Or you might end up doing something very stupid. Like these people did.
• In 2009 Jonathan James Sweat, 18, drove his SUV through the front window of the state attorney’s office in Gainesville, Florida. When the police arrived, he told them they couldn’t arrest him on DUI charges because he hadn’t been drinking—he’d been smoking pot. He was arrested.
• In 2008 an 18-year-old Seattle woman made an ATM deposit into her bank account. But she put the wrong envelope into the machine—instead of one filled with money, she accidentally “deposited” one that was full of methamphetamine. A bank employee found the meth the next morning. The woman was arrested.
• A 40-year-old Silverdale, Washington, man was pulled over for erratic driving in 2008. When he handed the officer his wallet, some white powder fell out of it. The man told the officer it was cocaine, but it was okay because he only used it when he was with prostitutes, and he’d been with one that evening. He was arrested.
• Police raided the house of a suspected drug dealer in Joliet, Illinois, in 2009 and found three marijuana plants in his back yard. The man’s explanation: The plants were for his dog, who was learning to sniff out marijuana for law-enforcement officers. He was arrested. (The dog was not.)
• A man flagged down a police car on a Philadelphia street late one night in 2009 and told the officers that he’d lost his car…while he was trying to buy drugs. To compound the problem, his six-year-old stepson was in the car. The boy was found two hours later and taken to his mother. And though the man scored points for helping the police find his son, he was arrested.
• A police officer in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, was in a convenience store when he noticed something odd about 29-year-old Cesar Lopez. What caught his eye? Lopez had a baseball cap in his hand, and a small plastic bag of marijuana stuck to his forehead. He was arrested.
A strand of spider silk the width of a pencil could stop a Boeing 747 airplane in flight.