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Why Fiona Apple, Armie Hammer and Other Stars Are Gettin' Busted for Pot in Same Texas Town! (September 21, 2012) |
You speak of
Sierra Blanca, a tiny town, as you put it, which sits about 85 miles east of El Paso. The town also has witnessed the arrests of stars ranging from Fiona Apple and Armie Hammer to Snoop Dogg, Willie Nelson and Paul Wall.
Sierra Blanca, in Hudspeth County, Texas, is a hub for two things: Drug trafficking and celebrity trafficking. The town is about 20 miles from the Mexican border, which is why there's a U.S. Customs and Border Protection checkpoint sitting there. That checkpoint busts myriad would-be mules every month, largely with the help of drug-sniffing dogs.
That checkpoint also happens to sit on I-10, an interstate highway that runs from Los Angeles to Florida. Why is that important? Because film crews often travel through there to shoot. And musicians often bring their tours through the Southwest on that very highway. They also, oftentimes, bring their stash. And arrests are bound to follow.
"Little Miss Fiona, last night her bus rolls in here, and the [drug-sniffing] dog hits the smell of pot from outside of the bus," says Rusty Fleming, public information officer for the Hudspeth County Sheriff's Office. "We searched the bus and found it in a sealed glass container inside of a backpack way in the back of the bus. That's a pretty sensitive dog."
