Elderly couple pulled over after their Buckeye car decal is mistaken for a marijuana leaf

By Graham Watson



Apparently Ohio State – and college football in general – isn’t very popular in the state of Tennessee.

At least not with the police.

Bonnie Jonas-Boggioni, 65, and her husband were driving home to Plano, Texas from Columbus after attending her mother-in-law’s funeral when a pair of black police SUV’s stopped the couple a few miles outside of Memphis.

“Knowing I wasn’t speeding, I couldn’t imagine why,” Jonas-Boggioni told the Columbus Dispatch. “They were very serious. They had the body armor and the guns.”

On the back of Jonas-Boggioni’s car was a Buckeye leaf decal, similar to the one players’ have on their helmets, and cops mistakenly thought it was marijuana leaf.

Yes, really.

“What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?” one of the cops asked Jonas-Boggioni.

After trying to explain that the sticker was not a marijuana leaf and that she and her husband were not trafficking drugs cross-country, the police advised Jonas-Boggioni to remove the sticker as to not cause any more confusion.

You know, just in case there were any other moronic drug cops out there that didn’t actually know what a marijuana leaf looked like.

From the Columbus-Dispatch:

[Jonas-Boggioni] was too rattled to notice what police department the officers represented. But she suspects that a joint drug-interdiction effort was under way because they had passed several law-enforcement vehicles from different agencies.

Neither the Tennessee Highway Patrol nor the Shelby County sheriff’s office in Memphis had information about the traffic stop. A marijuana sticker would not be a sufficient reason to stop a car, said a spokeswoman for the West Tennessee Drug Task Force.

Regardless, Tennessee police apparently aren't botany experts. If they were, they’d know a marijuana leaf has seven leaflets (see above picture) and a narrow shape as compared to the Buckeye leaf, which is fat and has five leaflets.

At least that’s what it says on the Internet. I have no firsthand knowledge of this.

As for Jonas-Boggioni, she acknowledged the cop’s wishes, but got back in her car without removing the sticker.

“I didn’t take it off,” Jonas-Boggioni told the paper. “This little old lady is no drug dealer.”

Just an avid Ohio State fan.