area Command stopped a white Dodge truck out of Texas on State Route 63.
According to OSP, the truck was pulling a large cargo trailer and had many traffic violations.
Officials say police had reasonable suspicion of the exportation of marijuana. A consent search of the cargo led police to find about 350 bags garbage bags of dried and processed marijuana.
Move along folks, it’s for personal use. Around 9,000 pounds of marijuana in a trailer and 1,500 pounds of Pringles were seized.
The driver is identified as Manuel Rodriguez Plascencia, 30, from Turlock, California.
He was issued criminal citations and was then released.
Nothing to see here.
The officers were found laconically bingeing quarter pounders in the McDonald’s next door.
Dude! That’s a lot of Ganja!
Think how many homes in europe they could heat with that.
It’s just one drug dealer so far.
Sonny, a distant relative, was once stopped by the forces of the law for a burnt-out brake light. In the bed of his pickup under a hastily deployed tarp were twenty gallons of recently distilled ethanol. (Last week was a good year.)
“Personal use!” insisted Sonny.
“Twenty gallons for you and the missus, Sonny? Isn’t that a bit much?”
“I’ve got a mother-in-law!”
They let him go.
Makes sense. Forethought.
I was thinking if the Pringles don’t outweigh the weed, something is off.
The Pringles are harder to buy. Biden’s America is like that.
Eagle Point? That was just some farmer taking his crop to market! The equivalent of pulling over a truckload of corn in Iowa.
Hasn’t Southern Oregon been declared the cannabis growing center of the world yet?
They’re smuggling Pringles now? Haven’t they squared away the supply line issues yet?
The Pringles make the case that it’s for personal use.
The Pringles were sarcasm. Oregon, California, and Colorado are finding out that legalizing Marijuana has not produced the revenue that they expected from permits to grow pot.
The Emerald Triangle in Northern California and creeps into Southern Oregon has a long history of pot farming. It is grown on state and federal lands, using stolen water, and in many cases stolen electricity. No pesticide or OSHA requirements. Did Oregon and California really believe that these growers were going to buy land, pay for water, pay for electricity, and pay taxes on their operations.
Legalizing weed has just moved Mexican cartels, Chinese gangs, and American citizens into illegal pot farming in Oregon and California. Pot farming takes place in rented homes in urban areas in Colorado as well as Oregon and California.
Grow it in the states mean you can move pot around in the US without having to cross the border checkpoints between the US and Mexico.
Well there is that. It’s hard to grow your own Pringles.
Oh come on, that can’t be right! The “legalize everything” crowd assures us that legalization takes the cartels etc right out of it!
Back in the late 70s I heard they were using U-2s to fly over southwestern Oregon and northern California using spectral imaging to find individual pot plants. Seemed like a lot of work but worthwhile.
Apparently it didn’t work, but then interdiction was probably hampered by the growers setting dynamite traps in the woods. Later I knew a guy from northern California who had a logo labeled US Marijuana Company tattooed on his right deltoid. He was okay, though. He’d given it up years before and he was in the process of getting the tattoo overlaid with something less
evidentiarystigmatizing, a wolf’s head.U-2s? Was Piper out of Cubs?
Hey, that’s what I heard. At the time the explanation was that U-2s were not observable by the growers and wouldn’t tip them off as to monitoring, whereas Cubs would. Also growers were already planting single plants at the time, rather then patches, to make them nearly impossible to visually detect from the air. And I would imagine that from its height a U-2 could do a whole lot more territory in a few days than a Cub. The area included a good portion of northern California.
I tell my daughters that I am expecting one of our seven grandkids to be killed by a weed impaired driver.
I know it’s not your tale, but that doesn’t add up. I belive you, but the source is sus.
Well, this was 40 years ago. Such technology was scarcer then. I was surprised at the time, but the source was credible at least.
The guy who mentioned the dynamite traps was a local who I mined gold with.
Well, with a source like that, who am I to say?
And U-2 flights are overkill, unles of course one agency requests tasking enroute for another agency’s assets already picking up int from somewhere further south.
Dynamite traps are a little over the top, though I did hear of fly-by-night agriculturalists stringing fishing line at approximately eye-level festooned with fish hooks to deter visitors.
Deer hunters were more common and more dangerous, mainly because some of them attended the Alec Baldwin School of Firearm Safety. Sonny would be out there from time to time too, but at least he’d share.
We’re talking out in the boonies. All we were concerned about were the bears, the rattlesnakes, and the growers. I wasn’t all that close, but no one ever knew where they were growing, and they were literally growing one plant here and one plant there. They knew where they were. We didn’t. And people did try to steal plants if they stumbled upon them, which really pissed the growers off. So they set up trip wires. I don’t recall fishing hooks, but it’s possible I just forgot. This all goes back a long time. So even where I was the miners were wary of the growers. People I knew wired spring loaded alarms that fired .223 with the bullet removed just to warn them of someone approaching their site. And some carried pistols. One guy carried a .45 Blackhawk but all I ever knew he had used it for was salmon fishing. Maybe that’s where I picked up my distaste for the BLM. Anyway. Good times. :)
Oh, I just remembered something interesting about the guy who told me about the U-2s. He was the guy who showed me a piece of Gary Powers’ U-2 the size of his thumbnail (still with the paint). He said he was looking at a part of the wreckage and piece of metal happened to break off and fall into his palm. He figured he could throw it out, or put it in a safe place. He was proud of that til the day he died.
Everything here is past the statute of limitations. And I made it up anyway.
Indeed, Yuri.
I’m guessing a few of the more successful drug operations maintain vehicles with fully functional safety equipment, follow required weight limits, and do not violate traffic laws.
Or they are cover to an assets use for another purpose