Airport cannabis amnesty boxes are not used – here’s why

After decriminalizing marijuana in Chicago, authorities wanted to remind people that while marijuana might be legal in their state, it might not be in others, let alone on flights. So the Chicago Police Department added some bright green amnesty boxes to two of their major airports, where people could dump their weed and leave the state without facing any consequences. The catch? Nobody uses them.

“The boxes placed at the end of each TSA checkpoint in both O’Hare and Midway were in place when the new cannabis law went into effect on January 1, 2020. The crates allow travelers to safely dispose of cannabis and cannabis products prior to travel, as they are still illegal under federal law,” Chicago Police Department spokeswoman Maggie Huynh told USA Today back in 2020.

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Photo by Erik Odiin via Unsplash

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The amnesty boxes are located at the city’s two main airports, in places where traffic should be heavy. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, only 34 collections have been made from these boxes as of January 2020. This information was gathered through Chicago Police Department logs, which go into even more detail on how useless these boxes are.

Only half of the logs show cannabis or something leafy that could be mistaken for cannabis being placed in these boxes. The other half is made up of plastic bags and other types of trash, showing that people are confusing these crates with regular trash cans.

I’ve never seen anything like it. At O’Hare International Airport, Chicago. Recreational cannabis only became legal here on Wednesday. pic.twitter.com/zVh0ATuaVv

— Kevin Davis (@KevDavis) January 3, 2020

Although this was clearly done with good intentions and a desire to avoid trouble for people who grazed in the wrong place, airports have not made any cannabis-related arrests. The only weed-related altercation that took place after the addition of the amnesty boxes was a case where someone managed to steal some weed before the police could retrieve it. The person escaped, but the amnesty boxes are now bolted to the floor.

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For now, it seems that amnesty boxes don’t serve much of a purpose other than holding junk. Now to the important question: what happens to this weed?