Headline writers had a field day this week after two Dutchmen were jailed for trying to smuggle £5 million worth of cannabis into Britain in piles of cheese.
“Dutch drug smugglers up to no gouda!” roared the Daily Mail as it gleefully reported on the story. UK Border Force intercepted Henrik Ruben and Dominic Leemen at Dover Docks as they tried to sneak the cannabis into the UK.
Ruben was jailed for six years and Leemen was jailed for five-and-a-half years at Maidstone Crown Court for conspiring to smuggle drugs this week. “Would you Brie-lieve it?” asked one commenter, while another declared that “Stiltons of the stuff comes across the border every day”, although a third said: “I couldn’t give Edam!”
You might think that was enough excitement for one week for the sub-editors at the Daily Mail, but think again. A funeral in eastern Germany ended on an involuntary high when mourners were accidentally served a cake laced with cannabis at the wake.
“Hashish to ashes!” wrote the Mail in its write-up of the events, referencing the classic David Bowie number. A police investigation revealed an employee accidentally took the wrong cake from the freezer to the funeral.
“You should have seen the faces of the stoners at the other party who got old Betha’s chocolate cake,” mused one reader.
Yet the Mail missed a trick by not reporting on the animals at Blackpool Zoo that will feel a little cosier thanks to equipment seized by police at one of Lancashire’s biggest ever illicit cannabis farms.
Officers confiscated lamps, reflectors, bulbs, transformers, and temperature gauges worth around £5,000 after discovering the operation, and they were donated to the zoo to help in the care of reptiles this winter. The opportunity to include the portmanteau “mariguana” and superimpose a joint on a happy looking iguana would surely have been too great to resist.
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