New York Mom Expecting Shipment Of Toys In The Mail, Gets Seven Pounds Of Marijuana Instead

A New York woman says she was expecting a shipment of toys a few days after Christmas; instead, she got seven pounds of marijuana.

As WITI (Milwaukee) reports, Pamela Marks of upstate New York writes reviews of toys and children’s clothes on her website. Over the years, she’s received an estimated 3,500 toys in the mail from various manufacturers and distributors.

On December 29th, Marks was expecting yet another shipment of toys or clothes, so when she got a box with a California return address, she thought she’d be getting more toys to review.

“We opened it up, and I thought it was going to be toys. I was able to smell it. I knew something was up right away.”

It wasn’t toys. It was seven pounds of marijuana.

“I thought it was wrapped in this green foam, and when I cut it, I smelled it. I thought, ‘Hmmm, very big surprise.’ It was not toys. I’m sure someone out there has the toys though.”

Marks appears to have a sense of humor about the mix-up.

“We’re a family-friendly site, That’s what we always tell everyone because we don’t want anything too funky.”

The package bore the return address of Jakk’s Pacific, a Santa Monica, California-based toy distributor. In a statement made available via KABC-TV (Los Angeles), Jakk’s promised to get to the bottom of the matter.

“The Company is taking this very seriously, and we are conducting an investigation to determine the facts behind this matter.”

It bears noting that just because the box of marijuana Marks received bore a return address from Jakk’s Pacific doesn’t necessarily mean that the pot came from there. The scofflaw who sent it could very well have made it look like it came from the toy manufacturer to make it harder to track it back to him or her.

As previously reported by the Inquisitr, now that marijuana is legal in some states but not others, scofflaws are using the postal service, and private delivery carriers, to send pot through the mail. In fact, the mail seems to be the preferred method of shipping pot, because as an extension of the government, employees cannot search packages without a warrant.

And when the Post Office does identify a package suspected of containing pot, it may just sit in an unlocked room for weeks or even months. Lacking clear policies for how to handle suspected pot, postmasters in at least two cities were found to have stored the illegal cargo in their offices. In one case, the door was unlocked; in another, the lock had been broken.

That lack of oversight has almost certainly led to some postal employees stealing pot from their workplaces. According to a U.S. News and World Report analysis of a USPS report on the problem, it’s almost a sure thing that postal workers have stolen at least some of that pot that sat around unguarded. However, that’s proven impossible to confirm, since the original USPS report is so heavily redacted.

However, it’s no secret that some postal workers have stolen pot from their workplaces and have paid the price for it. In Illinois, for example, two workers were charged with stealing 16 packages suspected of containing pot. Similarly, in Washington, D.C., three postal workers were accused of taking bribes to ensure that packages containing marijuana would be delivered.

Back in New York, Marks turned the seven pounds of pot she inadvertently received to Columbia County Sheriff’s Department. Meanwhile, she says she hopes this turn of events teaches her children a lesson.

“As a parent, if you get a product or anything delivered to you and you know something’s not right, call the authorities and have them come check it out because you just never know.”

[Featured Image by Maxim Minaev/Shutterstock]