State House Drug Inquiry Kept Under Wraps

UPDATE: The marijuana that looks like dog turds displayed with the story is not the marijuana that was actually found in the State House. Only a copy of a picture of the original marijuana was found and it wasn't suitable for newsprint.




There is an unbelievable follow-up to the Alabama State House Drug Dealer story that broke near the end of the legislative session in today's Montgomery Advertiser. I can't quite get my head around all of it.

Here's the skinny. A janitor placed a backpack with two pounds of marijuana inside former legislator Bobby Humphreys office in 2006. Humphreys found the backpack, opened it and discovered that it contained 2 pounds of pot, baggies and scales. He called security. Security looked at video tapes of people entering the State House, matched the bag to a janitor named Lorenza Hooks, who admitted the bag was his....but not the weed. Yeah right....I suppose we have evil, pot smoking, State House elves running loose in Montgomery, that plant marijuana in the backpacks of unsuspecting janitors

Hooks was never charged for the pot and continued as a State House employee for two more years until he was suspended after being named as a suspect in a shooting. Quality staff that guy!

But wait...there's more. After Hooks was named by the shooting victim as the guy who shot him a grand jury returned a 'no bill' on the case and turned him loose. Only then did the legislative council decide to fire him. The House legislative council did not know about the drugs until that meeting in April 2009. Hooks personnel file did not contain anything about the drugs and did not contain the pictures from the security camera even though House Security, administrative asst. to the clerk Don Ladner and Clerk Greg Pappas were all notified the day the drugs were found.

When Hooks was finally suspended after the shooting he was allowed to use his leave time to continue on the House payroll and to receive health benefits. According to a note in Hooks' personnel file, he had 336 sick leave hours and 229 annual leave hours. Three unidentified House employees also donated 160 hours of leave time to Hooks, which ultimately kept him on the House payroll until Dec. 1, 2008.

Wonder who those three House employees were?

You have to go and read the rest of this story.

My guess? Mr. Hooks was selling to some very high ranking officials inside the Alabama State House. People whose names we would all recognize. They covered for him. How else could this guy can haul two pounds of marijuana into the state house, get nailed but never charged for it? If it were anyone else they would have been charged with possession with intent to distribute and trafficking. How many young black men have been arrested, prosecuted and convicted of much lesser infractions involving marijuana in Montgomery?

I say we call all representatives and senators into a special session where they will be drug tested using a hair test, because urine tests for drugs are much too easy to manipulate. That will give us a baseline on who smokes pot, snorts coke, smokes meth or uses opiate based drugs. Then they can be charged, prosecuted and imprisoned like the 'common riff raff' that they rule from Goat Hill.

Oh....the weed in that picture up top looks like total bunk schwag. A commenter over on REDDIT asked "Ugh, is that dog shit in those baggies?" I wouldn't even smoke it. "It's Labrador man" ~Tommy Chong~ You'd think with that 62% pay increase the members of the House and Senate could afford the good stuff. Somebody needs to be prosecuted for making our state look worse than usual with that terrible representation of Alabama weed.


And here's another interesting tidbit...The day after Alvin Holmes took the mic on the State House floor and gave the low down on what was going on Speaker Seth Hammett (who is mentioned in the full story) announced he would not seek re-election. Coincidence?

I hope all of you who read this will commence writing LTE's at once. And please take a moment to vote this up on Reddit and DIGG