Southwest Airlines Flight Makes Emergency Landing After Passenger Smokes A Joint

A Southwest Airlines flight had to make an emergency landing after a passenger smoked a joint in the bathroom, setting off the smoke alarms, KCAL-TV is reporting.

Thirty-two passengers were on board Flight 1250 from San Francisco to L.A., and they found themselves inconvenienced, to put it mildly, after a passenger snuck off to a bathroom to light up. According to passenger Jonathan Burkes, the unidentified passenger must have been in a big hurry to commune with Bob Marley.

“It looked like that someone needed to smoke a joint on a plane, and he went into the bathroom, smoked his blunt, and set off the fire alarm.”

Actually, it’s not clear, as of this writing, how the passenger was getting his blaze on, whether via a joint, as reported by KCAL, or via a blunt (a cigar or cigarillo with the inner tobacco removed and replaced with marijuana), or some other way.

Nevertheless, smoking anything in an airplane bathroom, tobacco, or marijuana, or anything else, is very much against the law. And fliers have heard from every pre-takeoff speech on every flight they’ve ever taken, disabling, or attempting to disable, the smoke detector in the plane’s bathroom is equally (or perhaps even more) illegal.

.@SouthwestAir flight makes emergency landing because passenger was allegedly smoking pot https://t.co/uuBpzUk3IJ

— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 31, 2018

Once the smoke alarm went off, the pilot had to make an emergency landing. The passengers were told that it was due to a “mechanical failure,” but if you’ve ever been around a pot smoker, you can pick up pretty quickly on the fact that they’ve been lighting up. The plane landed at San Jose Mineta International Airport, about 50 miles south of San Francisco, and the passengers were put on other flights to their destinations. The alleged smoker was turned over to law enforcement.

As it turns out, according to the San Jose Mercury-News, authorities in the California city must have been in a mellow mood, because the smoker wasn’t arrested, detained, or charged with any crimes.

In case you were wondering, you can take pot on some domestic flights — sort of (and the Inquisitr strongly advises against trying). Officially, marijuana is illegal under federal law, so it’s contraband and TSA agents would be within their rights to confiscate it and call the cops.

Unofficially, according to High Times, TSA agents will generally look the other way if you’re flying from a place where pot is legal to another place where pot is legal – so on a flight from San Francisco to L.A., that checks all the boxes, so to speak. Your odds may not be so good if you’re flying, say, Oklahoma City to New Orleans (Oklahoma and Louisiana having some of the harshest marijuana laws in the country).