DOSE:

smoked

Cannabis

(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

165 lb

This is basically a testament to the importance of knowing your rights and not allowing law enforcement to pressure you into doing something that would incriminate you or others.

To provide you with a little background I have been smoking bud since my sophomore year in high school when i decided that maybe the DARE program really was bullshit and casual marijuana use might not be so bad after all. Long story short i enjoyed it so much that i didn't stop and eventually left for college. During my time in my hometown hotboxing cars was almost a tradition. Of course this is borderline retarded since its probably the most obvious way of getting stoned. Somehow this never backfired and I had avoided trouble with authorities altogether but of course you can't be lucky your whole life.

During my freshman year at a notoriously liberal Big 12 campus I began smoking regularly with a guy who lived near me and we would roll a blunt or two and drive through the country to smoke. Usually we just drove but on one of these drives we found a park where there was a overlook point that allowed one to see the entire campus and surrounding area etc. We began frequenting this park and smoking since it was out of the way and generally pretty empty. Somehow the topic of hotboxing came up and he told me he had never done it and we resolved to fix that.

The next day my roomate, friend, and I drove up to the park to hotbox a blunt. It was a little rainy and we considered this to be perfect conditions for a hotbox. We parked at the end of the lot and rolled up the windows and began chiefing. All was going as planned except for a few cars that drove in and out but generally paid no attention to us. The whole time my friend was so paranoid that we had to constantly reassure him that we had never had trouble before and eventually got him calm enough to enjoy the hotbox. About halfway through the blunt a car parked in the lot behind us for about 5 minutes and left which we thought was suspicious but ignored it and continued smoking. We weren't facing the entrance to the lot but I could see everything in my rearview mirror. As the blunt was ending (probably half an inch long) my friend got a terrified look on his face and told me a highway trooper had pulled in the lot. I called bullshit thinking he was just trying to scare me but sure enough the trooper pulled up behind us.

Obviously the car was full of smoke and we didnt really know what to do so i told them to put the roach in the ashtray and hide all the paraphanalia like the box of strawberry phillies we had and waited for the trooper to make his move. Since I was driving i knew I would be the doing the talking and tried to think of a cover that would explain a car full of marijuana smoke. After about 2 minutes he left the car and knocked on the window and asked us to step from the vehicle. As I opened my door, which he was standing in front of, the cloud from the hotbox literally hit him in the face at which point I began to accept the fact that I was going to be arrested.

Before I go into the details of the conversation and series of events I think its important that two days before I had skimmed a page on this site about my rights regarding searches and my fourth amendment rights. If you smoke pot or even if you are completely clean I recommend reading the info on this site and others. You just never know.

Anyways he immediatly asked me where the 'dope' was at and I decided my only real option was to deny everything and refuse to allow him to search at any cost. I told him we didnt have any and that we were only smoking some cigars which he obviously didnt believe. He then started asking to search my car and telling me that if I had nothing to hide then it shouldnt matter. I basically respoded the same way every time and told him that it wasnt necassary and that there was no reason for a search and it would only waste his time and ours. During all this another trooper pulled in and observed my questioning but never really did anything. After realizing that he wasnt going to get me to allow a search he took all three of IDs and went back to his car while we stood next to mine. I assume he checked for warrants etc but we were all good and he talked to the other trooper before coming back and telling us that he knew we had something in the car and tried to convince me once again to allow a search which I continued to refuse, politely of course which helped the situation. We could tell he was frustrated and he eventually returned our IDs and told us that the drug dog was busy or else he would have busted out asses and told us to leave now and never come back which sounded like a damn good idea to me so we got in my car and left.

You would think that he would have had a right to search since he clearly saw and smelled a car full of pot smoke. How else would a car fill up with smoke unless somebody was smoking in it? But he couldn't and what saved me was the decision to be firm and refuse search and it paid off in the end.

The moral: read as much information about your rights as you can and be discreet

Knowing that I broke a hotbox on a state troopers face is pretty cool too.

Exp Year: 2005	ExpID: 50185
Gender: Male
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Sep 23, 2008	Views: 12,457
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Cannabis (1), Police / Customs (60) : General (1), Retrospective / Summary (11), Small Group (2-9) (17)