Thread: Now "they" steal our illegal drug trade

Now 'they' steal our illegal drug trade
More Toyotas than Fords were sold in the United States last month. Which just shows this country's already embattled automotive industry is going the way of the sneaker industry.

Try to find a pair of sneakers made in America. You cannot, because the Asians working for pennies a day have stolen away the jobs of proud shoemakers here in the land of the free.

It is the fault of unions, and due to the minimum wage and absurd safety regulations and child labor laws, all strangling this country's economy. Jobs are fleeing this country as rapidly as illegal immigrants are sneaking in. And if this wasn't bad enough, our legislators have undermined the domestic production of the most American of drugs. They have allowed the Mexicans to seize control of the methamphetamine trade.

It's bad enough they have taken all the landscaping, laboring, busboy and dish-washing jobs. Now they are smuggling meth into this country and it is the fault of supposedly well-meaning legislators.

The Midwestern manufacture of methamphetamine was booming for years. It is a powerful drug, and all the equipment and ingredients necessary to make it are available right here in the Heartland. Best of all, you could cook the stuff anywhere. A field, the back of your pickup, a motel room, the shed behind your trailer, your son's bedroom, all of these are fine for setting up a meth lab.

That's what the police call them, labs. And it sounds deliciously sinister, like some sort of basement hideaway with dozens of test tubes and beakers, where you would reanimate the dead, or Dr. Jekyll might experiment on how to become Mr. Hyde.

What they are really talking about is a collection of household goods, such as soda bottles, coffee filters, duct tape, paper towels and the like. Along with an assortment of toxic chemicals. A place where Dr. Jethro can turn into Mr. High, all through good old-fashioned American ingenuity and elbow grease.

There was no need for a field of Afghani poppies or Colombian coca. You just had to be able to steal from a Wal-Mart and find a tank of anhydrous ammonia on the edge of some farm field to tap into. It was mom, baseball, meth and apple pie, right up until January.

That was when the state passed a law greatly complicating the acquisition of large amounts of over the counter cold medicine, which you need for making methamphetamine. This changed everything.

The law sent all the cough medicine containing pseudoephedrine, which apparently are all the ones that work, behind the counter. If you want to buy some, you must show your identification and sign a store logbook.

The 8-month-old law already has thwarted addicts in their quest to obtain cold medicine, from what the politicians say. But they want to take it even further by instituting a statewide electronic database. This measure should not only keep cold medicine out of the hands of desperate drug addicts, but will be a fantastic method for the government to keep track of you. Just in case they want to know who has a stuffy head.

Still, something must be working, as police around the state report finding less labs. But this is merely a pyrrhic victory. Stemming the flow of cold medicine from drug stores to meth labs may have choked off the amount of methamphetamine produced domestically, but it has also swung open the door to foreign competition.

You can take away the cold medicine, but you still have the addict. And Mexicans drug dealers have satisfied their demand by flooding America with imported crystal methamphetamine.

Not only do they have a void to fill, the Mexicans are doing a good job of filling it. Just like the Japanese horned in on Detroit's automotive market by coming into this country with a superior product, the Mexican meth is "far purer" and "more highly addictive, than powdered home cooked methamphetamine." At least the New York Times says so.

And so it goes. Another American business leaving for a country a little more lax in its labor practices.

This is a call to our elected officials to cease in this self-destructive persecution of the cold medicine industry. And to the drug addicts of this country — keep American dollars in America. Buy American.


- Contact Joe Hosey at (815) 729-6054 or e-mail him at jhosey@scn1.com

08/27/06

I have a friend of the family who is retired from the army. He married a girl from Korea. She has a sister in Korea who owns a Nike factory. Every 2 years she returns to Korea for the summer and brings back Nike sneaker from Korea. She pays like 1.50-3.00 a pair. That is her sisters cost if I remember right to make them in her factory. Now what do you think the workers get paid?

Now what do you think the workers get paid?

Practically nothing I'm sure.

I just got a laugh out of the article. I'm one that depends on the cold/allergy meds that they talked about. Like many....I tried other things. They don't work. This move was to make sure we put a real damper on this meth problem.......it hasn't done squat but pad the wallets of Mexicos drug people and put innocent people on a data base. We outsource everything....even the illegal stuff.