I’ve written a fair amount about Sheriff J.B. Smith over the past couple of weeks, related to a back and forth he’s been having with us over a letter we wrote to him asking that he put an accused cannibal in his charge on a vegetarian diet. Well, the sheriff (who’s obviously doing a bang-up job over in Smith County, Texas) was in the news again this morning following a major drug bust in which he reportedly uncovered 242 pounds of marijuana hidden in a bin of lettuce inside a truck during a traffic stop. Anyway, the news report about the bust made me laugh out loud—the sheriff obviously has PETA on the brain:

“This was a great stop and it took a lot of drugs off the streets. … We are still working on this and are being assisted by the DEA, so there are still things we do not know.” Smith said his office is trying to contact the company that purchased the lettuce, but if the purchaser did not make immediate arrangements, it would be divided between the East Texas Food Bank and the Salvation Army. “We would also keep some of the lettuce and feed it to the (jail) population. This should make PETA happy, because we might be serving more salads in the next few days.”

Keep up the great work, sheriff, and thanks for keeping us in mind.

A little while back, we wrote to the county jail holding alleged cannibal Christopher Lee McCuin, asking that they put him on a flesh-free diet ASAP—since, apart from anything else, there really is something horribly perverse about feeding the guy body parts given the circumstances surrounding his arrest. We received a prompt response to our letter from one Sheriff J.B. Smith, who pointed out (very reasonably) that intentionally altering McCuin’s meals without changing all the other inmate’s meals might be viewed as prejudicial treatment, and asked if we could provide some documentation to support our statement that vegetarian meals promote nonviolence in correction facilities.

Our follow-up letter, which was faxed to the sheriff’s office today, does exactly that. Complete with references to Pythagoras, Albert Einstein, and Tolstoy, along with some information about trial programs at correctional facilities that have given all the inmates vegetarian food, it makes for a pretty good read. Here it is in full.

It’s just a suggestion of course, but I think it makes sense that a dude who’s been accused of cooking and eating someone should be put on a flesh-free diet. Or as PETA VP Bruce Friedrich puts it, “If people are revolted by the idea of eating a human corpse, they should also lose their appetites at the thought of eating the flesh of other tortured victims.” You can read Bruce’s letter to the Texas prison where accused murderer Christopher Lee McCuin is being held here.