Stopped by police with a blunt in hand

Thought I'd share with you guys a story that happened to me a couple weeks ago, and that thanks to everything I've learnt whilst in the community, turned out ok for me.

So me and a couple friends have just finished college classes for the day and are thinking about places to smoke up. I'm carrying around just over half an oz in my bag, and it's all bagged up separately as some of my mates wanted to link from a really good hook up I had. Naturally I'm feeling super cautious, as around here if you get caught with it like that, they will charge you. So we decide to go to a little public garden we've been to tons of times before without problem. We get there and start rolling up a huge blunt when suddenly this absolute fiend clocks what we're up to and strolls on over. Eventually we decide to give him a tiny spliff just to shut him up and get him to leave as he's being really suspicious by this point. Unfortunately it's too late and just as this guy goes to walk off two officers walk into the garden. Apparently they'd been watching us from round the corner the whole time the guy was there.

So I'm sitting there with a fully rolled blunt in my hand, half an oz in my bag, and I'm absolutely shitting myself. I come up with some bullshit story about rolling my own cigar but things generally weren't looking good. They ask to have a look in my bag.

Suddenly it clicks. I'd never been stopped by police before so was a little shaken but managed to stay calm and polite with them. Every time they asked to look in my bag I said the same thing "I'm not resisting, but I don't consent to a search". They tried to trick me a couple times by saying I was being suspicious by not consenting, and that if they had grounds for suspicion they didn't need my consent but I remembered all the shit I've been told and knew they had nothing. In fact every time they asked me I got more and more confident because I knew that if they were going to search me anyway they already would have. After a couple minutes of talking to them politely and letting the guy smell the blunt (it was fresh out the pack so absolutely reeked of nothing but strawberry), they told me they weren't going to search me and went off.

So remember, even if you've got that shit straight up in your hand, and you think you're done, those magic words can still save you like they did for me. At one point it looked they were gonna nick me because I started panicking and saying I knew my rights. TBH I think it just pissed them off and they were gonna go out of their way to get me but I calmed down and started saying sorry if I offended them In the end I walked off with my dank and smoked that blunt 5 minutes later

 

In the UK that wouldn't be enough, they'd need something to corroborate with that like a roach end on the ground for it to be grounds for a search

No MMJ here

 

Not just that, but if they damage or break any of your property and you consented to a search, they have no obligation to pay for it

I'd packed the blunt down and twisted it off so couldn't see anything there, and opening it up would have counted as a search, which if they were gonna do they would've just searched my bag