Picture this: You’re at home, trimming the Christmas tree, when you go to collect the mail. You find a package on your porch (one that the local Amazon-package-thieving crew missed that day). It doesn’t have your name on it, but it has your address.
Huh. Odd.
So you do what anyone would do—you open it. Maybe someone is sending you a Christmas gift, even if that someone isn’t quite sure what your name is.
And when you do, you find… four pounds of marijuana, shipped straight to you from sunny California!
So now what? Do you hold onto your newly received manna from heaven? If you’re one North Carolina woman, no way: You call the cops. And the local TV station.
According to WFMY, this was the predicament a “Mrs. Watson” in Greensboro, North Carolina found herself in. Watson was at home, waiting for her husband to come home from work, when she noticed an unexpected package on her porch.
It didn’t have her name, but it had her address—and it also had four pounds of vacuum-sealed weed inside, with a North Carolina street value estimated at between $2,000 and $6,000, the news station reported.
“I just could not believe that someone would send that amount of drugs to my house,” she told the television station. “I’m very frightened. I still am, a little.”
Watson called police, who arrived and seized the mysterious wayward contraband. They’re conducting an investigation, but say that they are certain the weed came from California, something deduced after inspecting the return address. (For her sake and her husband’s, we hope this wasn’t his.)
According to police in North Carolina, “unwanted weed in the mail” is now a regular thing—and for it, we have California to blame.
Ever since California voters passed Prop. 64 and legalized marijuana on Nov. 8, “police in Greensboro say there’s been an influx of marijuana deliveries here by mail,” according to the TV station.
So much marijuana is shipped via the mails that USPS inspectors intercepted 34,000 pounds of the stuff in 2015, with an unknown amount of it is diverted by postal workers.
Regardless. Watson is now telling her story to the media, with the intention of using it as a cautionary tale.
“I think it is something that people should be aware of especially during the holidays because I wasn’t expecting a gift and that should’ve kind of triggered something,” she said.
Shipping cannabis across state lines via the mails is, it should go without saying, a crime, and not something we recommend. But if you must ship it, get the address right—and make sure that anyone on the receiving end is inclined to not call police.