Hightower Lowdown

The most amazing thing to me about Robert Holding, a milkman in Lancashire, England, is not that he was delivering little packets of marijuana to a few of his elderly customers along his milk route--but that the Brits can actually still get home delivery of milk!

Our national postal service says it can't even keep delivering our mail to us six days a week, and here's a 72-year-old milkman still going door to door each day. His little side business was to drop off small bits of cannabis to 17 of his clients who'd left little notes on their stoops alongside their empty bottles, asking, "Can I have an ounce?" "They were old," Holding said, "and had aches and pains," so he kept his profit margin low, feeling he was doing a public service. "They enjoyed it," he says, "They saved a lot of money..."

But after six months as a dealer, our Lancashire milkman was ratted out by someone. British bobbies raided Holding's home, found six ounces of the dreaded weed, and arrested him. Alas, while England's marijuana laws aren't quite as insane as ours, he was sentenced to 36 weeks in prison and given a lecture about the "harm" he'd been doing.

However, after the scolding, the judge noted that Holding's wife has Alzheimer's disease and that he visits her every day in the nursing home, thus the jail time was suspended --provided, of course, that he delivers nothing but milk.

Imagine the disappointment of his customers.