Last night, I took a break from Occupy coverage to see the saddest movie ever, How to Die in Oregon, at the Whitsell Auditorium in the Portland Art Museum. The movie follows an upbeat, awesome 54-year-old Portland mom with liver cancer as she chooses to end her life under Oregon’s Death With Dignity law. At the end of the screening, the whole crowd is crying, rapt and sniffling as the director gets onstage for a Q&A. The room is somber and quiet. Then, the couple next to my boyfriend and me get up to leave and drop their pipe, spilling fragments of marijuana on the floor. They somehow don’t notice and quickly head for the exit, leaving us to dissolve into completely inappropriate laughter that draws stares.
The question, of course, is immediate: What do we do? This is a very particular Portland problem. I’ll post what we did in the comments.
We went for Option 4: Run out and tell them! One of them came slinking back in, discreetly pocketed the pipe, and departed.
One time I found a bag of weed and a pipe in the ashtray of a u-haul. I went with option 1.
I found a backpack at first thursday this summer with a freshly loaded bowl, baby joint, and a starbucks gift card! I too went with option one.
The amount of weed that would have been inside that pipe and the pipe itself are not explicitly illegal; I would have just picked it up and taken it to them. I also hold doors for old women and mothers.
My partner and I were once eating a Valentine’s Day dinner at a Very Fancy Restaurant in town. She left to use the bathroom and found a bag in the back hallway, on the floor. We chose option 1. Happy Valentine’s Day to us!
Pick it up and give it to them. Sheesh.
Ha! I would also run after them and ask them to come back. There is something about this response that feels very Portland. I’m all rule following and stuff, but if someone wants to bring their pot to a moving documentary, I’ll want to make sure they don’t lose it. That would be sad and un-neighborly.
If it’s fragments, I see no reason to even keep them. I’m definitely not going to scrape them up off the sticky floor. Come on, are you that hard up, bro?? I don’t need someone’s pipe and losing a pipe sucks, so I would definitely let them know.
Most of the comments seem to be of the found-baggie variety, which is a different story, especially if you have no way of knowing where it came from. Score!
If you’re tempted to pick up the crumbs that come tumbling out of someone else’s dope pipe, my advice is:
7) Get a job.
God help me, I agree with Blabby. That’s like twice in the past month. I feel kind of faint. Pass me some medical marijuana.
I would have picked up the pipe and ripped it in the theater then looked for the couple outside and told them ‘thanks’ cuz I had smoked their ganj and left their pipe on the floor if they still wanted it.