“Mr. postman, won’t you bring me a letter, the sooner the better.”

Thanks to local blogger Kym Kemp for tipping me off to this story from the New York Times Opinion Pages.

Quite a lot of postage due on this package.

Seems someone mailed a package of pot out of state and put a local bookstore as the (fake) return address in order to make it look legit. Perhaps the sender had partaken in a bit of her or his own produce and wasn’t paying attention, because the parcel was sent without adequate postage, causing it to be “returned” to the bookstore. The bookstore owners, not wanting to be inadvertently caught in someone else’s deal or a potential sting, turned the weed over to local law enforcement—who were reluctant to even deal with such a small amount (under a pound).

For a stoner, having a bag of trimmed pot arrive unexpectedly in the mail would be an even better catch than my earlier post about bags of untrimmed weed causing a traffic hazard in the middle of Highway 101. In both cases, the cops ended up with the marijuana, which is the only reason we were able to hear about these events. It makes you wonder how frequently someone’s misplaced product is found by a smoker who gleefully—and quietly—accepts it as a groundscore from heaven. Probably more often than anyone realizes.

The Emerald Triangle would be a difficult location a fiction writer to set a story in, since truth is so much less believable than anything you could make up. If someone from St. Louis or Tampa or Fargo heard these tales from some random pothead, their response would probably be, “dude, you’re smoking way too much dope to believe things like that!” It’s just like that here.

With all the local and national publicity this story has garnered, one thing can be sure: there won’t be any accusations by either the sender or intended receiver of the parcel that the other is lying about what happened to it.