A drug on the market

This is so bizarre! Narcotics officers in Georgia arrest Indian store clerks for selling them cough medicine, matches and camping fuel! Have conclusive evidence that the clerk is a drug pusher because he / she nodded along to some obscure drug slang! Never mind that the clerk barely speaks English and almost certainly hasn't got around to reading The Naked Lunch.

I've never been much in favour of drug policing anyway, and this is just ridiculous. You can't go around arresting people for selling perfectly legal goods over the counter, just because they could be used to make drugs. I mean there are all sorts of things you can do with over the counter stuff - I remember reading somewhere that you could make high explosives with a mix of kerosene and fertiliser. Does this mean that a store clerk who sells those two things to a customer is a terrorist? I mean hello, we're talking about a country where it's legal to own guns, for crying out loud. And it's not like the store clerk is picking this stuff out for you and handing it to you along with a booklet on cooking meth for dummies - they're just charging up whatever you ask for. You don't really expect store clerks to listen to what you're saying (even if they do speak English) let alone conduct a detailed semantic analysis of every possible interpretation you words could have. Don't these cops have anything better to do with their lives than bait hassled store clerks?

And what about the customers themselves? If I have a cold and want to fix it before I go camping (not that I would ever go camping, of course - are you kidding me, it's the OUTDOORS!) do I run the risk of being arrested and put into prison for years on drug charges? And if I really were a meth junkie, this is hardly going to stop me. So no store in the country will sell me everything I need to make meth in one shot - am I suddenly going to give up my drug habit because I'd rather live through the withdrawal symptoms than go to two different stores and get some of the ingredients I need from one and some from the other?

Maybe these guys should stop smoking the stuff they confiscate.

P.S. In other news, you can make meth from stuff you buy at your local grocery store! Where would we be without the NY Times?