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Drugs

Absolute Legend Grounds Southwest Plane After Sparking a J in the Bathroom

Apparently he's never heard of edibles.
Drew Schwartz
Brooklyn, US
Photo of a Southwest plane by Flickr user Tomás Del Coro; photo of a joint by KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/Getty Images

Things haven't been going so well for Southwest lately. Yesterday, one of its employees was accused of asking a passenger to prove that her son was her own before a flight, and less than a month after an engine on one of its planes exploded—killing one passenger—a window cracked open on another plane mid-flight, forcing it to make an emergency landing. So when the smoke alarms went off on a Southwest flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles Wednesday, the folks onboard were, understandably, pretty freaked out.

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"At first we were like, 'Ooh, that’s weird.' And then the plane took an immediate drop," passenger Jonathan Burkes told CBS Los Angeles. "And that was a little bit scary."

Luckily, the flight managed to make an emergency landing in San Jose, and all 33 passengers were evacuated. But there wasn't a fire onboard, no terrifying engine failure or catastrophic malfunction—instead, the "emergency" was allegedly just some dude who really wanted to blaze up in the bathroom.

Passenger Edmund Lo told NBC Bay Area he saw the stoner in question board the plane in a wheelchair. But when the flight hit its cruising altitude, the guy got up out of his seat and walked to the bathroom. Within minutes, the smoke alarms went off, and, according to Lo, the dude shuffled back to his seat reeking of weed—likely pleased with himself for joining the other mile high club.

The pilot originally reported a "mechanical difficulty," according to the Mercury News, and made a dive straight for San Jose, kicking the guy off while the rest of the passengers were put on different flights.

Although weed is legal in California now, that doesn't mean you can just light up on a flying metal death tube any damn time you please. You run the risk of filling the plane with smoke, or lighting someone's carry-on bag on fire. If the passenger really wanted to enjoy his flight, he could have just picked up some weed brownies, or cookies, or gummies, or mints, or any of the other countless (and more discreet) alternatives to just roasting a bone.

But no. Either this man gives fewer fucks than any human on the planet, or he has a divine respect for the joint—empirically verified as the best way to get blazed. However sweet those first few hits might have been, his high went south as soon as the alarms went off. He was handed off to authorities once the plane touched down in San Jose, and he's now facing up to a $3,300 fine.

At the end of the day, it's hard not to feel for the guy. Flights are stressful—you never know what might go wrong—and there's nothing like a little bomb-ass-dank-ass to take the edge off. Plus, there are far worse things he could've done in that bathroom than smoke a joint. Let's just hope that before his next flight, somebody hooks him up with a solid recipe for edibles.

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