The Police Attention You Get Driving a Drug Dealer Car Through Europe

🇸🇪 Swedish police stopped me coming off the ferry in Stockholm this morning for 8 officers to do an unsettlingly thorough car search through all my luggage (hope they enjoyed my boxer shorts! 😂), even down to my vitamins and car engine.

This is the 2nd run in I’ve had with the police in just the last couple weeks driving through Europe.

Apparently, driving a drug dealer looking car brings unwanted attention.

One Latvian police officer even said he thought my car was stolen! He actually said that to me. Me, a nerdy engineer… who just happens to look like he could have been a drug dealer or car thief in another lifetime.

I had to show him proof of my car insurance to convince him it was actually mine — I thought he was going to arrest me and impound my car!

The Swedish police today actually also asked if I owned this car or if it was some kind of rental.

Usually, when I got stopped by police in the UK and gave it the old fancy pants British accent and tell them I’m a well-known engineer they cheer up and back off.

Not so with these Europeans — they really go through all the checks and it takes a looong time!

When I mentioned to the Swedish police woman today that I know it looks like a drug dealer’s car she just replied, “You said it, not me”! 😂

I often joke to people that I’d have more money if I really was a drug dealer, and that I’d be great at that, just like anything else I wanted to do (doctor, lawyer etc). We all love the excellent Breaking Bad show, although I couldn’t in reality recon the cost in human lives, which hit home in the episode seeing the severely neglected child of the junkie parents in this episode.

I decided to leave out my usual joke about what a great drug dealer I’d make as they were taking their job very seriously — and even I have limits.

She breathalized me for alcohol and everything. First time.

No strip search though. She was blonde so I wouldn’t have objected.

Shame. Next time.

Two of the guy officers both separately remarked:

“That is a very nice car”.

Implication?

[I wonder how this drug dealer looking guy paid for it]

I said, “Hey, I’ve worked insane 60+ hour weeks for over 20 years and had to treat myself once in my life!”.

“Plus I got a good deal on it so didn’t pay as much as it looks”.

[I bought it before Covid inflationary money printing.]

It took 3 officers one after another getting into the driver seat trying to figure out how to open the bonnet of my car to check under the hood. I didn’t know either — although if I did it would have been funny to not tell them anyway and just watch them struggling to figure it out! 😂

Interestingly, they rustled through everything even my hotel papers from my glove box, checked where I was staying in Sweden and for how long, but didn’t check my arm rest where I had a stash of cash… so if you’re going to smuggle drugs… … don’t.

Don’t risk it, just get a job working in finance or politics like the rest of the crooks, it pays better and for a lot longer and since you’re inside the system you don’t get arrested.

Shout out to my city-slicker finance bros, you know I love you smart guys, especially Gary Stevenson (YouTube).

Politicians on the other hand… yeah you guys are just lucky the treason laws don’t work.

Anyway, in the end, the police found no drugs and had to let me go.

Now I understand how persecuted drug dealers are!

I know, I know, some of you are thinking — “What, really, he’s not on coke??”.

Nope, I’m naturally this boisterous (especially when it comes to coding and GitHub!). I even have to avoid coffee because it causes me to bounce off the walls.

As an engineer, I of course made as good and efficient use of the police stop time as I could by educating the officers that democracy was the root cause of Western decline - a couple of the male officers were nodding, they knew.

I decided to go with the simpler term “democracy” rather than the more accurate problem “universal suffrage” on this occasion, as it’s often misunderstood to mean only women’s suffrage, rather than unqualified non-taxpayer suffrage, and didn’t want to trigger the police woman given my situation.

It was the police woman who actually sparked this conversation by thinking that the UK’s problems were caused by Brexit - she must be one of those types that still watches the mainstream media.

So she had a bit of an education coming her way. I explained that Brexit was caused by Tony Blair’s mass immigration policies, and that nobody disliked Europeans back home. It had just made everything worse by lack of international investment, offshoring of finance jobs and importing even more people from outside Europe as the politicians defied the will of the people to reduce record immigration levels — which was the only reason many English people voted for Brexit despite knowing it might cost the economy.

Contractor bros may laugh but I even brought up Rishi Sunak pushing IR35 on private sector to kill the freelance tech market so that consultancies like his billionaire father-in-law’s first InfoSys company could mop up. “It’s all corruption back home”.

Hence why I emigrated and why most of the people I know who are successful are looking to leave the UK, with the UK having the second highest rate of millionaires emigrating, after China of course (because they dwarf our population).

We discussed Dubai, the difficulty of getting jobs abroad, and the problem that there is no country that can absorb millions of people migrating from a failing country like the UK. The Swedish have their own immigration problems so I was probably preaching to the choir by this point.

Yeah they stopped me for that long I covered all these topics that I study.

On the bright side, having just arrived at my hotel for the week and unpacking, I just found a thousand Polish złoty in my small suitcase that the police didn’t pickpocket that I was forgot was there (I thought I’d kept an eye on all my valuables).

Moral of the story - don’t drive a drug dealer’s car across Europe and you won’t be getting hassled by police [as much].