Crack Is Even More Whack When You Steal $50,000 Worth of Lunch Meat to Buy It

Crack sucks, man. I mean, sure, it's fun (not speaking from personal experience), but probably not worth it for all of the trouble those friendly little rocks cause. It makes you do some unwise things, crack. Things that are embarrassing when they appear in the New York Daily News, such as trading $50,000 worth of bologna to get your hands on the stuff.

Larry Ron Bowen, of Mabelvale, Arkansas, had likely fallen on some hard times. The specifics of those hard times reportedly included a career of driving around large quantities of refrigerated luncheon meat; an addiction to crack, or perhaps just a Walter White-esque interest in selling it as a side gig; and a desire to get involved into a strange world of organized crime that inexplicably uses said luncheon meat as currency.

The incident at hand took place last June, when a tractor-trailer full of headcheese or pimento loaf or what-have-you was left in Bowen's care, per his job as a truck driver, to be delivered to a series of destinations in Alabama and Florida. But in his state of fiendishness, Bowen made the unwise decision to simply trade the entire refrigerated trailer for an unspecified quantity of crack, according to investigators.

According to WMC Action News 5, after three days of searching, the truck company traced the truck's GPS signal to a gas station in Memphis, where Bowen sat nearby, eating a lunch-meat sandwich. Although suspects are considered innocent until proven guilty in our great nation of liberty, the lunch-meat sandwich served as a possible indication that Bowen gave zero fucks.

In addition to being bereft of its trailer, the truck's tires had also been replaced with cheaper ones. However, Bowen was able to lead police to a storage facility where the trailer was recovered, although about 1/3 of the meat was still at large.

On Friday, Bowen admitted in court that he had absconded with more than $50,000 of lunch meat, and was promptly sentenced to six years of probation, a year of in-patient drug treatment, and a fine of $18,500 in restitution fees.

What the drug dealers were planning to do with the lunch meat itself remains unclear. We always knew crack was whack, but handing off tens of thousands of dollars worth of cold cuts to get your paws on it may be among the most SMH-worthy of trade-offs.