And finally… everything’s going to pot

The un-named officer had been called to a parcel sorting centre to inspect packages staff thought looked suspicious.

He was shown various boxes when he arrived that had been sent back from an address in the south of England.

The curious smell coming from the boxes convinced the officer they were packed with cannabis.

He seized the boxes and took them to the police station where he spent half an hour unloading them and even requested a sniffer dog.

However, when the boxes were opened the dog was unexcited by the 8kg of a different kind of pot: potpourri.

The unknown officer spent the following hour re-packaging the “haul” and returning it to the depot and will likely be ridiculed by his colleagues for years to come.

In other pot news a man twice caught growing cannabis in his home has told police as well as a judge that as a freeman of the land he was not bound by the common law in an apparent reference to Magna Carta.

Portsmouth Crown Court heard how the home of Niall Dixon was raided by police who discovered 65 plants three years ago.

The court heard that in a second raid last year they found two more in a tent as well as some dried cannabis and one more plant in Mr Dixon’s conservatory.

Nicholas Hall, prosecuting, told the court that Mr Dixon said to police that he was exercising under Magna Carta “his right granted by god to consume any plants that he chose to do and therefore the inapplication to him of this legislation.”

Colorado’s marijuana experiment has been very successful a year in with crime down and tourism up.

In fact, the state has now collected so much tax revenue from pot sales that it may be legally obliged to hand some back to the public.

Colorado’s constitution caps the amount of tax that can be taken from taxpayers before some must be given back, meaning Coloradans could scoop up a share of the $50 million generated by the popular drug.

Both the Democrats and Republicans are in agreement on the issue though – with each party insisting that there is no reason to return the money to taxpayers.

“I think it’s appropriate that we keep the money for marijuana that the voters said that we should,” said Republican senate president Bill Cadman.

“This is a little bit of a different animal. There’s a struggle on this one,” added senator Kevin Grantham, a Republican budget writers.

In January a Denver police chief said that a year into the drug’s legalisation “everything is fine” and that crime had continued to decline while police went about their work as usual.