An Arnold man pleaded guilty to a federal meth-related charge Thursday and admitted buying more than 5,000 cold pills .... [he] admitted that he sold the boxes to others knowing that the pills would be used to manufacture methamphetamine and that he used the money to pay child support and other expenses. ... He could face roughly nine to 11 years in federal prison when sentenced later this year.
How many murders, rapes, armed robberies, assaults and other crimes against persons and property went unsolved in Jefferson County, Missouri while "detectives with the Jefferson County Municipal Enforcement Group" pored over pharmacy records looking for an easy bust?
How many lives does Assistant US Attorney Jennifer Winfield destroy each year? How many gallons of innocent blood drip from each stolen paycheck she cashes?
The victim, whose name I won't sully by mentioning it in the same post as Winfield's, bought a perfectly legal substance and sold it to people who used it in the manufacture of something that, in anything resembling a civilized society, would be a perfectly legal substance.*
He did it to pay the bills.
He did it to support his family.
For that, he gets to spend the next several years in a cage -- and, no doubt, be presented upon his release with an invoice for the child support he couldn't earn or pay while incarcerated -- while the blood-sucking monsters who put him there remain at large to rinse, lather and endlessly repeat.
And we'll put up with it, until we stop putting up with it.
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* This is the part where I'm supposed to say that methamphetamine is really bad and that you shouldn't use it, so that some eager beaver at DEA doesn't flag this post and ask the local police to walk their dogs through my house.
OK, it's really bad and you shouldn't use it. I can even say that from experience, having tried it once ... once, many years ago. I briefly dated a woman with a meth problem (a bad one -- I doubt she's still alive). After we broke up (I dropped her, mainly because she kept getting stupid and going back to it) I decided to see what the big deal was.
I couldn't tell what the big deal was. It hit me as very much a take it or leave it thing, and I left it. It was expensive, it wasn't especially pleasant (think of a jangly, sleep-deprived caffeine high, only a full order of magnitude higher in all the worst ways), you could go to jail for it, and I could see that using it seemed to be producing sustained negative effects across a wide swath of the population my age and younger in my hometown (Lebanon, Missouri).
My only subsequent encounter with meth was a few years ago when some idiot filled every yard in my neighborhood overnight with pseudoephedrine boxes, presumably left over from a cooking session. I called the police to complain -- about the litter.
As a side note, officer, if you walk the dogs through my house, the only thing of interest you'll find is a bottle of perfectly legal Old Crow Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey ... if I haven't finished it yet ... and a guy with a firm (and sure to be vocalized) grasp of the Fourth Amendment. You don't want to go there -- I'm not going to share the bourbon.
But anyway, where was I? Yes, meth is some nasty stuff. I don't use it. If anyone asks me, I'll strongly recommend against using it.
But there's just no up side to it being illegal.
The people who want to use it are going to use it, legal or not.
The people who make it and sell it are going to make it and sell it especially because it's illegal, which drives the price up high enough to make it profitable (if it was legal, the guy in the story above wouldn't have even had the opportunity to do what he did!).
They're going to find cut-outs to buy their pseudoephedrine and their anhydrous ammonia and whatever the hell else goes into it, they're going to find mules to haul the stuff around for them, they're going to involve unknowing others in their schemes (a cousin of mine and his wife went up for several years on conspiracy charges, apparently because they let a friend park his truck at their house overnight -- and he had stuff in it for making, you guessed it, methamphetamine; that was back in the aforementioned hometown, or nearby), and they're going to blow up suburban kitchens and expose their kids to dangerous vapors when they cook it.
All so parasites like Jennifer Winfield and "the Jefferson County Municipal Enforcement Group" can wield power and make bank. Fuck that noise.
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