FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SCHOOL CHILDREN FIND OVER $20,000 OF MARIJUANA HIDDEN NEAR THEIR HOME
Contact: San Miguel County Sheriff Bill Masters 970-729-2025
23 April 2018 -- (Telluride, CO) – Two elementary-age children found a 30-gallon trash bag hidden in some trees in a vacant lot near their homes near Norwood while playing on Friday (4/20/18). The children told their parents, who opened the bag and found it contained multiple bags of what appeared to be marijuana. They then called the Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies determined the trash bag contained five one-gallon ziplock bags, each stuffed with marijuana packaged for distribution or sale. The combined weight of the bags was over four pounds which has a retail value on the black market (depending upon location) of between about $22,000 and $40,000.
The packaging and secretion of the bag indicates it had been hidden for someone else to pick up. Deputies found evidence that this was not someone’s legal medical marijuana that fell off a truck, but was grown for illegal sale on the black market.
Investigating deputies said the amount of marijuana found was on the high side of any physician’s recommendation for medical marijuana that SMSO has seen to date, so if this was grown in an otherwise legal medical marijuana grow, the grower is clearly over-cultivating, using the cover of the law, to profit on the black market. If it was grown for recreational use, this amount of marijuana was a felony to possess the moment it was taken from the cultivation site.
Sheriff Bill Masters said, “This outrageous incident proves again that San Miguel County is correct in doing everything it can to control outlaw marijuana growers by strictly enforcing state law and local land use codes.”
The San Miguel Sheriff’s Office, located in Telluride, Colorado and established in 1883, serves 7,800 residents and countless visitors across the 1,288 square miles of San Miguel County. Sheriff Bill Masters has been serving as the county’s elected Sheriff since 1980.
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