Back in the fifties and the sixties, drugs weren’t as prevalent as they are today. And folks in small towns and rural areas were not “hip” to drugs—or so many city dealers and users thought. A dumb criminal with this attitude ran into trouble one day on the main street of a small Indiana town with a not-so-dumb police officer.
Sitting in his squad car just watching traffic on a warm afternoon, Officer Larry Hawkins (not the same Larry Hawkins mentioned earlier in this book) spotted a Ford station wagon with out-of-state license plates—and a rear compartment full of marijuana plants.
“I guess he just figured our little town has a bunch of backward cops who don’t know what marijuana looks like,” Hawkins said. “Well, I knew what it looked like. I just took off after him, and he didn’t run.”
The officer pulled the station wagon over and walked up to the driver’s window. “Partner,” he said, “I hope for your sake that those plants are plastic.”
The man just looked at the officer with a pleasant look on his face and said, “Yeah, they are.”
“Well, I’m sure you won’t mind if I just kind of check it out.”
For a long moment the driver just looked at the woman in the seat next to him. Finally, he shrugged. “Sure.”
So the officer went back and opened the tailgate and pulled out seven live marijuana plants—each one in its own pot. They were full-grown plants—the top of each one bent down by the roof of the car. And they were definitely not plastic.
The smart guy was arrested. The sheriff’s office used the plants to show schoolchildren what marijuana looks like. And Hawkins had the last laugh on this city slicker.
“They used to make rope out of hemp, which is marijuana,” Hawkins says. “This guy had just enough to hang himself.”