• Nicolle Clemetson

So can you get the weed back? It's legal, right?

Well, last week for an upcoming cover story, photographer Nicolle Clemetson and I toured the place where your pot—and thousands of pounds of other peoples' pot—winds up: The police property and evidence warehouse. This giant building in NW Portland mostly feels like an IKEA warehouse full of stolen goods, but the weed room (accessible only by pressing two keycards to pads on two separate walls simultaneously) feels different. It feels more like a tomb, with burlap sacks full of pot plants hanging ominously from meathooks.

All of this pot will be destroyed. That's right, every ounce of pot that winds up in police hands will be incinerated (and not, ha ha, in the usual way).

Until this winter, if your Oregon-legal weed was confiscated, you could file a request for the return of your property and the police would return it, just like if your bike or shoes or any other property had been confiscated but was no longer needed for a case. But in January, Oregon Attorney General John Kroger's office wrote an opinion (pdf) that the federal Controlled Substances' Act supersedes the state law compelling officers to return property. If an officer does return confiscated weed, Kroger's office determined they could be subject to federal criminal prosecution. So now all the weed is destroyed—one more casualty of the legal mess that results from the conflict between state and federal laws around marijuana.

Check out more about the doomed marijuana and other strange objects from the police evidence room in next week's paper.

So the other day I was just settling onto my couch when BLAM—there was a loud explosion and flash of light outside my window. My first thought was "bomb," my next thought was "car explosion (again)," (I had a car's engine explode outside my window once, but that was a different apartment—it's not like in the movies!), but when I looked outside the cloud of smoke surrounded not a car, but a bush outside the apartments across the street.

"Shake 'n' bake!" my fiancé proudly pronounced. "Meth! I heard about it on NPR." Obviously, we are yuppies, so instead of crossing the street to find out what happened (it was clear that nobody was hurt), I googled "meth shake 'n' bake" and tweeted about how it scared my cats. For your edification:

Those ingredients include things like drain cleaner, lithium batteries and pseudoephedrine — a decongestant in cold medications such as Sudafed. Easy access to these ingredients means more methamphetamine addicts are making the drug themselves. They're using a method known as "shake and bake"—and often winding up in hospital burn wards... The shake-and-bake method involves mixing everything together in a plastic bottle and then shaking, cooling and venting the container as you go. Do it right, and you end up with at least several grams of meth in less than an hour; do it wrong, and you can find yourself holding an explosive fireball of corrosive chemicals.

And anyway, the neighborhood busybodies were on it, and when one of them crossed the street to quiz the guy—who I've never met, but just looks like your average rocker dude, and who did not appear to be panicking (in fact he was cool as a cucumber), nor did what seemed to be the two girls and maybe one other guy in there—she came back with her faced screwed up skeptically saying, "He said something caught fire in the kitchen so he threw it outside." Where it EXPLODED in a fiery ball of light.

Soon after, like five cop cars, an ambulance, and the fire department were there, with everyone circling around and examining the explosion spot. The ambulance and fire trucks left pretty quickly, but one of the cops stayed for quite a while talking to everyone assembled in the apartment. But... nobody left in handcuffs.

Consider: I maybe saw someone leave the apartment right after the explosion, but I can't be sure. I definitely saw Rocker Dude cleaning up post-explosion, moving the dirt around with his shoe before the cops got there. But "corrosive chemicals" sound hard to clean up quickly and in front of gawking neighbors. And yet... what else could it have been? Was he deep-frying M80s? Would the cops really just let people go for making meth in an apartment building? I don't particularly want to get the guy in trouble (though I don't particularly want chemical explosions happening across the street, either), I'm just curious. Given the evidence, what do you think happened?

So those persistent pro-weed petition-wavers lurking on SE Hawthorne are getting somewhere. This week, the Campaign for Sensible Law Enforcement hit a mile marker in their push to legalize marijuana in the state: Collecting over 50,000 signatures on their petition for an amendment. The constitutional amendment would legalize personal use of marijuana for those 21 and over, provided their actions don't endanger children or public safety.

“We are on track to make the ballot in November. We are pleased that Oregon voters will have a chance to put an end to the expensive waste of law enforcement resources that marijuana prohibition requires and the criminal activity it causes,” said Chief Petitioner Robert Wolfe.

The measure needs about 116,000 valid signatures by July 6 to qualify for the November election, which Wolfe seems to see as an easy feat.