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88-Year-Old Inventor Hassled By the DEA
New submitter Calibax writes "30 years ago, Bob Wallace and his partner came up with a product to help hikers, flood victims and others purify water. Wallace, now 88 years old, packs his product by hand in his garage, stores it in his backyard shed and sells it for $6.50. Recently, the DEA has been hassling him because his product uses crystalline iodine. He has been refused a license to purchase the iodine because it can be used in the production of crystal meth, and as a result he is now out of business. A DEA spokesman describes this as 'collateral damage' not resulting from DEA regulations but from the selfish actions of criminals."
No, the problem is the prohibition mindset.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Can we just end prohibition already? Drug enforcement is ruining more lives than drugs.
As can coal, sulfur, saltpeter. Let's forbid them.
More accurately, this is like hassling a firework manufacturer under the guise of stopping gun violence.
According to TFA, he did apply for a license and was refused by the DOJ. He's appealing that decision.
The fact remains that a useful product to purify water cheaply is no longer available because the government wants to control the active ingredient, and is willing to make the product unavailable as "collateral damage". I would guess some other collateral damage is the people who may end up with diseases because they drink water that isn't purified, and the percentage that die as a result.
You're operating under the premise that it's reasonable to place all these restrictions on his behavior to prevent meth labs from popping up.
Another perspective (that I share) is that the government shouldn't be trying to regulate drugs to begin with, and that the government is essentially taxing him to pursue an unachievable objective, eradicating drug use.
I appreciate the grandparent post providing some context, but to me it's just another example of an outdated prohibitionist mindset getting in the way of people actually producing useful products.
The period of extended prohibition in the US has tremendous costs that people have sort of become habituated to--not just financial costs, but costs in terms of police militarization, civil rights violations, an implicitly (if not explicitly) racist justice system, etc.
This sort of government babysitting doesn't seem sustainable in the long-term, especially if the government gets serious about what it actually needs to spend money on and what it doesn't (and if it doesn't happen voluntarily, it will happen as a consequence of market and economic collapse).
While the DEA has in the past, and likely will in the future done some stupid and mindless things, it doesn't appear that this is the case in this instance
It does to me. It won't stop real meth cooks for a minute. It just covers the DEA's asses and fucks up a legitimate businessman selling a potentially life-saving product.
he could put a little more thought into the product, seal off the iodine in sintered glass or some other method that allowed water to pass over the crystals but did not allow for removal or tampering
Yeah, because a meth cook could never work out how to break a glass capsule.
And it would cost a lot more and probably price it out of the market (for those who actually wanted to purify water).He has been filling the iodine bottles by hand in his shed, and doesn't have an R&D facility or make his own glassware.
- $1200 is a lot to pay for a license and a license generally needs to be renewed once a year.
- He would need to produce an additional 200-300 units a year to justify the cost of the license and this is a lot of units to produce.
- He's 88 years old. He most probably produces the product for his love of the technology than for profit by this time.
Let's be pretty blunt about this... I'd imagine that it all started with the $1200. While the DEA is obviously trying to do their job, their job policing the drug trade in the U.S. should not be impact legitimate uses of these chemicals by stopping the small and up and coming businesses from being able to function. It would be like saying that since a bomb maker would likely need a resistor or relay to make a detonator, then anyone who wishes to build anything with a resistor or relay should have to pay DHS a $1200 fee before they could purchase them. This would eliminate a tremendous number of small businesses from starting up and would seriously hurt America as a result. We as computer geeks often forget that things like crystalline iodine is a component to a guy like this in the same way that a resistor is to a electronics nerd.
The DEA is a publicly funded entity. They already receive their budgets from the government and we as a people pay their operating expenses as a whole because we recognize that they "fight an evil" which most of us believe needs to be fought. I am disappointed to see that they are penalizing this guy. Yes, you have many great and valid points about how he dealt poorly with this situation...but... he's justifiably pissed off that the DEA is penalizing him for doing absolutely nothing wrong. I makes absolutely no difference which organization it is that is trying to take his money... honest inventors and businessmen shouldn't have to pay stipends such as this because there's a few bad apples screwing it up for him.
No he obviously is not a diplomat. He almost certainly isn't someone you'd want negotiating contracts for your company. But he is a guy who produces and probably regularly improves upon a technical innovation and provides it to a group of people who wish to buy it and see a utility with it. The DEA is obviously aware of him now. They had the budget to track him down and communicate with him. Asking $1200 for a license to a chemical he obviously knows how to handle was just plain stupid. As to the bulk purchasers thing... this is obviously what was most important or should have been to the DEA. Instead of putting the guy out of business, they instead should have been more diplomatic and asked him "If someone orders more of these things than they could actually use, could you give them a call and say 'Hi... wow you're my best customer this month... it's a big order and I don't want to make you wait unjustifiably long, what are you using all these filters for? Can I send you the first 1/4 of the order today as I have that many on my shelf and I'll send the remaining 3/4 when I finish producing them?' and call us if they sound like they aren't buying them for the filtering itself.". I bet you anything, the old fella would have been much more amenable, and then the DEA would have accomplished something meaningful instead of shutting down a small, legitimate business.
It doesn't sound like he was 'asked', since when he refused, they forbade him the chemical. Asking implies that you have the choice to say yes OR no.
I ask my 4 year old if he'd like to go to bed, and he doesn't have a choice. That in no way diminishes the polite manner in which I ask.
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So: some nutter abuses something useful, what should we do ? Another nutter kills someone with a kitchen knife, should we ban all knives ? You use petrol to make a molotov cocktail so should we shut all petrol stations ? We cannot tie everything down just because a few people abuse what we need for day to day life.
If it was legal, you wouldn't ever have a meth lab next door, some mail order house would be selling reasonably pure Chinese made meth for a fraction of the price a bathtub lab could make it for.
Meth labs exist because of our drug laws.
And if drugs were legalised, there would no longer be any reason to operate a back street meth lab...
Drugs would instead be manufactured in large factories, which can be situated well away from any neighbours and can have regulated safety procedures... Explosive chemicals are already processed every day in factories on an industrial scale with a relatively good safety track record.
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Yes, and it follows that piling on extra consequences - jail time - is never going to be effective. We should instead accept that this is human nature and concentrate on mitigating the consequences, for example by having the government run drug dens where people can get their high while under guard, on safe dosages and substances, and with overall usage monitored to keep it on safe level. Of course such measures would be needed only for drugs likely to result in dangerous behaviour, rather than, say, cannabis or tobacco.
So DEA is not responsible for the unintended side effects of its actions, but drug users are? Despite this being the same unintended side effect? After all, if drugs were not illegal the war in Mexico would not be an issue.
At the end of the day human rights are whatever people agree they are. There are several competing versions, and I'd argue that the right to alter your body chemistry should be included, because after all it's your body.
Also, who are you to say what sacrifice is meaningful or not to someone else?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
This isn't a human rights issue
On the contrary, the Supreme Court ruled that it's a woman's right to remove a blastocyct from her body. If she has the right to remove a fetus, why doesn't she have the right to inject heroin? It isn't anyone's business but hers. If she steals to support her habit, arrest her for stealing.
People routinely blame the DEA and the prohibition on the war in Mexico
And they're right, just as alcohol prohibition was responsible for the wars in Chicago and other cities. The only reason there wasn't violence in Canada was because alcohol was legal in Canada.
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