Um, right.

I was walking home this afternoon and ran across a strange site. In an alleyway near our apartment, around 200 large cardboard boxes had been stacked against a garden wall. According to the stickers on the outside of the boxes, they had come from Canada, and each contained 1000 cartridges of a lidocaine/epinephrine injection. (That's an anesthetic used in dentists' offices, as I discovered later.) No shipping address was visible. Across the alley were 10 plastic garbage bags full of the paper instructions that come with prescriptions. And the boxes and garbage bags were totally unattended.

I waited a few minutes, thinking that the responsible party would come back, but no one appeared. I opened a box (they weren't sealed) to check that the contents were as stated, and sure enough, they were. It seemed ridiculous to leave 200,000 cartridges of a drug sitting alone, in the hot sun, on a Jerusalem street corner, so I did my civic duty and called the police, then sat down to wait for them.

When the police cruiser arrived 20 minutes later, I explained the situation to the two cops, who seemed at a total loss as to what to do. They poked around in a few boxes and stared at them, scratching their heads. Finally, one declared, "The boxes are stacked neatly, so they haven't been abandoned." Um, right. I'm so glad you're in charge.

The cops proceeded to tell passers-by not to touch the boxes while they started knocking on doors, looking for the owner. At that point, I left. It was hot, and I need to get some work done this afternoon. A while later, I popped back outside to see what had happened and saw some men loading the boxes into a big truck. Whether the owner was found or the police just hauled the boxes away, I'm not sure.