We can always count on Florida, the sideshow to the circus that is the US, to generate the most bizarre headlines any given week. Last Thursday, a fired Miami Beach cop successfully got his job back by blaming his failed drug test on—wait for it—a sexual enhancement cream of mysterious origin. This is the stuff the writers on second-tier network procedurals wish they could come up with.
Cocoa Butter or Coke-o Butter?
Homicide detective Reinaldo Casas was “baffled, perplexed and confused” after testing positive for cocaine last February. Despite his facility with synonyms and his insistence that he’d never knowingly done coke in his life, he lost his job. But a few days later in a union grievance, Casas came up with a possible (though not exactly plausible) explanation for the dirty urine. He and his girlfriend had been applying a sex-enhancing cream to combat his erectile dysfunction. He’d gotten the cream from a friend, who’d gotten it from “an old Cuban guy.”
The friend testified that he’d received the cream as a gift after helping out with a political campaign and had no idea what was in it, only that it worked. When unmarked purple tubs of the cream were lab-tested, they did indeed contain cocaine.
Deceiving Since Coconuts Are a Hard Fruit
But you know the old college jingle: coke and dicks don’t always mix. In fact, doing blow can actually cause erectile dysfunction. Conversely, in other cases it can cause something called priapism: you get hard and stay hard…for hours. I guess if Casas had trouble getting it up, a two-hour erection would be better than the alternative, at least from his girlfriend’s point of view.
The city called the detective’s story “unbelievable” and argued that as a cop, he had no excuse to be ignorant. Nevertheless, since there was no evidence Casas consciously consumed cocaine, he got his job back along with a year’s worth of back pay.
Betty Crocker’s Best Coke Cream Recipe
The sex cream defense wouldn’t be hard to fake. All it would require is a handful of simple ingredients:
1 nondescript container with lid (empty)
1 bottle Vaseline
1 gram cocaine (the crummy stuff from Jim)
1 friend who really owes you one
Pour Vaseline into container until half-full to give the impression of use. Stir in cocaine with fork until thoroughly blended. Serves 1.
Jobs Come and Go But Nicknames Never Die
But if Casas were capable of such a ruse, you’d think he’d have found a version where he didn’t announce his penile woes to the world. Why didn’t he call it eye cream, hand cream, any other type of cream? Whether he knew the concoction contained coke (possibly), or whether an old Cuban man actually existed (somewhere down the line, surely), I’m inclined to believe Casas was honest about using the stuff on his nether parts. Either way, he had to know that getting his job back would come at the price of forever being branded “the sex cream guy. ” How many times will he have to good-naturedly endure office barbs about a “very impotent case”? I guess in this economy, even total emasculation is better than being an unemployed alleged cokehead.
Sponsored DISCLAIMER: This is a paid advertisement for California Behavioral Health, LLC, a CA licensed substance abuse treatment provider and not a service provided by The Fix. Calls to this number are answered by CBH, free and without obligation to the consumer. No one who answers the call receives a fee based upon the consumer’s choice to enter treatment. For additional info on other treatment providers and options visit www.samhsa.gov.
