Photo by Qole Pejorian on flickr

Matthew Gonzalez and Kevin Jones have been charged with the misdemeanor offense of abuse of a corpse, said Scott Durfee, a spokesman for the Harris County District Attorneys Office. According to documents filed in the case, Gonzalez, Jones and an unnamed juvenile on March 15 went to an Humble cemetery, dug up a man's grave, left with the head and turned it into a "bong."

What’s most disturbing about this case is the dedication these men possessed for their cause. They clearly aren’t stoners; a true stoner would have made it as far as the shovel aisle at Lowe’s before conceding that going home and smoking out of an apple while watching Super Troopers on cable sounded more appealing than spending all night in a cemetery.

No, these guys are casual marijuana enthusiasts. When they loaded the trunk of their Jeep Liberty with plastic tarps, storm lanterns, and a gigantic power drill, they weren’t thinking about monster bong rips – those would come only after hours of back-breaking digging and sawing. To these guys, smoking was secondary; their over-arching objective was doing something with a head. Weed was probably just the easiest thing to agree upon. After all, who wants to chug beer out of a dead guy’s mouth? That’d be like kissing him.

Marijuana was the conduit through which these enterprising grave meddlers would achieve their goal – their goal of cutting off a corpse’s head and using it to get wasted. Without it, they might have dithered: Is sipping Jack and Coke out of a human head worth getting blisters on our hands? I don’t really like smoking hookah – why would I dig up a corpse to convert a head into one? Zima tastes gross; brain matter and sinus residue might make it taste even worse.

But there was no equivocation with weed. Once that casket was out of the ground, the top laying in the mud after having been pried open with a crowbar, the next step would be clear: let’s get this head cut off so we can load it up with a monster bowl and smoke out of it.

There’s no denying that getting intoxicated via a human head is an option that’s always on the table for everyone. But to these guys, only smoking marijuana justified the risk of getting caught digging up a human corpse; with any other drug, they could have gone either way. Marijuana presented the opportunity – it was the clearest path to holding that skull, looking deep into its eye cavities, and saying, “I’m going to use you to get high.” You might say it was their gateway.