am i a real dope?

ok, this is one of those cotton-type posts where you get to vote.

yesterday, when i said i dropped a bag of dope into the caulfield police station, i was not jesting, dear readers.

in the garden, right under princess' bedroom window, we found a large jetstar bag filled with a huge quantity of hydroponic-type organic stuff, which reeked of something other than garden herbs.

i could see the little star-shaped leaves. all dried up. i could see the heads.

it had been wrapped, taped and tossed over the fence. so it seems.

these were the options:

1. try to sell

2. keep to smoke

3. throw in bin

4. throw in bin up the street

5. give to friends

6. hand in to police.

now before we go any further, i must explain john was home from work, organising some plumbing. so, we had the fatherly greek plumber out there as well. in the garden, near the bag of dope. in fact they kind of found it together.

"that looks like marijuana" said the greek plumber, in his accented english. "is it yours?"

"does it?" said john. he has never seen it before. "no, it's not mine!"

"well, i'm going to throw it away, whatever it is," said john and came inside to show me.

i was sitting at the dining table, thesising. i stuck my world-weary head in the bag and smelled the smell. it had been a long while, my friends. i picked out great clumps of the stuff and looked at it closely.

"i'm pretty sure that's dope, honey," i said.

then we had a conversation about what to do with it. options 1,2 and 5 were out of the question. we are fine, upstanding citizens.

the complication was, dear friends, i think this house has been a hydro house in a past life. when we moved in, there were (and still are) holes in the ceilings of the three kids' rooms, some patched some just left. holes arranged in such a way that they form a large rectangle across the ceilings. also, we found a circular hole sawed into the floorboards in a corner of one of the rooms. just left there, with the carpet over the top. so anybody's ankle could go through it.

so i had my suspicions. also, wondered how the young landlord/developer got so rich to be able to own this house, as well as three neighbouring houses. how come his father knows what marijuana looks like?

i don't think there's necessarily any connection between this house's past life, and this bag o' dope in our garden. a coincidence? BUT i didn't want it in our bin. garbage is not collected until monday and there may not be one next monday.

i also didn't want it in another bin in case someone came looking for their dope. i don't want to be in the middle of a drug war, or similar. i wanted it on record that we'd found it, and handed it in. [stop it! i can hear you groaning.]

so i called the police station. spoke to a cop and he said to bring it in. i said i didn't want to drive with it in my car. (we are talking a lot of stuff here. like a small pillow's worth, from my elbow to fingers long at least and a foot wide. think grass clippings in a large plastic bag, several handsful. this was not some "youth stash". this was a big business delivery or something like that gone wrong. it was at least half a kilo)

the police man said to put it in the boot, and gave me his name in case i got stopped.

i drove it to the station and took it in, and handed it in.

i told another officer about the house, how we found it in the garden. he was going to call the agent, he said it sounds like the house was used at some stage for that kind of operation, that electricity would have been re-routed, as it costs thousands. and that's what they do.

i said to him "look, i've got three kids. we've done the right thing here. i don't want my door kicked down in the middle of the night by police. i don't want my kids scared. if anyone wants to come and look at the house, they're welcome. just make an appointment."

he said that shouldn't happen.

great.

oh, and i got a receipt. which very drily says i do not wish the good returned. it's not a wallet with money or a gold ingot we're talking about here. and it has written in the property description section '1 x bag "marijuana" '

not happy about those quote marks. when i asked the officer what will happen with it, he looked me right in the eyes and said "it'll be destroyed."

"rubbish," said my friend on the phone today, "they'll sell it."

the other funny thing was my palms were itching like mad yesterday morning. and that's stopped.

easy come, easy go.

so, now you get to vote.

1. we are idiots.

2. we did the right thing.

be honest. i don't mind. we know we did the right thing, but what would you have done?