Arizona is well-known as a corridor for smuggling marijuana, and out-of-towners often like to take home a souvenir. Weed, however, is not allowed on airplanes, so stoners are occasionally forced to mail their cannabinoid keepsakes to their out of state homes (click here and here for a couple examples). When doing this, it's important to get the address right -- otherwise, your weed could up in the hands of senior citizens.
Police in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, say an elderly couple received a package in the mail last week from an Arizona address with which they weren't familiar. Inside: a big brick of weed.
Initially, the couple left the package on their front porch because they didn't know the person to whom it was addressed, and they assumed it would be picked up.
After a few days, the package was still there, so the couple opened it and found what many people would consider a godsend: five pounds of weed with an estimated street value of about $10,000.
The couple turned over the marijuana to police who determined the Arizona return address was a fake, and the package -- shockingly -- originated somewhere else.
Last summer, an elderly woman in Michigan received a similar package. That one was from Arizona.
As Blackman Township, Michigan, police Sergeant Rich White explained to New Times at the time, he was hip to Arizona's status as America's weed-distribution center.
Below is how our conversation with White played out:
"Heard an old lady had a bunch of weed sent to her house?" we asked White.
"Yeah, a little bit," he says.
"Two pounds of weed is more than a little bit," we explained.
"Not coming from you guys [Arizona, not New Times] it's not," White joked.
The theory, White explained, is that the sender mailed the weed to the wrong address or had it mailed to the old woman's house with plans that someone would steal it from her mailbox before she had a chance to get the mail.
