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Old March 23rd 05, 05:09 PM
Mary Shafer
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On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 15:20:12 -0600, Herb Schaltegger
wrote:

In article ,
Pat Flannery wrote:

What's interesting about the situation is that the meth labs are
supposed to be endemic around here, but I don't think I've ever seen
anyone high on it- so I presume it all gets exported out of the area.
(cut to scene in Colombia: "Hey mister... could I interest you in some
'Nodak Ice'?")


You won't, in all likelihood. Meth tends to be fast- and
short-acting. Meth users DO get very twitchy and spastic and don't
tend to make a lot of sense BUT WHAT THEY HAVE TO SAY is ALWAYS very
VERY IMPORTANT! The common phrase around here is "tweaked out." And
if you have fairly common, random explosions of houses without nearby
propane or natural gas pipelines, good chances it was due to a meth
lab cooking itself off. Also, watch for lots of corroded brass and
stainless steel fixtures in homes and apartments - the cooking process
apparently results in lots of corrosive fumes.


Even when they blow their labs up, there's a lot of clean-up required.
Intact labs are even worse, of course. It's a big HazMat deal with
people in bunny suits and OSHA and EPA involved.

There are a lot of meth labs in Iowa (at one time there were,
supposedly, more meth labs in Iowa than in California) and the
clean-up costs were really hard on the counties. The state now takes
care of that, though.

We have a fair number of meth labs in the Antelope Valley, probably
because it's close to the Los Angeles market and there are a fair
number of abandoned structures around.

The saddest part of the mess in these parts is the great number of
kids taken away from deadbeat meth-head parents. It's just swamping
the foster care system. There are simply not enough spaces in the
available homes to take them all in while their parents are in jail
(for making the stuff), incapacitated (from doing it) or dead (from
doing too much of it).


The motivation behind the people who make meth is to not be deadbeats;
it's capitalism in action. It's no different from moonshiners or
Afghani opium farmers. I'm not going to mention the tobacco industry,
though.

It's too bad about the kids, of course, because the foster system is
so crummy that getting put into it is usually no better than staying
with rotten parents and is sometimes much worse.

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer