Car fire in Kenner leads to 3 marijuana arrests- NOLA.com

Three New Orleans men made it easy for Kenner police to find their hidden drug stash, authorities said.

The three men were arrested Sunday night when marijuana they hid in T-shirts and plastic garbage bags in their vehicle’s engine started a fire , Kenner police said.

“From the heat of the engine it caught on fire,” Kenner Police Lt. Wayne McInnis said.

Police officers responded to a call about a vehicle fire at 10:15 p.m. at [a convenience store] just off Interstate 10 at Loyola Drive, McInnis said.The men were hastily grabbing items from under the engine of a 2007 Dodge Caliber and throwing them in a garbage can, all the while trying to douse flames in the engine and the garbage can and pick up fallen marijuana, McInnis said.

The officers could smell marijuana, McInnis said. They could also see loose marijuana in the engine, on the ground underneath the car and in a trail leading from the gas pumps, McInnis said.

In all, police found 1.8 pounds of marijuana, or 838.7 grams, which McInnis called a “substantial” amount. “Usually we deal in ounces, we don’t usually deal in pounds,” he said.

Okay, now you know I’m completely against arresting or harassing any adult for their personal, responsible use of marijuana.  And reading this story is kind of funny, in a tragic way, as you can picture these poor guys trying to save their beloved bud, cursing themselves — stupid, stupid stupid! — for hiding their stash in the engine… wrapped up in plastic and cotton… surrounded by oil and gas…

But really, it is just another sad consequence of prohibition, and another episode where the 1% of idiots who happen to smoke weed make the 99% of us responsible smokers look bad.  I suppose that fire started while they were on I-10.  Now you have a flaming car on the freeway endangering others.  These guys are idiots, to be certain, and idiots do idiotic things.  But there would be no motivation for these idiots to have attempted smuggling and selling marijuana if there were no profit in it.  If they could buy it at a liquor store and their customers could buy it at a liquor store, there’d be no market for “Dodge Caliber Engine Bud” and they could go about their idiot lives doing some other, safer idiot things

Tags: car fire, Louisiana

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 12:40 am and is filed under 4:20 NewsHour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a trackback from your own site.