It's time to retire the marijuana bust photograph. So, this week in The Providence Phoenix, we are hereby sending the accompanying photo - both a recent local example of what we mean when we say "marijuana bust photograph" and a symbolic stand-in for an entire genre of news photography - somewhere warm and sunny to live out the rest of its days away from the public eye.

We cannot speak on behalf other local media outlets: newspapers, radio stations, TV channels, or online outlets like Coventry Patch, which ran this pic under the headline "Coventry, Scituate Police Make $250,000 Pot Bust in Joint Investigation," on March 14. (There's a nice "joint" pun tucked in there.) We can only speak for ourselves.

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