The pot copter buzzed our house again today. For the last two or three months, a helicopter with no discernable markings has been flying low near the cornfields of our neighborhood. At first, we thought it was the private chopper of the rock star up the valley, or perhaps the corporate bigwig down the holler.

A neighbor told us that it was just the pot copter.

They’re flying low near us not because we’re potheads, but because there are cornfields all around us. Corn and marijuana, we have learned, sometimes go hand-in-hand. The pot copter finds patches of dope growing in among the cornstalks. As it was explained to me, it has something to do with infrared technology. I don’t understand it. It’s nothing I’ve really studied much, because I don’t grow pot.

I’ve passed on every chance to grow marijuana, not because I’m anti-marijuana, but because I’m anti-anything going up my butt. You can smoke all the dope you’d like. It don’t b’front me none. Just don’t try to poke me. That’s the motto I live by. And since I feel so strongly about my rear end, I’d like to keep it out of prison. They lock people up for growing pot. I’m a realist. I’m not weak, by any means, but I know what would happen to me in prison. Even though I don’t grow marijuana, when I see the pot copter, my butt puckers.

When they find marijuana, the police do what is supposed to be done – they burn it. The difference between law enforcement officials and pot smokers is the amount of pot burned and the use of paraphernalia. As we learned by watching those informative movies in school, a casual drug user will smoke small amounts, rolling it into a cigarette or smoking it in a pipe, the kind you used to buy in the back room of Heads Together. Law enforcement officials do the same thing with the pot they find. They just do it more quickly, piling it into massive heaps, soaking it with gasoline and lighting up. They use no paraphernalia. There is no need for a roach clip. No cops are asking you for papers.

I’ve seen drug burning on the news, watched the towering bales of pot go up in smoke and looked on as drug enforcement officials tended the fires, wearing no gas masks. When I watch, I have the same question, over and over – do the cops get high from sucking in the smoke of the confiscated crops? It’s a logical question. We’ve all been to a concert where we may not be smoking, but the guy next to us is puffing away like Bob Marley on a three-day weekend. Multiply that by a thousand and you get the effect that policeman deal with during a good-sized evidence burning.

This week in Denver, Colorado, a Hazmat team had to be called to help decontaminate three drug enforcement detectives who had been exposed to moldy marijuana fumes. According to reports, the three officers were attempting to destroy some marijuana in the evidence locker room when they were overcome by vapors.

Wow. Is that what happened to my great grandmother? I remember them saying something about her being “overcome by the vapors”. Granny smoked pot?

The little known fact we all learn from this story is that if you let your marijuana sit around, it gets moldy, like bread. I did not know that. The fungus that develops can be very hazardous. Because the detectives burned this hazardous, moldy pot, an entire floor of the Denver Police Department had to be evacuated. The detectives, after being treated, were released and are back on the job, burning more pot today.

The fact that the policemen were overcome by vapors tells us that they do, indeed, inhale pot smoke while burning evidence. What a terrible job that must be, knowing that you have to go to work every day and do the exact thing you’re arresting other people for doing. That sort of behavior could weigh heavily on your conscience.

So what have we learned today?

Drug detectives inhale pot smoke. If you let your marijuana lay around in a police station, it will grow mold. And, most importantly, I don’t want anything going up my butt – which brings me to my real point.

This is my butt.

This is my butt after serving time for growing pot.

Any questions?

Oh, and before I go… I have something else to say to the pot copter. As long as you’re out there, buzzing around in the cornfields, you could do something constructive.

Shoot some of the deer.