Being on the news would suck for sure and I'm sure doing time is even worse.
I've never been busted for anything, but I did have a close call about 13 years ago. My buddy and I were out drinking all day and selling bud and shrooms and on our way back from Makena Beach we had all our empties from the day in the back of the car, which were an empty 24 pack of beer, two empty six packs of beer, an empty gallon of Rossi wine. We also had about 4 bags of weed and 7 bags of shrooms left over and as we were passing Hookipa Beach Park, my car wouldn't shift into third gear so I decided to pull over and let the car that had been following me for 15 minutes or so pass. The car started pulling over with me and at first I thought is was somebody I pissed off from driving too slow and thought maybe they were feeling a little scrappy. That thought soon vanished as the blue lights turned on on the car behind me. My buddy grabbed his backpack with all the baggies in it on the ready to bag out into the cane fields we were parked next to. So I'm sitting in the driver's seat and feeling like I'm about to have a heart attack and the cop walks up to my window and say, "rikdabrick?" And I looked at him and said, "Jimmy?" He was a cop I knew from when I was bouncing at a nightclub. He continued and said, "You know your registrations expired?" And I replied as normally as I possibly could, "Yeah I know, I was totally going to take care of that." And he said, "You know your safety check is expired?" And I said, "Yeah, I was going to take care of that too" And he said, "You know your car is smoking" I said, "Really? Yeah, I couldn't get it to shift into third gear" Then after a moment I said, "So how's your night going?" while still feeling like having a heart attack, and he said, "Boring as you can see. Get that stuff taking care of and have a good night", and he drove off. My buddy and I looked at each other in total disbelief and then just started laughing and of course went over every detail a few times on the rest of the way home. That was an intense few minutes that could have severely altered the course of my life had it been a cop I didn't know. Thank God for his grace on my stupidity.
On a side note, I don't want anybody to think I condone drunk driving. I was a lot younger and dumber in those days, but that's no excuse, drunk driving is just stupid.
And I'm right with you Surfd on saying I was a different person back then too.