Ask a Stoner: Airline Employees Might Steal My Stash, Too?

Dear Stoner: Given that story about United Airlines employees stealing weed from checked bags, should I reconsider the way I travel with it?
Frequent Flyer

Dear Frequent Flyer: Airline employees have always stolen items from our luggage, whether it’s cash, weed or Bluetooth speakers. The story about two United Airlines employees stealing cannabis just had some particularly newsworthy twists. For starters, the men arrested were allegedly paying a handful of co-workers up to $10,000 a week to take “large quantities” of pot from checked bags, according to the Los Angeles Times. Whoever they were stealing from might’ve gotten mad, however, because the masterminds were reportedly robbed at gunpoint, which led to their downfall.

Per the Times, the scheme was uncovered when the two men reported the gunpoint robbery to police (no cannabis was mentioned in the report), who eventually found San Francisco International Airport surveillance tape showing the United employees taking large trash bags from a private area to their vehicles. Whatever you’re flying with probably isn’t enough to ping the radar of that kind of operation, but your stash is never guaranteed to survive a flight. That’s the risk we take.

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