High on Their Own Supply: How Burning 20 Tons of Weed Hotboxed an Entire Town

This Is Not a Stoner Movie (It’s Real Life 2025)

Picture this: a quiet town in Turkey’s Diyarbakır province, minding its own business on a spring day, when poof – a gigantic cloud of marijuana smoke engulfs the streets. This isn’t a scene from a Cheech & Chong comedy; it actually happened in April 2025. The town of Lice (pronounced lee-jay, not the creepy crawly kind) saw authorities ignite a mountain of weed – over 20 tons of the stuff – in a public bonfire as part of a drug bust disposal. The result? The 25,000 residents got an unintended contact high that lingered for nearly a week. 🌿🔥 Yes, the whole town was involuntarily stoned courtesy of law enforcement. You can’t make this up.

Let’s set the scene: police pile up tens of thousands of kilos of confiscated cannabis in the town center and strike a match. Perhaps they expected a quick burn and a pat on the back. Instead, a thick skunky haze rolled through the streets like an apocalyptic fog bank – except this fog made people giggle at stop signs and crave Doritos. Within hours, villagers were shutting their windows tight and stuffing towels under the doors. For five days, going outside meant risking dizziness, random laughter fits, and the munchies (plus less-funny symptoms like nausea and mild hallucinations). Grandma couldn’t hang laundry without getting lightheaded. The local cats were probably seeing flying mice. This was a government operation, by the way – one that literally hotboxed an entire town. Cue the facepalm. 🤦

The Unplanned Pot Party

Who needs a music festival when your town square becomes a giant bong? Social media quickly got whiff of Lice’s plight (and smell). Memes popped up about “Turkey’s Highest Town” and jokes that the mayor should install nacho stands on every corner. Residents, for their part, were not amused – imagine getting stoned against your will on your way to buy milk. One minute you’re heading to the market, the next you’re wondering why the clouds are trailing rainbows. Authorities warned folks to stay indoors, essentially admitting, “Our bad, we turned the air into a THC soup.”

It’s worth noting this wasn’t some tiny bonfire; it was a massive burn of contraband valued at about $260 million USD. That’s right, the cops literally burned a fortune in weed and ended up fumigating the populace with premium secondhand smoke. In their zeal to snuff out drugs, they created the world’s worst (or wildest) block party. Locals described the atmosphere as “unreal” – people felt woozy just breathing in their own living rooms. Some joked that the town-wide high did more to chill out the community than any town meeting ever could. Silver lining: crime probably took a hiatus because, well, who has the energy to rob a bank when you’ve been inadvertently blitzed by lunchtime?

So, how do you know your town has been accidentally hotboxed? A few telltale signs:

• Cloudy with a Chance of Cheetos: The sky has a greenish tint and convenience stores are mysteriously sold out of chips and ice cream.
• Public Giggle Fits: City council meetings are oddly cheerful and nobody remembers what the agenda was.
• Time Warp Traffic: Drivers stopping at green lights because they got lost in thought listening to the radio. (Hey, it happens.)
• Zen Zone: Even the local grumpy grandpa is smiling at absolutely nothing, basking on a bench like it’s Woodstock ’69.
• Emergency Services, Chilled: The fire department reports zero fires – except for the giant one they’re responsible for – and the police chief’s statement comes with an apology… and a slight chuckle.

When the War on Drugs Goes Up in Smoke

Beyond the humor (and trust us, this story is the very definition of you gotta laugh or you’ll cry), there’s a whiff of social critique here stronger than the smell of singed cannabis. The whole fiasco in Lice is a cartoonish example of the war on drugs backfiring – literally backfiring into people’s lungs. In an era when parts of the world are legalizing or at least decriminalizing marijuana, here we have officials so stuck on the “destroy contraband” script that they didn’t stop to think: Maybe don’t burn a gazillion pounds of pot in the middle of town? 🤷‍♂️ It’s a spectacular failure of common sense.

Residents became collateral damage in the battle against a plant. You have to appreciate the irony: to protect people from the evil of drugs, the powers-that-be accidentally dosed an entire town with it. If there were an Olympics for unintended consequences, this would take gold (with a little leaf emblem engraved on the medal). It’s the kind of story that makes you question who writes these rules. Did no one in the meeting raise a hand and say, “Uh, folks, maybe we should cart this 20-ton bonfire outside city limits… upwind?”

Skepticism is warranted when authorities promise they know what they’re doing. Sometimes, the emperor has no clothes – or in this case, the police have no gas masks. Perhaps it’s a lesson in humility: Mother Nature (and basic chemistry) doesn’t care about your intentions. Smoke goes where it pleases, borders be damned. And in 2025, a year already brimming with odd headlines, an entire town getting an unasked-for THC infusion fits right in with the viral weirdness we’ve come to expect.

A Skunky Sign of the Times

If there’s one takeaway from “Operation Green Cloud” (as the internet has dubbed it), it’s that we truly live in absurd times. When the news reads like a parody article, and real-life events could be plots of a South Park episode, you know society is offbeat enough to share and share alike. Stories like this spread fast because they hit that sweet spot of shock, humor, and a hint of “can you believe this?!”. It’s the kind of tale you send your friend at 2 AM: “Dude, read this, LOL.”

And share we should. Not just because it’s hilariously tragic, but because it sparks conversation about how we handle our problems (and how sometimes our solutions become bigger problems). In a world trying to stay sane, maybe a dose of laughing at the insanity is the real prescription we need. Consider it communal therapy via viral story – one puff of absurdity at a time.

In the end, the people of Lice came down from their forced high, the haze lifted, and life went back to normal (with a persistent smell in the drapes). But the legend of the town that got high on its own supply will live on, an uncanny meme of 2025. So next time someone says, “This meeting could have been an email,” remember: this bonfire could have been a memo – and a whole lot of folks could have avoided a very strange week.

Stay skeptical, stay observant, and try not to burn down the village to save it… or at least, do it downwind. 😉 In the grand theatre of modern life, reality is often stranger (and funnier) than fiction. And that’s why we can’t stop watching.