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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."
It can also be used to create an explosive compound that shall remain nameless.
...it'd be a shame if anything were to happen to it!
Methamphetamine actually is useful to hikers and flood victims!
so much for blaming people for killing people, this is blaming the gun maker for the people killed by it.
Notice how this hasn't gone to court? The DEA would be shut down so fast from harassing Mr. Wallace in court that they wouldn't even dare it. Instead, they shut him down by threats alone, aka PIPA/SOPA.
No, the problem is the prohibition mindset.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Also, make sure there's no Los Pollos Hermanos close by.
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
Can we just end prohibition already? Drug enforcement is ruining more lives than drugs.
He should just contact the criminals who cook meth, I mean they get their supply of it from some where. In a land where crystalline iodine is illegal only criminals will have crystalline iodine. Or something like that.
... then nothing gets done.
The DEA could easily tell whomever gives the licenses to approve this guy, but they choose not to. Instead, they want to blame it on criminals, instead of where the blame really lies, which is the bullshit anti-drug laws that we have too many of.
We could legalize meth, have the government or some pharmacy make it safely, and then every loser that wants to do it won't be supporting the people who make it.
The problem here is not meth addicts, it's the bullshit they go thru to make the meth, which hurts consumers more. You won't have druggies stealing the crap the makes meth, you won't have places become toxic because people are making meth in their bathtub/kitchen.
America, the land of the hypocrites and home of the illusion of freedom.
Be seeing you...
I hate to read TFA and I hate to defend the DEA (did we learn nothing from Prohibition?) but once again this is a sloppy and wholly misleading article summary (thanks Slashdot!) To wit:
As much as I like this guy and his sense of humor, it seems much less sinister than the Slashdot linkbait summary indicates. It appears to be a pretty simple case of "government restricts chemical that can be used in meth labs, old guy making product in his garage with said product doesn't want to deal with the government bureaucracy and is surprised when the government shuts off his access to that chemical."
"95% of all Slashdot
Iodine isn't available without a license from the DEA.
Not here, or here, or even here.
In fact, I can only find 32 results in the first web site I thought to look in.
Looks like the system works!
Sorry hikers and flood victims, we know you'd like clean water but while you're drinking that tepid water and consequently when you're lying ill you can reflect on the fact that your sacrifice means that drug dealers have had to find another source for iodine to create methamphetamine. We know it's a large sacrifice for an almost immeasurably small payoff, but this was low-hanging fruit and we're pretty lazy. DEA.
Not to mention nobody wants to spend the incredible amount of money it would take to fix broken people, instead they'd rather let their friends make money on both ends thanks to privatization of everything from the military to the prisons.
I once saw a show with this monk, damned if I can think of the name of it, that spent all his time with junkies. he said if you talked to them, I mean REALLY sat down and talked to them, nearly all of them had ONE THING, one single thing that they just couldn't face. After all nobody wakes up and says "I want lots of sores and my teeth falling out" now do they? He gave as an example one junkie where after talking to her it turned out her parents had thrown her to the street after her sister was killed in her car, so he paid to fly her halfway around the world and went with her to her parents graves so she could get it off her chest. less than a year later she was clean and working.
Recreational "party" drugs like pot should frankly be legal but when you have people that will literally go commit a crime just to get thrown in prison because they can't get their drug of choice on the outside? There is something in that person's life they simply cannot face. Sadly one of the guys i hung out with in HS is now living under a bridge somewhere, it turned out his mom was getting him fried at the age of 8 and fucking johns in front of him. can anybody blame the guy for staying stoned?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Keynes is widely misunderstood. He once said that it would be better to build totally useless pyramids than to have high unemployment, but he wasn't actually suggesting that we should do that. It's obvious when you think about it, because there are a million and one productive things that could be done with the same labor. The actual idea is that it's better to pay someone to work in a soup kitchen than it is to watch crime skyrocket if you leave them to starve and they resort to theft.
If (as would seem obvious from this case) the DEA is not engaged in anything productive, you don't have to make them unemployed. You just have to eliminate their current positions and instead set them to work patrolling the streets in gang neighborhoods at night to suppress actual crime.
General welfare clause.
Oh, for crying out loud. Not that again.
The phrase "general welfare" appears in the preamble, where it's a statement of intentions, not a grant of power, and again in article 1, section 8, where it is a limit on the federal power to tax, requiring all expenditures to be for the general welfare, not for the benefit of any region or group over another. It is not a blanket authorization to do anything and everything that the legislature thinks might be a good idea.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Here's the DEA's list. Those marked as "List 1" are the most restricted. It's not that long a list. Iodine is the only chemical on List 1 that isn't particularly hazardous.
He seems to have clarified / changed his mind: http://www.garyjohnson2012.com/issues/foreign-policy
(Thanks for bringing that up... I didn't know he ever said that.)
And that is why Portugal's approach to drugs, treating it as a medical and mental health issue, is working and ours isn't.
After all the money spent on the War on Drugs, the US still has the addiction rates that we had at the turn of the 19th century. If we only had as many freedoms.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I apologize in advance for actually reading TFA, but I don't see anywhere in the article any claims from the DEA that the chemical has ever been used to actually make meth.
Choice quotes:
about four years ago, the DEA began to look closely at the product, even citing it in a position paper, and suggested that it was being used by cranksters as well as campers.
Suggestions do not equal proof.
Special Agent Richard Camps, a San Jose-based state narcotics task force commander, said he received reports of suspicious buyers. "Weird-looking people, 'Beavis and Butt-Head'-types, were coming into camping stores and buying everything they had on the shelves," Camps said.
Really? A "state narcotics commander" (which I assume is someone important, probably in charge of other officers) just called a class of people "beavis and butt-head types," and he gets to keep his job? Whoever is doing PR for the state is probably cringing right now.
"Then they would take off into the mountains and try to cook meth with it." The DEA reported agents found Polar Pure at a meth lab they dismantled in Tennessee two years ago.
Okay, so they tried to do it, but then what happened? Did they succeed?
If it's just as hard to cookup meth with this stuff as it is to cook up meth with other stuff that's legal, or if you just can't figure out how to cook up meth with this stuff at all, then let this old guy have his iodine.
coding is life
No, did you even read the summary? He was denied the license. He didn't refuse to file for a license. He was denied. The gp's point is right on the money.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Ron Paul's position on evolution is that it happens, and that it's not the whole story. He makes this clear in his book, Liberty Defined:
The creationists frown on the evolutionists, and the evolutionists dismiss the creationists as kooky and unscientific. Lost in this struggle are those who look objectively at all the scientific evidence for evolution without feeling any need to reject the notion of an all-powerful, all-knowing Creator. My personal view is that recognizing the validity of an evolutionary process does not support atheism nor should it diminish one’s view about God and the universe.
In a nutshell, it's the same position that the Anglican church reached in the decade or so after Darwin published the Origins of Species.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
We could legalize meth, have the government or some pharmacy make it safely, and then every loser that wants to do it won't be supporting the people who make it.
Just because the DEA overreaches and just because there are solid libertarian arguments for legalizing some drugs doesn't mean there are no substances for which prohibition makes good social, economic, and ethical sense....
Your idea sounds nice, but unless your plan includes banning the users of your legal dispensary from medical and dental care the fiscal costs alone are way too high. Amphetamine abuse causes serious neurological problems, well in excess of those potentially caused by alcohol, cocaine, or heroin; the burden of caring for addicts could be staggering. Severe depression, anxiety, concentration problems, motor impairment, etc. Not to mention the social and moral costs of, you know, just watching people cook themselves into death or permanent oblivion with product that you asked your government to manufacture and give to them.
If you firmly believe that people should have a right to get high, fine. But don't go spouting off about which particular substances should be available - without the pharmacology, economics, and ethics to back it up - simply to satisfy your libertarian impulse. That's not advocacy, it's sociopathy.
- $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 is just too addictive. It has more or less a 100% addiction rate. So you can't do "just a little" meth or be an occasional user. You get hooked, hardcore. Combine that with the massive amount of damage it does and it is just not safe for use at all really.
I think people forget that there are different levels of dangers in terms of drugs. Some, like marajuna, are pretty harmless. It doesn't have any physical addiction symptoms, is effectively impossible to OD on, and doesn't cause much long term damage (there are studies to indicate it causes some damage to higher reasoning skills, and of course when smoked it causes damage that any smoke inhalation does). It is quite safe over all.
Others though, like meth, are exceedingly dangerous. They have strong physical addictions (some like heroin can have fatal withdrawal symptoms), and do extreme amounts of damage to the body. You want to see real nasty, look up Krokodil but don't look at photos unless you have a strong stomach: People literally rot away alive. Life expectancy for addicts is a couple years at best.
While I sure as hell don't support the current "All drugs are evil and should be illegal," mentality, you have to learn about them and appreciate that some are just too addictive and destructive to be things that are sold over the counter. We need to legalize the reasonably safe drugs, not just everything and say "Fuck it, this can kill you quick but who cares?"
Read more. I know we are capable of.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/dec/27/crime-smuggling-alcohol-tobacco
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/648986/posts
http://www.atf.gov/alcohol-tobacco/
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
No, the guy doesn't make $100,000 per year, he brings in 100,000 per year gross. Unless his margins are absoloutely huge then he will be making a lot less.
You also ignored the part of the article where he did apply for the license but was then refused.
And how much is he supposed to spend on security? Enough to wipe out a year's net income?
I do not think the over regulation of these kinds of materials is necessary in society, but it is what it is right now.
He is in a position to do the best thing possible: treat the regulations with the utter contempt they deserve and bring in some much needed publicity.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Only the supreme court justices opinions matter.
Well, that's a rather royalist opinion on your part, I must say, and one with which Madison and Jefferson disagreed. (cf. the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.) The supreme court said it was fine and dandy for FDR to steal all the gold in the country and imprison innocent people for their race, but that didn't make it legal. It only meant that the government would pretend it was legal.
The constitution is written in English, not sanskrit. It's not the court's job to tell us what it says, it's their job to enforce it, and they've done a piss poor job of that for a very long time.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The issue with the phosphate was the effect on plants and other green organisms. Algae and bacteria blooms, that kind of thing. What is so much worse about zeolite A, sodium carbonate, citrates, and sodium silicate?
Blar.