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An Anecdote
So the other night I went out on patrol with a friend of mine’s cop friend. We decided to have me go on graveyard duty with him, the shift from 1 to 6 AM, as it was guaranteed to be more interesting. This is what I learned:
“Dem stoners is easier to catch than anyone else!â€
A Lesson Learned Whilst Undercover
“Oh really? How so?â€
“Well son, it really all comes down the subtlety of the thing. Drunkards are hard ‘cause they correct themselves or are dead ‘fore you get there. With the stoners, there’re simply a few things to look for that make ‘em stick out like a couple o’ Jews on Wednesday.â
“…like what!?â€
“Oh well firstly, you can just use the tools you have at hand. Take the speed-gun fer example. See this feller up her? His speed is skippin†around a bit, y’know at random, ‘cause the human brain randomly changes pressure on the gas to keep your speed in a certain range of a few miles per hour. Now the stoners, they do it a bit different. Bein’ in the altered and inferior mindset that they’re in while bein’ stoners, they maintain their speed across a higher range, and change it at a more particular rate."
“What does that have to do with being high on marijuana?â
“Well now I’m not done yet. You use a ‘nother tool. See this here? You pop this CD inna machine and play through the couple o’ songs onnit, and if you can match a beat of the music to the beat at which they accelerate and decelerate, you know dems a stoner.â€
“Oh I see. What album is it?â€
“Now 17. Seems like this stuff is all they listen’n to when they’re out risking their lives behind the wheel. Bunch o’ music for dem gay queers if y’ask me, but there’s stoners for ya. Now keep in mind that it don’t work with the gay music with a fast or complicated beat, as the reefers, in their temporary retardation, won’t be able to keep up a tricky beat. But I’ll talk about the speedy music later.â€
“But if they’re not actually ever speeding, then how can you pull them over?â€
“I think it’s ‘cause it’ll fall under the, uh, probable search an’ seizure, or the probable cause phrase, or some other shit in the Bill o’ Rights.â€
“Ahh.â
“Oh well now, keep in mind, that stuff only works with the obvious ones. You might see later, if we have a pretty slow night, that I’ll just have us drivin’ in circles round tha new Whataburger, or the, uh, Kentucky Fried Pizza Bell right next to it, you know, the combo one with all the diff’rent places in the same buildinâ€?â
“Right.€
“It used to be we’d stay ‘round there all night long, with all the stuff goin’ down back there in the drive-through.â€
“What like prostitutes or something?â
“What in the…no! Not hookers! Jesus Christ, son what’re you thinkinâ€? Not hookers. It’s the drug dealers.â€
“Drug dealers in a drive-through?â€
“Not innit, next to it. What they’d do is dem drug dealers would park along the stretch of drive-through where there wasn’t a speaker box or window or shit. They’d park right there, so that what dem stoners could do, is while they’re gettin’ food, they could get all their other drugs too, like that LCD stuff. So ‘cause of them, we’d be there all the time. Now that ain’t the case anymore, as about 3 years ago a law finally went through state senate that made parking too close to drive-throughâ€s a federal offense.â€
“Huh?â
“Yup, nowadays if’n we’d ever actually want to go into the parking lots for more direct ev’dence, we just act like we’re some stupid cops goin’ through drive-through for a late-night snack, so dem stoners don’t think we’re direct threats. They can recognize our head-lights in the mirrors, so they know to sit up straight and look un-high when we drive by. That’s probable cause too though, ‘cause I ain’t never seen a un-high teenager in the back seat sit up that straight and move that little since I played the fuckin’ Game o’ Life last night with Lorraine and the boys. Anyways, nowadays we simply employ that other method we used earlier, ‘cept this time we look to see if they’re chewin’ to the music, instead of drivin’ to it. We use Now 18 for this. We use the faster CD on mouth stoners, ‘cause they tend to chew to songs with abnormal beats or whatever. See, if it were a slow song they wouldn’t chew to it, ‘cause that’d just be like normal chewin’.â
“How do you know all this?â€
“Well it tooks years of scientific studyin†by the government on hamsters an’ shit ‘fore they ever caught on. Well other than those two we do the usual stuff, y’know, we look to see if they drive too slow, follow bad directions too closely, accidentally start followin†us, actually see another driver’s blinker and yield to ‘em…y’know that stuff.â€
“Oh.â
“Uh, so you wanna stick around much longer and catch one o’ dem stoners?â€
“Uhh, no I have to do some stuff early tomorrow. I think it’d be good if you could just drop me off in a little bit.â€
“Oh well, all right, if y’say so. Too bad, yer certainly gonna miss out tonight… Yer just right here, right? In these apartments?â
“Uh, yes.â€
“Ha ha, I once caught a stoner in here ‘cause he was rocking in his car back an’ forth, covered in ketchup like some retard to some band called Ghost Observatory or somethin†like that. Here good?â€
“Yes! This is good.â€
I closed the car door behind me and he drove off, leaving a cloud of exhaust to dissipate around my shins. My real apartment complex was more than a mile away. With all his knowledge, and all my being as blazed as I was in a car with an on-duty police officer, I had almost shat my pants 3 different times before he even mentioned Whataburger. I had made the decision to leave the potentially explosive situation in as quick a way as possible: by throwing myself from the car. Upon execution, I went for the conversational direction with my plan. I set off across the darkness, with its intermittent islands of halogen light. I knew that I wouldn’t get in trouble this way, even in the state I was in. That cop knew a lot about pulling over stoned drivers, but he didn’t know a thing about tracking down paranoid stoners on foot.
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