UPDATE, OCT. 11, 12:32 P.M.: Someone leaving a comment on the Huntington Beach Police Department (HBPD) Facebook page, which broke the news about three elderly folks being rushed to the emergency room after unknowingly eating brownies laced with marijuana at a funeral, claims a woman was arrested and placed in the jail psychiatric ward for bringing out the loaded dessert tray. “I saw that post also,” Lt. Russell Rinehart, the HBPD spokesman, tells the Weekly. “I cannot confirm any of that
information; if it is true, it was not by our department involving this
incident.” We can confirm that the very existence of the department's Facebook page is producing interesting back-and-forth comments about this case.
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As reported in our original post below, HBPD presented the pot brownies incident and the robbery of medical marijuana delivery people the day before to warn the community about the dangers surrounding cannabis for sick people. What follows are five representative Facebook comments about the original HBPD post (there were 51 last time I checked). Misspellings and grammatical errors have been left intact:
ORIGINAL POST, OCT. 10, 2:03 P.M.: Three folks in their 70s and 80s were admitted to Hoag Memorial Hospital in Newport Beach Sunday for nausea, dizziness and inability to stand
unassisted. What do you normally call that? Sunday at Hoag Memorial Hospital. But this time there was something unusual about the admissions: all three seniors had attended the memorial service for a mutual friend in Huntington Beach. All three had sampled the same brownies from a tray. And all three had unknowingly consumed brownies laced with marijuana.The Huntington Beach Police Department, which is investigating the case
and publicized it on its Facebook page, has determined the brownies
contained “medical marijuana.” Indeed, the Facebook post demonizes the
state voter-approved remedy for what ails you.
“It is important for the community to
understand that marijuana is a drug, and like all other drugs and
alcohol, it is important to understand the negative consequences it
creates in our community,” reads the post. “Calling it 'medical marijuana' does not make
it any safer. Huntington Beach does not permit or have licensed medical marijuana dispensaries in the city limits.”The same Facebook post includes another example of medical-marijuana mayhem. The evening before the old folks got baked without their permission, two people who deliver medical cannabis were robbed in a residential neighborhood.
Police received a 9-1-1 call around 8:30 p.m. from a homeowner who said two people were robbed in front of his house in the 20700 block of
Mataro Lane, Huntington Beach. Cops arrived to find two victims, a 35-year-old man from Anaheim and 25-year-old woman of Garden Grove, but the gunmen were long gone. They apparently posed as customers and chose the quiet
residential neighborhood as their address for delivery of medical marijuana.
When
the delivery service arrived, one man pulled a gun on the employees getting out of the van, and the pair stole $1,500 worth of marijuana, car keys and cell
phones. The robbers then ran south on Matario, turned around the corner to Alvarado Drive and disappeared into the darkness. No getaway vehicle was seen. They were described as African Americans in their lates 20s wearing t-shirts and jeans.“Robberies
and burglaries of 'medical' marijuana dispensaries and delivery
services,” warns the HBPD Facebook post, “are becoming a more common problem in communities due to the
high profit margins of selling marijuana and all the transactions being
conducted in cash.”OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.
