Paris Hilton, Dopey As Ever

AUGUST 30--After a small baggie of cocaine fell from her purse into the hands of a waiting Las Vegas cop, quick-thinking Paris Hilton claimed that the purse was not actually hers, but that she had actually “borrowed it from a friend.”

But the quick-thinking heiress, after having been read a Miranda warning, then proceeded to muck up her future defense to a felony drug charge by admitting that a variety of other items in the purse were hers: $1300 in cash, lip balm, credit cards, a pack of Zig-Zag rolling papers, and a tablet of Albuterol, an asthma drug. The cocaine, you see, was the property of someone else, Hilton contends.

According to a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department report, excerpted here, when a cop asked Hilton, 29, about the cocaine, “she said he had not seen it but now thought it was gum.” You know, the powdered form of gum so popular with the kids these days.

Hilton was collared after the SUV in which she was a passenger was stopped when a cop smelled the odor of marijuana wafting from the vehicle. As a crowd of onlookers grew, Hilton said that she was “extremely embarrassed, due to all the people taking pictures of her, and she did not want to be seen by them.” Hilton was then accompanied inside the Wynn Hotel, so that she could use the bathroom and remain “out of the public’s eye until the investigation was over.”

According to investigators, the cocaine fell from the purse as Hilton--ensconced in a hotel security office--opened it to retrieve some lip balm. “I saw a small bindle of what I believed to be cocaine in a clear baggy begin to fall from the purse and into my hand,” reported Lieutenant Dennis Flynn. Hilton is scheduled for an October 27 arraignment on a felony drug possession charge. (3 pages)