The balances send this into dealing territory. You don’t want to be around dealing.
YOU DON’T WANT TO BE AROUND DEALING.
Confiscate everything, and don’t back down.
It looks like an unwrapped cigar. It’s dark brown, leafy, dried/dessicated, about half of it is in a cylidrical form 1/2" in diameter and 4" long, the rest is loose leaves. The ends are flared out like they’ve been partially unpeeled. There’s also a piece of paper money from Afghanistan, a 100-something note, most of the writing is arabic.
One of those moments when **Mr. Moto ** and I are on the same page, but keep in mind that this is only what you found. Now that you’ve determined your trust of him/her has been violated, what’s in there that you haven’t found yet…?
Search the room. Look through old toys. Search stuffed animals that may have had the stuffing removed from them to allow for storage space. Grab/pull at wood moldings (especially in their closet) and floorboards that seem to have more wear & tear than the boards around it. Closely examine any furniture that seems loose or rickety as well as all matresses and boxsprings. Check the heels of any shoe that could have a hollowed out heel. Jimmy/break open any box or container with a lock on it.
And rip apart anything that smells either like the ‘tobacco’ you found or worse… that smells like fresh machine oil/ WD-40.
(because drug dealers don’t like to get ripped off)
Are you wooshing us? If not, you found a blunt.
Better yet, just smash everything in the room with a sledgehammer. Can’t be too careful, you know.
A triple beam balance in my room meant I was mixing up a small batch of mercury fulminate for some recreational noisemaking.
Of course, these days that makes for a quick trip to the Guantanamo vacation paradise.
One way to find out if it has been used for drugs is a wipe test.
Hmmm… do nothing & risk losing my house via Drug forfeiture laws.
Or smash flat the stuff of the drug-dealer who is putting my home at risk with a 16-lb sledge.
Decisions, decisions…
Whatever you do, be sure not to engage the human being living in your house.
The disassembled cigar maybe due to the leaves being used to wrap something like salvia divinorum, which is currently legal to use, but it does leave the person tripping. It’s a feel good drug, that can be purchased in a natural health store. Expect the this to become illegal in the future. Tobacco may be used with other add ins besides salvia divinorum.
I’d say “lemon skunk.” In any case, yeah, the odds are that it’s a blunt (cigar with some marijuana in it).
Count, a thorough inspection of the room is in order, but there’s no need to encourage Can Handle the Truth to be paranoid about it.
Any sums of cash greater than 100K? Caches of cheap cellphones? Snarling pitbulls? Oddly smelling tropical fruits?
These may be the warning signs of an unwholesome hobby. Best to schedule a sitdown with Junior.
There is a little bit of space between doing nothing and tearing the room apart. And it sure is easy to say “He ain’t your son anymore, you gotta think of him as a drug dealer threatening your family!”.
Quite honestly your descriptions sound very un-pot-like to me. Combining some of the more “innocent” suggestions here, any chance he was home-making an exploding cigar? Totally bad idea as well, but…
I’ve known some BIG-time dealers–for a time I bought from an informant who nailed the leader of the DEA’s most wanted Mexico-to-Arizona cartel–and some small-time ones, and I’ve never met a single one who uses a balance.
Could be super-low-grade weed, especially if you’re close to Mexico. The cheapest and nastiest stuff is brown and looks closer to tobacco than most weed does. But weed doesn’t really look like tobacco at all.
Was the cylindrical part actually in a cigar wrapper, or was it just packed tightly into a cylinder of material? 'Cause a blunt is weed in a cigar wrapper.
I know how drug-paranoid some people can be, and I don’t know your son. But simply dabbling in marijuana use as a teenager doesn’t necessarily point to all things evil. It is a fairly benign recreational drug.
I stopped using it a looooong time ago. My parents once found some hash in my personal belongings when I was about 18. They asked what it was; I told them. Then they performed the remarkable act of returning it to me and voicing their opinion. Because of this very measured response I gained a lot of respect for my parents and felt like I had their complete trust to proceed with my life how I felt fit.
My life turned out quite fine. So, don’t fly off the handle is what I’m suggesting.
Oh, I would have a measured response as well. Unfortunately that measured response would have to include confiscation. I can’t allow pot in my house.
It would also involve talking to my kids, which I advocated above.
I agree with Leaffan. This kid doesn’t sound like a dealer: he uses the wrong equipment, and if what you found is even weed, it sounds like $15 worth at most. No dealer keeps that little supply around.
Thanks, stolch…I was beginning to wonder if I was the only one who thought this…
But then I realized…from the tone of the OP, we don’t know that there is a human being living in his house.
He only mentions some suspicious lab equipment, some suspicious but unsmelly tobacco, a suspicious bill of 100 units of Afghanic money, a suspicious cylindrical shape of something desiccated…
But so far, no mention of any teenagers or other human beings…
And now to be serious:
Mr. Can Handle the Truth----
Please try to live up to your name.
Your kid needs you.
Now.
I’d call it dogshit and pine needles. Or maybe that’s just the smoke.
Now if you had reported that the room smelled like a skunk, that’d be a different story. It sounds llike you caught the boy in the early stages of some experimenting with tobacco and or pot. You need to have a casual discussion with him; that boys his age start to try this stuff and you will be aware if there are any signs/smells/etc. from him or his friends. Then ask him about the scale.
Be prepared for the “why are you going through my stuff?” defense. Don’t mention the cigar yet. See where you get, and if he denies any of it then you can proceed to mention finding the cigar too.
Don’t be preachy and ask questions like you’re naive and really don’t understand this stuff. That way he’ll be more willing to open up with you then if you start out aggressive and confrontational.
The kids I knew in college who sold pot used a balance. I guess this is a good sign, then (he’s behaving more like a collegian then somebody wanted by the DEA).
How does unsmoked weed smell? I’m tempted to say sweet, crystally goodness, but then it’d sound like I actually like the smell. I’d say it’s definitely pungent, although I’m at a loss to give more precise descriptions.