Junkie steals 100-year-old morphine, doesn’t get high


There’s nobody quite as determined or stupid as a junkie.

Maybe it’s hard to buy a hit on the streets of Cashmere, Washington, or maybe this particular junkie was short of cash. In any case, someone with a craving for drugs broke into the Cashmere Historic Museum and Pioneer Village and made off with a bottle of morphine pills dating back to World War One.

A doctor interviewed by the Wenatchee World newspaper said that the century-old pills would have long since lost their potency and wouldn’t have any effect at all, good or bad.

The intruder left a trail of destruction in his or her wake, as junkies usually do. Museum officials found a broken fence, a broken door, and a trashed display case. The case was a rare original from a period doctor’s office dating to 1890. Volunteers are now cleaning up the office so they can reopen it to the public.

This isn’t the first time the museum has been broken into. Its historic saloon has been burgled a couple of times by drunks looking for booze. There’s no alcohol in the saloon, and the folks at the Cashmere Historic Museum and Pioneer Village may want to rethink having real medication on display in their doctor’s office, even if it hasn’t been able to get anyone high since Burroughs was in short pants.

[Morphine cure ad c.1900 courtesy Mike Cline via Wikimedia Commons]

Woman makes bomb threat to delay boss’ plane

At some point, most travelers will either come close to missing a flight, or actually miss it and have to wait for the next one. It’s not a fun situation to be in – praying that you make it, or that your flight is delayed just a few minutes so that you can get on it, and then sitting in the airport for hours if you do miss the plane – but it’s certainly not one that justifies faking a bomb threat.

Yet that’s exactly what one woman is accused of doing in order to help out her boss, who was running late to catch his flight from Miami to Honduras.

Officials at the Miami Airport received a call and an email on Wednesday saying there was a bomb on the American Airlines plane. They searched the plane, but found no bomb, and then traced the email to 31-year old Claudia De La Rosa’s computer. She was arrested and is now being held on $7,500 bail.

During questions, the woman said that she had made her boss run late and, worried that he would miss his plane, she decided to call in the bomb threat. She figured the bomb search would delay the plane long enough for her boss to arrive and get on the flight.

A little lesson for the over-achieving assistants out there: no job is worth getting arrested for and calling in a bomb threat is never a good idea. Just let your boss miss his plane.

[via USA Today]