Dear Stoner: My parents just caught me smoking a joint with friends, and now I'm grounded until summer is over. Did you ever get busted when you were younger?
Grounded in Golden
Dear GG: Yes, I got busted all the time by parents, security guards, college-dorm assistants, campus police, the ski patrol and even my friend's mom, the very first time I smoked. I've told that story in the blogs before, but the long-short of it is that I should have realized then that I wasn't very good at keeping my cannabis use a secret. You should work on that skill, young Jedi toker.
The best/worst time I ever got popped was in high school, though. I was bopping along in my shitty convertible Mustang, listening to a scratchy Grateful Dead tape with the top down, when the neighborhood patrol cop chirped his siren to pull me over just yards from my friend's house. I stopped the car and turned down the stereo — and when he walked up to the wide-open car, he smiled and immediately asked me why the car smelled like marijuana.
I looked at him like he was the stoner. I was in a convertible, with the top down. If it smelled like marijuana, it was probably coming from my friend's back yard — but not my car. Or so I thought. In my door pocket was a bowl's worth of schwag in a cigarette cellophane wrapper — but I had forgotten about that, and I thought I could one-up the cop by letting him search my clean car. I still debate whether or not he truly smelled it or just pulled one over on my young, dumb ass.
Well, he found the pot. But the kicker to this story is that I didn't turn my stereo down quite far enough, and as his fat ass struggled around the car, searching for anything else to bust me with, the prick started singing along...to the Grateful Dead. While busting me for weed. He made me stamp it out into dust on the concrete, then call my mother to come pick me up from his custody.
In retrospect, that's a lot better than going to jail, but at the time it was even more humiliating to have my mom come pick me up and have the cop lecture me in front of her like he's my dickhead older brother trying to teach me a lesson before he runs off and parties with his friends.
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