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War on Drugs

Cops Question Family for Cooking Mushrooms

"I figured a police officer would know what illegal drugs looked like."

Lenore Skenazy | 6.1.2018 10:01 AM

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Morel mushrooms
Aleksandar Milutinovic / Dreamstime

Sometimes the people hallucinating are not the ones taking the mushrooms, but the ones seeing them on Facebook.

After a couple in Maryland posted photos of the yummy morel mushrooms they had discovered, they got a call from the cops.

OutdoorHub reports that

John Garrison posted a series of photos with his girlfriend, Hope Deery, on Facebook showing off the couple's morel mushroom find while out hunting for the sought after fungi one afternoon.

"Mountain Morels!!! About to sautee them with brown sugar and cinnamon and see how that turns out," his Facebook post reads.

While that does indeed sound like something you would only eat while high as a mountain goat, a revolting recipe is not what got them in trouble.

Garrison claims a few hours after eating the mushrooms, a police officer showed up at their door and questioned the couple about posting pictures of psychedelic psilocybin mushrooms.

But the police officer had made a mistake.

"We let them in and as soon as the police officer walked in he asked us why we were eating mushrooms and posting about it online."

That would be pretty dumb. But the cop was dumber. As Garrison wrote on Facebook: "He thought he was on the biggest bust of his career thinking we were having a magic mushroom party before I explained to him that Morels are a native choice edible mushroom similar to truffles."

The non-stoned truffle-maker had to rummage through the trash to find evidence of his non-crime. But the cop was still skeptical, which surprised Garrison because psychedelic mushrooms look nothing like morels. "I figured a police officer would know what illegal drugs looked like," thought Garrison, wrongly.

It wasn't until a more gourmet cop showed up and identified morels as tasty, not trippy, that the couple was released. But first the cops proceeded to "process their IDs."

Why? Because even non-events are events once the cops are involved. That is the (ahem) morel of the story.

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Lenore Skenazy is president of Let Grow, a nonprofit promoting childhood independence and resilience, and founder of the Free-Range Kids movement.

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