Possession of Jolly Ranchers Is the Criminal Charge of the Future

This is just absurd.

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Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

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Blame Walter White and his creation of etremely potent meth that resembled candy. Then again, that' was on Breaking Bad, which is fiction. This arrest should be blamed on overzealous police.

Back in June, 25-year-old Brooklyn native Love Olatunjiojo was detained for possession of crystal meth by extremely-pressed NYPD officers in Coney Island. It turned out to be a bag of Jolly Ranchers, which Olatunjiojo and a friend had just purchased. 

The two were stopped just a few blocks away by Officer Jermaine Taylor and a team of cops. Both were arrested; Olatunjiojo was detained for 24 hours and told it "only a matter of time before [police] found something," according to Olatunjiojo's attorney, Kenneth Smith, who filed a suit in Brooklyn Federal Court on Tuesday. 

"I don’t know if these cops have been watching Breaking Bad, but my client is not Walter White," Smith told the New York Daily News.

The Daily News says that two red and four blue Jolly Ranchers underwent a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry analysis at an NYPD lab, further wasting time and resources. When the results returned two days later and identified them as, well, Jolly Ranchers, police felt like idiots. 

Former DEA agent Mike Levine told the Daily News that Jolly Ranchers and crystal meth do favor each other. "Crystal meth is produced in all kinds of colors," he said, adding that there's a kind that resembles "strawberry Pop Rocks candy" currently circulating.

So now if police see anyone holding a substance resembling candy, they just assume it's meth? If police at least wanted to be reasonable, they should've asked the men if they were about to make lean. Too much television.

[via New York Daily News]

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