Even preschool teachers unwind with a round of drinks now and then. But in professional kitchens, where the hours are long, the pace intense and the goal is to deliver pleasure, the need to blow off steam has long involved substances that are mind-altering and, often enough, illegal.

“Everybody smokes dope after work,” said Anthony Bourdain, the author and chef who made his name chronicling drugs and debauchery in professional kitchens. “People you would never imagine.”

So while it should not come as a surprise that some chefs get high, it’s less often noted that drug use in the kitchen can change the experience in the dining room.

In the 1980s, cocaine helped fuel the frenetic open kitchens and boisterous dining rooms that were the incubators of celebrity chef culture. Today, a small but influential band of cooks says both their chin-dripping, carbohydrate-heavy food and the accessible, feel-good mood in their dining rooms are influenced by the kind of herb that can get people arrested.

Call it haute stoner cuisine.

“There has been an entire strata of restaurants created by chefs to feed other chefs,” Mr. Bourdain said. “These are restaurants created specially for the tastes of the slightly stoned, slightly drunk chef after work.”

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Washington drug agents have illegally seized signed petitions for marijuana legalization, according to organizers of ballot initiative I-1068.

Marijuana advocacy group Sensible Washington says it has learned that a dozen signed copies of the marijuana legalization initiative for Washington State of which it is the sponsor, were seized last week by the federally-funded WestNET drug task force.

Advocates say that the drug agents who seized the petitions are interfering with a constitutionally-protected legislative procedure.

“Our estimate is that 2009 signatures are sitting in WestNET’s offices in Port Orchard, apparently seized as ‘evidence’ during a series of raids against the North End Club 420 in Tacoma,” said Sensible Washington campaign director and initiative co-author Philip Dawdy.

“We have made repeated calls to WestNET’s office, but have yet to receive any assurance that the task force’s personnel have secured the signed petitions and that they plan to promptly return them to Sensible Washington,” Dawdy said.

“It proves how insane marijuana prohibition has gotten, that law enforcement would seized signed copies of I-1068 as ‘evidence’ in a drug raid,” Dawdy said.

“The only thing they are evidence of is democracy in action,” Dawdy said. “It is not a crime or evidence of a crime for citizens to sign a statewide initiative.”

Sensible Washington is calling upon WestNET to immediately return the seized petitions to its offices at 3161 Elliott Avenue, Suite 340, Seattle, WA 98121, or to make other arrangements for the immediate delivery to Sensible Washington.

Their ATM screens are now featuring anti-marijuana messages

After a years-long battle to avoid extradition, marijuana activist and entrepreneur Marc Emery of Vancouver, B.C., the self-proclaimed “Prince of Pot,” is going to the United States. It’s not a trip that Emery wanted to take.

Emery, 52, was driven from a Vancouver jail to the Washington State border and was handed over to U.S. authorities, according to his wife, Jodie, reports The Canadian Press.

Jodie said her husband will be held in a detention center south of Seattle until appearing before a judge to plead guilty of selling millions of marijuana seeds to American customers, and begin his plea-bargained sentence of five years in a U.S. federal prison.

“My husband committed a crime punishable by only a $200 fine in Canda, yet this Conservative government is sending him to serve up to 25 years in U.S. jail,” Jodie Emery said Thursday morning.

His attorney, Richard Troberman, said Emery will plead guilty to one county of conspiracy to manufacture marijuana in exchange for the agreed-upon five-year sentence.

Emery appeared in U.S. District Court and agreed to remain in custody pending his 2 p.m. plea hearing on Monday, May 24.

A handful of protesters gathered outside the Seattle courthouse and remarked upon the irony of seeing Emery prosecuted in a city with a permissive attitude about marijuana.

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Medical marijuana is legal under the Colorado Constitution, but newly passed regulations allow cities to ban the dispensaries that sell it. Now cannabis advocates are planning lawsuits if cities choose to ban the shops, reports Mireya Garcia of KRDO.

“They are missing the most important part of this — the patients,” said Michael Stetler, a dispensary owner in Pueblo.

The Colorado Springs Medical Cannabis Council works with local communities in Southern Colorado that have moratoriums in place. CSMCC officials said the longer communities take to figure out how to regulate dispensaries, the worse patients will suffer.

“Cities like Fountain and Manitou no longer have [public transportation] systems that run to those venues anymore,” said Tanya Garduno, president of CSMCC. “Patients that were able to come to Colorado Springs are no longer able to do that.”

If Southern Colorado communities extend moratoriums, the CSMCC foresees legal action taken as early as July.

“Once a municipality tries to actually implement moratoriums, that is when you will see those things happen,” Garduno said.

Maybe there should be an IQ test for police officers. What was first thought to be one of the largest marijuana seizures in the Corpus Christi Police Department’s history turned into an embarrassing incident for the cops, as the clueless officers spent a busy and exciting evening harvesting hundreds of harmless weeds from a city park.

The revealing incident began when a teenager riding his bike through Waldron Park in Flour Bluff discovered what he thought were pot plants growing there about 8 p.m Thursday, reports Bart Bedsole of KRIStv.com.

The would-be junior narc wasted no time in excitedly reporting his “find.”

Police then self-importantly hauled away 300 to 400 medium-sized plants that they, too, believed were marijuana.

Exhausted officers only stopped collecting the harmless plants because it got too dark to work; they planned to return bright and early in the morning to look around for more marijuana.

Trouble is, after spending more than an hour laboriously removing and tagging hundreds of plants, and then hauling it all to the police department downtown, testing revealed that none of it was marijuana at all.

“This is exactly the caliber of plice work that is done in Corpus Christi, Texas,” wrote Derrick Sillers, one commenter on the original news story. “The residents of Corpus [Christi] and Nueces County should seriously be concerned with how their tax dollars are spent. This is the same police department that serves, protects and investigates you.”

Embarrassed officers haven’t given any word yet on what the plants actually were.

Neither did they explain how their big “drug haul” will be disposed of, now that they’ve spent untold hours and plenty of taxpayer money clearing weeds of the the city park.