First Rule of Growing Pot... Don't call the cops

Marijuana: Always ready to live up to its cliche.

Let's take the following scenario, from Santa Fe. Dude chokes his wife, she calls the cops.

She calls the cops, apparently forgetting that her home features a nicely organized pot-growing operation, complete with a notebook documenting production.

The guy gets taken down to the station house. He is released shortly after, police tell the Galveston County Daily News, because "the reporting officer apparently forgot to sign the paperwork."

Don't come down too hard on the officer, though. He really needed some Funyuns like, right away, man. And then he got distracted by all the spooky shit on the dollar bill.

We talked to the Santa Fe police (The music while on hold: Brad Paisley's "Waiting on a Woman").

Lt. Philip Meadows says the pot-growing empire wasn't all that huge -- just eight plants and some artificial lights -- but it was enough to catch the attention of the officers answering the call from the guy's live-in girlfriend who said she'd been attacked.

The paperwork mistake was just an oversight, he says (trustingly), and the cops will re-arrest the 29-year-old guy as soon as the warrants come back from the judge's office.

The man will face a Class B misdemeanor charge of marijuana possession, and a felony family-violence charge.

His bad luck: He a) attempted to choke his live-in girlfriend; and b) did it after September 1.

Without the choke, he'd only be facing a misdemeanor charge, Meadows says. And even a choke did not become a felony until a new law took effect last month.

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