Woman denies ownership of marijuana hidden in her genitals

Reason cited: she's a medical student.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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The Snowden Principle

retchdog

maybe i’m naïve, but the procedure used for finding that marijuana seems pretty invasive. do they apply it to everyone booked into jail, or just drug suspects, or what?

also, i don’t think she was intending to smuggle it into jail. what an opportunistic charge.
- TWX
  
  From what I understand, it depends on how the officers interpret the situation and what the prisoner is charged with.
  - foobar
    
    The whims of police officers is an excellent basis for a system of justice.
    - TWX
      
      I’m certainly not endorsing their methods. But on the other hand, I don’t want to see contraband in jails or prisons either. I’m more concerned with unnecessary screenings or searches that don’t yield real positive hits. Ideally such invasive searches would only be performed on those who actually are smuggling this way.
      
      I also don’t think that Marijuana should be illegal, and I state that having never consumed it myself. Treat it like tobacco and alcohol, requiring consumption where it doesn’t disturb others and not in public places. If that means a pot-equivalent of a beer garden at a festival and that some people can’t consume it in their homes because of disturbing their neighbors with the smell or because of no-smoking rules in rental units, them’s the breaks. Either way, if marijuana weren’t illegal then this probably wouldn’t be so much a problem.
- Work_Watch_Buy_Repeat
  
  http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/supreme-court-says-jails-can-strip-search-you-even-traffic-violations
  The US prison system is quite the hall of horrors if you take a look at it. Fortunately, those in the middle and upper classes rarely have to, except as fictionalized entertainment.
  - retchdog
    
    med school seems solidly middle class to me. i mean, as solid as it is for anyone.
    - GlyphGryph
      
      Which is why it’s newsworthy
      - retchdog
        
        fair enough. or maybe it’s because she had drugs in her vag and tried to used a ridiculously pathetic excuse.
        
        let’s see: “woman denies ownership of marijuana in genitals; reason cited: would lose custody of children.” eh, i’d give it 50/50.
        
        edit: one more: “… reason cited: would lose welfare benefits.” now this one would be a shoo-in.
  - ZikZak
    
    If the drug war were waged against rich white people in the same way it is against poor brown people, it would have ended years ago.
- soylecithin
  
  You’re naive.
  
  “The Supreme Court on [April 2, 2012] ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband …
  
  Citing examples from briefs submitted to the Supreme Court, [dissenting] Justice Breyer wrote that people have been subjected to ‘the humiliation of a visual strip search’ after being arrested for driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal and riding a bicycle without an audible bell. A nun was strip-searched, he wrote, after an arrest for trespassing during an antiwar demonstration.”
  
  https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/us/justices-approve-strip-searches-for-any-offense.html?pagewanted=all
  - retchdog
    
    well, naïve is better than callous (see below).
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Jim-Kelly/692448753 Jim Kelly
    
    Ah, yes. The “bend over and cough” ruling.
http://anomicofficedrone.com/ AnomicOfficeDrone

Seems legit.
corydodt

She’s just holding it for a friend. A very close friend.
Chuck

Maybe she’s from a part of the country where the Christian Conservatives have passed laws saying that she doesn’t own her vagina. If that’s the case, then how is she supposed to keep people from putting stuff in there? She’d have no authority to stop them, after all.
- Assault_is_eternal
  
  A wise man did point out that it’s “uter-us”, not “uter-you”
  - oasisob1
    
    You mean, it’s you-terus, not us-terus?
    - bluest_one
      
      I think you both mean it’s “uter-us” not “you-terus” (or vice versa).
Brainspore

In cases of legitimate drug abuse oh never mind.
Tchoutoye

A typical case of honeypot.
voiceinthedistance

Those law enforcement goons just muffed her homework assignment for OB/GYN 101.
- oasisob1
  
  Seriously, you just used ‘muffed’ in that comment?
  - voiceinthedistance
    
    I was making an assumption about the muff.
http://www.aarongilliland.com/ Aaron Gilliland

It was for her glaucoma. In her uterus.
http://daniel.friesen.name/ Daniel Friesen

Of course… in a sane world Marijuana shouldn’t be illegal in the first place and shouldn’t matter where it was found.
- ocker3
  
  Well, they’ve started selling alcohol that’s been poured over the breasts of supermodels, I suppose this was the next step!
LinkMan

An 18yo medical student?
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  That’s when you would start pre-med.
  - skimedic
    
    If she’s a medical student at 18 it’s not in Florida (or anywhere else in the US). She might be an undergrad who hopes to be a med student someday, but she’s probably not going to get admitted to medical school with that on her record.
    - C W
      
      Premed.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      As the only person on my dorm floor who wasn’t in it, I can assure you that there are 6-year med programs in the US that accept students straight out of high school.
http://profile.yahoo.com/LJBHIXYJ55RLT34HN3KIYI5CTI yahoo-LJBHIXYJ55RLT34HN3KIYI5CTI

Does strip search include cavity search?
- Ipo
  
  They make you bend over and spread your cheeks for a visual inspection upon admittance to jail.
  Maybe we’re underestimating the size of that bud.
Preston Sturges

I Smell That Sticky Icky
Who Got That Sticky Icky
I Got That Sticky Icky, Icky, Icky
I Smell That Sticky Icky
Who Got That Sticky Icky
I Got That Sticky Icky, Icky, Icky
I Smell That Sticky (Oh Yeah)
Who Got That Sticky (I Do)
I Smell That Sticky (Oh Yeah)
Who Got That Sticky (Me Too)
I Smell That Sticky (Oh Yeah)
Who Got That Sticky (I Do)
I Smell That Sticky (Oh Yeah)
Who Got That Sticky (Me Too)
Preston Sturges

“Do you smoke after sex?”

“I don’t know, I never looked.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TIpjUp-gDw
bo1n6bo1n6

Oh, thats where that went!
http://www.facebook.com/greg.husband Greg Husband

based on these comments and the post as a whole, i think im going to stop reading boingboing
- Ipo
  
  Oh, so soon. You hadn’t even really started.
  You better just stay on FB, where it’s safe.
BombBlastLightingWaltz

Maybe she honestly does not recall how it got in there. Its possible.
PathogenAntifreeze

In a purported “land of the free,” no part of this story would have occurred beyond the driver being pulled over and cited or arrested for driving incorrectly.
- http://daniel.friesen.name/ Daniel Friesen
  
  Yeah… though the weaving driver might be tested and have their license suspended if evidence found that they were driving under the influence — the influence in this case being drugs that are not alcohol.
http://theganges.org/ theganges

I’d have just eaten it instead of stashin’ it…
marilove

I worked for my home town’s county jail when I was just 18 years old. One day, I was watching the female inmates take the short walk to the recreation area.

There was a distinct bag that dropped out of her pant leg.

It was a big wad of drugs (cocaine? I can’t remember) in her vagina that had fallen out.
She also tried to deny they were hers!
Øyvind

I’m a bit confused… Why couldn’t it be hers because she was a med student? Was it because her body now belongs to medicine, and it was the med school’s drugs? Or because med students are physically unable to own drugs?
- brainflakes
  
  It’s because the headline’s a load of bollocks. She denied marijuana found on a car seat was hers, not the drugs subsequently found in her vagina.
http://orbitnet.com JIMWICh

Now that’s what I’d call Diggity DANK!
Ipo

It really sucks for her to have gotten caught!
This fucks up her life pretty good.
Such a vile crime as the very private hiding of a small amount of hemp flowers.
The repercussions to her are in no relationship to the severity of her offense.
That in itself is terrible.

I don’t have a vagina, but if I did, I certainly wouldn’t want my government to release my name and picture together with information on what I stick in it. This is indecent exposure. Letting a minor run the gauntlet. Public shaming. Cruel and unusual punishment even before trial. And she got a life sentence.
brainflakes

Lets just correct the headline here:

Woman denies ownership of marijuana found on car seat. Later more marijuana found in her vagina, claims she was just “trying to protect the others from getting in trouble.”

But you know, lets not let silly things like the facts of the story get in the way of a good headline.
- daneyul
  
  Let’s correct the headline even more:
  
  “Woman violated by police, life ruined, for possessing completely harmless substance.”
  
  Yay! One less med student to worry about!
  
  Let’s laugh at her desperate attempt to protect herself from public shaming and a destroyed career!
  
  Any story that uses the word “vagina” has got to be funny, right?
Dirk

I read BoingBoing in Google Reader and immediately under this post’s entry there is an ad for Beaver Creek Lodge. Google’s robots have become very advanced…
- Preston Sturges
  
  And who can forget “Beaver Liquors?”
- Sean Nelson
  
  Same happened to me. . . I was just on my way to make this very same post, but CTRL-F’d for “beaver” first.
TheMudshark

Woman waylaid, sexually violated and robbed by state-employed armed thugs.
http://twitter.com/unexplodedscot Scott Rose

If she’s smart enough to go to medical school, you’d think she come up with a better excuse. Like, she thought she might be pregnant and her family has a history of paediatric glaucoma. Presto, possession turns to prophylaxis.

It was a victim-less crime, at least until the cops showed up.
Uppitynproud

NOT FUN now wondering how much of what I have smoked in my life was inside someone’s paranoid orifices beforehand.