Yeah, you have to go behind the counter and show ID to buy Sudafed now some places.

The Krogers here in Rochester has a little sign with a kindly looking pharmacist telling us that we have to go to the pharmacy window to buy cold medicines now, "for our safety and conveinence"

Bullshit! It has nothing to do with my safety, it has to do with the Cops and the Press drumming up "The Meth Epidemic", a constant meme in the Press for about the last year.

And so now we in our little Indiana towns can look forward to the same kinds of things that the brothers in the ghetto have been dealing with since crack came along:

A sky high jump in theft and violent crime, increased police thuggery and abuse, and more lives and families shattered when the LAW starts throwing fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters in jail, taking a big problem like substance abuse and making it even worse.

Thanks for bringing this to BC, Al. This is so surreal, that you can buy a book that tells you how to use common ingedients to make an illegal drug.

Coffee filters? I run out of 'em, zip down to the 7-11 just before heading off to bed, and end up on a list of potential drug manufacturers?

The DEA can't stop this. Any more than they have been able to stop people from growing pot. Our entire economy is going to end up revolving around law enforcement, prison construction, and salaried brownshirts.

But hey, keep on waving that flag and telling the world that we are the "land of the free".

The drug war is Prohibition by another name.

"Meth" is just like the "bathtub" gin of the Prohibition era (1919-1933), just as "crack" was in the 1980s, a by-product of prohibitionist policies. Were it not for the war on drugs, meth and crack would never have been invented.

There is a growing drug policy reform movement in America that has been steadily gaining public support over the past 10 years or so as more people begin to realize that the war on drugs is a miserable failure, a problem that masquerades as a "solution" to itself.

And now the DEA has, according to DEA administrator Karen Tandy, delivered "...a significant blow not only to the marijuana trafficking trade in the U.S. and Canada, but also to the marijuana legalization movement."

Source.

But by the best I can tell, this Drug War nonsense is 10x worse than the Prohibition on alcohol. The old prohibition bred crime and corruption and such, but nothing near the destruction of our freedom that this modern nonsense has, such as this Georgia story. I don't recall hearing of shopkeepers- let alone mere clerks- being arrested for selling yeast.

Nice link Margaret, and Al...

loved the "what would Jefferson do"

You sly dog.

>>As a good patriotic American, when faced with situations like this I often wonder WWJD? What would Jefferson do? I don't know exactly, but I strongly suspect that it would involve guns. Lots of guns.<<

Jefferson was adamantly opposed to the use of force as an instrument of national policy.

You should make you WWJD into What Would Jackson Do - Andrew Jackson would handle this sort of situation much more to your liking, with plenty of guns, hostage taking, population decimation, symbolic summary executions and other good fun.

Dave

Al Barger wrote: "But by the best I can tell, this Drug War nonsense is 10x worse than the Prohibition on alcohol."

It is immeasurably worse.

This is partly because drug prohibition has been going on for much much longer than alcohol Prohibition, which only lasted 13 years, did.

Were it not for the 21st amendment, we likely would have seen grocery store clerks being arrested for selling yeast -- while the black market alcohol business continued to thrive anyway.

In between this and DEA administrator Karen Tandy's statement about Marc Emery's July 29 arrest delivering a significant blow to a political movement that has been steadily gaining support over the last decade lies desperation, a refusal to admit to an obvious defeat that occurred at the very moment the war on drugs was declared.

Bennett, I am glad you read the story at the other end of that link as it comes from the only US publication (thus far) to have printed Ms. Tandy's statement.

It's weird and scary how the American media is ignoring this story while, in the meantime, it is headline news in Canada.

wats this aboot?

You oppose the drug war?? Think of the children!

So, if someone walks into a gas station and wants to buy one of those little fake-flowers-in-a-glass-tube, some dude just off the boat from Bombay is supposed to quiz this customer on how, exactly, he intends to use it?

It is a FACT that you can OD on H20. (Really.)

Perhaps when customers come to the counter with more than two bottles of Aquafina, the clerk should call the DEA?

Only the DEA can save us from dihydrogen monoxide.

Did you see Penn & Teller's Bullsh!t environmentalist episode? They had a girl at a big environmental protest getting signatures on a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide, noting that all the big chemical companies use it, and that it appears to cause sweating and urination. She got plenty of signatures.

Between the goddam hippies and the DEA pigs, I don't know who to hate worse.