Posted on 11/28/2011 5:44:56 AM PST by Second Amendment First
Eighty-eight-year-old retired metallurgist Bob Wallace is a self-described tinkerer, but he hardly thinks of himself as the Thomas Edison of the illegal drug world.
He has nothing to hide. His product is packaged by hand in a cluttered Saratoga garage. It's stored in a garden shed in the backyard. The whole operation is guarded by an aged, congenial dog named Buddy.
But federal and state drug enforcement agents are coming down hard on Wallace's humble homemade solution he concocted to help backpackers purify water.
Wallace says federal and state agents have effectively put him out of business, because authorities won't clear the way for him to buy or sell the iodine he needs for his purification bottles. Rejected for a state permit by the Department of Justice, he is scheduled to appeal his case before an administrative judge in Sacramento next month.
Meanwhile, the exasperated Stanford-educated engineer and his 85-year-old girlfriend said the government - in its zeal to clamp down on meth labs - has instead stopped hikers, flood victims and others from protecting themselves against getting a really bad case of the runs.
"This old couple, barely surviving, old farts, and we're supposed to be meth dealers? This is just plain stupid," Wallace said, as he sat in the nerve center of his not-so-clandestine compound surrounded by contoured hiking maps, periodic tables and the prototypes of some metal snow shoes he invented a few years ago. "These are the same knotheads that make you take your shoes off in the airport."
When asked about Wallace, the DEA (which in fairness does not provide security in airports) responded in an email that some investigations discovered clandestine labs were using Polar Pure.
(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...
---Atlas Shrugged
The government is just plain evil. It has no right to stop a legitimate invention just because some people might abuse it for criminal ends. Its not like like our drug warriors have better things to do with their time than to go after an old man who wants to help people avoid diarrhea when they go out hiking in the back country.
...and yet SC Johnson and other corporations are permitted to continue making the mainstay of the illegal drug industry.....plastic ziploc baggies.
I guess that's why those have been outlawed, too.
Just ban everything the meth makers are using directly or indirectly in the manufacture of it./s
This is exactly why the government should outlaw baseball bats, sticks, knives, screw drivers, forks, tire irons, lamps, electrical cords, etc., etc., because they can all be used for criminal activity. s/off
The corrupt Feds go after an 88 year old instead of the drug dealers. It figures. The 88 year old is a soft target. Drug dealers are armed. The Feds are nothing if not overpaid, over-regulating, jackbooted bullies.
“Just ban everything the meth makers are using directly or indirectly in the manufacture of it./s”
Isn’t that why we can no longer buy cold medicine?
The fact of the matter is that there is not an adult in the United States of America who doesn’t commit a felony on a regular basis. There are literally tens of thousands of laws in the criminal code, so many that lawmakers DO NOT KNOW how many ways there are to break them. Some analysts figure that the average American adult could be charged with 3 FEDERAL (let alone state) felonies PER DAY. 1% of the Adult U.S. Population is in prison at any given moment, and we have more prisoners than any other country in the world, including communist China both in number and per capita (we have, IIRC, 5X more per capita than China, who is number 2).
I assure you that a major factor in this is that the Communists wanted gun control. Stupid sheeple went along with the government decision to advance the nanny state, beginning with the removal of God-given rights for felons such as having their gun rights removed, never thinking that if the government said felons have no rights, and a stupid/complacent populace went along with it, that they would all soon become felons.
The judicial system is as corrupt as any body of the legislative system. To think that all 3 branches of the government are not corrupt, one would have to be extremely ignorant, or extremely stupid.
The Dept of INjust us has struck again.
Spitting nails mad. Leave this old fart alone you A$$hat Holder ~
What are they gonna do next ? Go after Estwing ( or other tool manu’s ) for their hatchets and hammers because they may have been used in a crime ?
O’Basturds band of demons..........grrrrrrrr
bookmark
If the punishment was death
no one would be making meth
They’ll go after anyone who is able to make someones life better through industry. The communist goal (and these are communists), is to create an economic situation so bad, that it leads to civil unrest, using the liberal segment of OWS as their revolutionary arm in order to gain total control.
You’ll see it with energy (like gasoline, coal, and nuclear), with food (See SB510, et al.), transportaion (see the EPA regs on everything), and on and on. It’s a systematic breaking of the will of the American people and it will never ever stop. The courts are complicit in the con, and even if a court rules against the communists after years of litigation, they merely do as they please, and wait for the next ruling to ignore again.
Satanists/Socialists/Communists do not relent. They work by means of force, and will invariably, and inevitably force you to a conflict. Never forget that, because when it happens, it happens fast (the end conflict). Then the long train of abuses starts to ramp up again.
Considering the government’s intentions with Chore Boy cooking pot scrubbers
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2812806/posts
I can’t see why you used a sarcasm tag on your post.
Seems pretty dumb. When I was in the Marines we were given tablets of iodine to purify water in our canteens. I still take iodine (and iodide) for my general health. It’s called Lugol’s solution - one of the first “medicines” for treating a specific problem (goiter). Mainstream medicine doesn’t like it because you can’t patent something on the Periodic Table of Elements! My wife takes Iodoral (a tablet version of Lugol’s) that helps tremendously with her fibromyalgia.
The death penalty for drugs is no deterrent. That’s why the following execute people for drugs all the time.
1. Singapore
In a country where even vandalism can get one lashed with a meter-long rattan cane, it is expected that drug laws here are pretty strict. Anyone caught with at least 17 ounces of marijuana, or half an ounce of cocaine or heroin will be treated as a drug trafficker, and drug traffickers here get hanged. Between 1991 and 2004, 400 people went to the gallows for drug trafficking in this city-state, a number of them foreign nationals.
2. Malaysia
Singapore’s next –door neighbor is no less harsh when it comes to drugs. Under its laws, a mandatory death penalty is meted against anyone caught with seven ounces of marijuana or a half ounce of heroin, as these are amounts that constitute drug trafficking in this Southeast Asian country. Even those charged with just simple drug possession or use in Malaysia can expect severe punishment, including lengthy prison terms as well as heavy fines.
3. Iran
Iran is one of the most active executioners of drug offenders. Under the Islamic regime, up to 500 drug traffickers are executed every year. More than 10,000 narcotics traffickers and drug users have already been put to death in Iran in the past few decades. Drug possession and use is also punished severely. Getting caught with a few grams of marijuana could get one up to 70 lashes.
4. Indonesia
Some of the toughest anti-drug laws are implemented in Indonesia, where a drug user could get 10-15 years in jail. And as with other countries that use capital punishment for drug offenders, it reserves the maximum penalty for drug dealers, usually dispatched by firing squad.
5. Saudi Arabia
If alcohol is illegal in this Islamic kingdom, you can only imagine how illicit drugs are treated there. As with alcohol, penalties for possession and consumption of illicit drugs are severe, from public flogging to harsh jail sentences. Drug traffickers, meanwhile, get the same penalty as murderers and rapists: a public beheading.
6. China
From January 2005 to May 2006, China has convicted more than 53,000 people for various drug offenses, with more than 22,000 handed down harsh penalties including life imprisonment or the death penalty, even for non-violent drug offenses such as drug smuggling, trafficking, and production. And if there’s a country that beats Saudi Arabia—and the rest of the world for that matter—in sheer number of executions, it’s China. An estimated 470 people were executed in China in 2007, many of them drug offenders.
7. United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates is one of the 20 or so countries which hands down capital punishment against drug offenders. The much scarier aspect of the UAE’s drug laws, however, is the fact that people get arrested there even for just an infinitesimal trace of any drug deemed illicit in the country.
Consider this: a Swiss national was sentenced to four years in prison after customs officials at Dubai airport found three poppy seeds on his clothes, presumably from a bread roll he ate at Heathrow Airport in London before his flight to Dubai!
Then there’s the even crazier case of Keith Andrew Brown, a British national also sentenced to a four-year jail term in Dubai. The reason? Dubai customs officials found 0.003g of cannabis, an amount so negligible it cannot even be seen by the naked eye, stuck to his shoe, in a cigarette Brown presumably stepped on somewhere on the way to Dubai.
Dubai may be one of the most liberal cities in the Middle East, but when it comes to their implementation of drug laws, it borders on the fanatical.
-——all the time.——
What you actually should have said is “once in a while”.
Then of course being a good FReeper, you didn’t read the post. The post said making Meth, not everyone using it.
“The judicial system is as corrupt as any body of the legislative system. To think that all 3 branches of the government are not corrupt, one would have to be extremely ignorant, or extremely stupid.”
Well said and absolutely correct!
Considering the fact that meth users are already under a self imposed death sentence, the state imposing the same won’t make much difference.
Extreme sentencing for manufactures, dealers, and meth related crimes might be a better way to go.
Iran is one of the most active executioners of drug offenders. Under the Islamic regime, up to 500 drug traffickers are executed every year. More than 10,000 narcotics traffickers and drug users have already been put to death in Iran in the past few decades.
At least one a day is all the time in my book.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.