Florida Man Calls Police to Report His Roommate For Stealing His Weed

Over the weekend, a man reportedly called his local sheriff’s office to report that his roommate was stealing his weed. As if calling the cops to report your own marijuana isn’t unusual enough, the man’s roommate had apparently taken only $20 worth of pot.

Man Calls Cops Multiple Times

The incident occurred recently in Pasco County, Florida. And according to local news outlet WFLA-TV, the man in question made multiple calls to the Pasco County 911 dispatcher.

Apparently, in each call the man attempted to get the cops to respond to his complaint that his roommate had stolen his weed. Specifically, $20 worth of it.

From the sounds of the local news report, the sheriff’s office never went to the complaining witness’s home. Instead, Pasco County Deputy Zalva reportedly asked the man to stop calling.

“The guy’s calling in saying his roommate stole his weed—$20 worth,” Zalva said in a video posted to social media. “I called him to let him know not to call the sheriff’s office to report his drugs. He started to freak out a little on the phone, and hung up on me shortly after.”

It appears that nothing else came of the man’s repeated calls to 911. And there have been no updates indicating that authorities responded or did anything about the roommate.

Cops, Weed Jokes, and Social Media

Instead of responding to the man’s calls, local authorities did what they called a #TweetAlong.

Basically, Deputy Zalva took to twitter while out on duty. In a couple posts, Zalva is seen driving around and describing the situation.

Presumably, the TweetAlong was intended to be a humorous social media post. Interestingly, this has become a fairly common thing for law enforcement agencies around the country.

Other examples of cops posting weed-enforcement related posts include:

• In the days leading up to Seattle Hempfest, cops one year handed out bags of Doritos. The bags came with notes reminding attendees that it is illegal to smoke in public.
• In the small town of Wyoming, Minnesota, cops regularly stage social media jokes about cannabis crackdowns. Most notably, they posted a picture of officers posing with snacks, video games, and a net. They called the whole thing “undercover #420 operations.”
• Similarly, cops at Iowa State University staged what they called “weed traps.” Like the cops in Minnesota, this cop weed joke depicted the officers’ luring weed smokers with donuts.
• Beyond these staged social media posts, cops regularly post photos of seized assets from drug busts.

On the surface, these types of social media posts appear to be good humored and more or less benign. But as High Times has argued in the past, these jokes tend to obscure problematic realities.

Most notably, the fact that despite growing legalization, thousands upon thousands of people remain under the control of the legal system because of weed-related offenses. And typically, low level, non-violent offenses.

Even worse, enforcement of cannabis prohibition laws are consistently revealed to be racially discriminatory, targeting people of color at significantly higher rates than their white peers.