‘I thought cocaine was piece of gum’

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Hotel heiress Paris Hilton was charged with felony cocaine possession on Monday but denied the drugs found in the purse she carried were hers, US media reported. Hilton faces up to four years in prison if convicted. Following the socialite’s weekend arrest with her boyfriend, Las Vegas nightclub executive Cy Waits, the police said it found 0.8 grams of cocaine, wrappers typically used to roll marijuana cigarettes, asthma medication and $1,300 in cash. The police pulled over the black SUV Waits was driving on Las Vegas’s renowned Strip after smelling marijuana emanating from the vehicle. Hilton was conditionally released shortly afterwards.
An arrest report cited by the US media said Hilton was escorted to a hotel “at her request” to use the bathroom shortly after the police stopped the car. While in a holding room, she took lip balm from her purse. “As she began to open it, I saw a small bundle of what I believed to be cocaine in a clear baggy begin to fall from the purse and into my hand,” Lieutenant Dennis Flynn of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department wrote in the report.
Asked whose cocaine was in the purse, Hilton told Flynn she “had not seen it” and thought it was chewing-gum, according to the report.