Girl eats father’s marijuana-laced bar // Reported by BRENNA LINSLEY of Associated Press
You better know who that package is from when that knock on your door to sign for a package comes . . . That 1st knock could be followed by a life-changing KNOCK!
A Chippewa Falls man faces a charge of second degree recklessly endangering safety after his daughter ate a chocolate bar with 225 milligrams of THC, the active ingredient of marijuana.
Jason N. Hetke, 38, 1619 Nicholas Lane No. 3 is also charged with child neglect and possession of THC dating from June 12 in Chippewa Falls. Hetke is scheduled to appear before Judge James Isaacson at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 28.
According to a criminal complaint: The girl appeared intoxicated in school after eating an entire THC chocolate bar, that has the nickname of a Colorado Bar. She said she ate edibles brought back from Colorado, which legalized marijuana for adults over 21 in 2012.
The girl said the bar was about a third of the size of a dollar bill. Her pulse was so weak that a school officer and an officer were unable to read it. In her pants pocket there was this writing: “Blue Kudu Chocolate, 225 mg of THC, 22.5 doses. Extremely potent. Do not eat all at once.”
The girl said she found the bar in a dresser drawer inside her father’s bedroom.
Using a search warrant, police opened a night stand in Jason Hetke’s residence and found a bag labeled “Colorado Bar,” that said the weight of the package was 43 grams and was labeled as being medicinal THC.
In another bedroom police found a bag weighing 3 grams. It was butane hash oil, a concentrated form of THC.
A report by a federally funded drug task force on Thursday said the amount of Colorado marijuana being seized en route to other states through the U.S. mail has more than quadrupled since 2010 and was destined for more states than before.
Postal inspectors seized more than 493 pounds of pot from packages in 2013, up from 57 pounds in 2010, the year after medical marijuana dispensaries proliferated in Colorado, according to the figures released this month by the Rocky Mountain High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area.
Just 15 packages were bound for 10 states in 2010, compared to the 207 parcels destined for 33 states in 2013. Top destinations were Florida, Maryland and Illinois, the report states.
Among the cases listed in the report:
—A Boulder, Colorado, man who sent more than 14 pounds of pot to places including Wisconsin, Massachusetts and California.
—A Lakewood, Colorado, man who police say used his condo and a warehouse to grow enough high-grade marijuana for his crime ring to send between 24 and 60 pounds each month to out-of-state customers.
—A suburban Denver drug task force seized nearly 20 pounds of pot from three FedEx packages bound for Illinois and Kansas.
The report, based on information from the United States Postal Inspection Service, doesn’t contain figures for the first six months of 2014, when recreational pot shops opened in the state.
The Postal Service in Denver has denied requests from The Associated Press for the same data.
The spike in pot seizures is a sign not of more proactive postal investigations but that more people are shipping pot through the mail, said Tom Gorman, director of Rocky HIDTA, a network of law enforcement organizations in four western states that share information on drug-running patterns. It releases a yearly report about marijuana legalization as part of its work.
Despite being legal in Colorado, federal law maintains marijuana use and sales are illegal. Because the Postal Service is a federal agency, using it to move marijuana — even within states where it is legal — is a crime.
Denver attorney Brian Vicente, who helped write the pot law, said the leakage of Colorado marijuana into other states is a serious issue that voters agreed should remain illegal. But he was skeptical of the HIDTA report, which he said promotes prohibition.
The U.S. Justice Department said it would tolerate marijuana sales in Colorado and Washington as long as the pot didn’t cross state lines.
He said people are also sending it through private couriers like FedEx and UPS, which don’t release statistics on their seizures. Neither company would comment on how it investigates such cases.
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