By Mikal Jakubal
[fb-like]Yet another story from the Hospice benefit. A story was making the rounds about how the Deputy who showed up with the pot plants strapped to his SUV had personally given someone a joint. Here’s an email I got about it from a friend who had originally told me the story:
I just heard from the person who was saying he got a doobie from the cop that he was actually lying! He was laughing his ass off that everybody believed his story.
Today he told me that he went up with a joint cupped in his hand and talked to the cop, shook his hand, and as he walked away from the cop, he showed a joint in his hand and said in (fake) amazement “wow, look what the cop just gave me!” and so legend was made. The whole place was retelling the story all day.
Gotta love this place, huh?
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Yeah, it’s a hilarious anecdote. Except that that deputy is a real person, with a real reputation to uphold. Why is it OK to casually smear him with a misleading headline and then justify it with a little wink, “Oops, didn’t really happen.”
Well, BM, let’s look at this a little more carefully for a moment. I don’t know where you live, or how familiar you are with this community (it’s the web, after all), but for the sake of others out in the wild, wide world, Humboldt County is crazy rumor central. People routinely believe and spread the silliest things as facts and such rumors can persist for years, long past any means of fact-checking them.
Not that most people care about fact-checking in the first place, but that’s another matter…
If you’ll notice, *I* am not the one who started this rumor, the guy with the joint did and others believed him and passed it on as fact.
Unlike everyone else who repeated the story as truth, I fact-checked it and posted the real story. Far from smearing the deputy, I actually cleared his name. Well, cleared his name about the joint.
As for him showing up at a community gathering held to benefit an organization that helps dying people and then making a joke about a donation of pot plants, I can’t do much about that one. It seems to be true. Many people saw and heard it. If he has a reputation of professionalism to uphold, making jokes at events like that may not be the best way to uphold it.
Either way, I think everyone here has a somewhat thick-skinned sense of humor about the almost surreal events that make Humboldt such a unique place.