This is the DEA on drugs. Any questions?

I'm not a huge fan of significantly altered consciousness. The way I see it, if you're going to survive the Christofascist Zombie Brigade putsch, you're going to need your wits about you. Wine gives me a headache and then puts me to sleep. Back in the days when I used to sample a little weed now and then, it made me feel weird and dizzy, THEN put me to sleep. Hard liquor just puts me to sleep. And I've never had any desire to sample anything else. I always figured when I was young that when you're as chronically depressed as I was, fucking with your brain cells could have all kinds of undesired effects.

The closest I ever get to substance abuse is caffeine and chocolate -- and now less of those than before.

Except during allergy season, which for me constitutes the months from January 1 through the end of December.

I'm usually able to deal with it through the judicious use of some kind of Benadryl-equivalent, Nasalcrom, and Dristan nasal spray. I only use decongestants like Sudafed when I have a really nasty cold. But now that the DEA has found a more glamorous (and far more dangerous) drug than pot to obsess over, people with allergies, people who like to barbecue and don't have gas grills, people who use a Mr. Coffee, cat owners, and those who like to take tilapia filets and grill them in foil packets with some garlic, oregano, and a couple of slices of vidalia onion and ripe tomato, had better buy them at the A&P instead of at the local 7/11 -- and don't say anything about cooking up those tilapia packets, or you could find yourself in a whole heap o'trouble:

The case of Operation Meth Merchant illustrates another difficulty for law enforcement officials fighting methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug that can be made with ordinary grocery store items.

Many states, including Georgia, have recently enacted laws restricting the sale of common cold medicines like Sudafed, and nationwide, the police are telling merchants to be suspicious of sales of charcoal, coffee filters, aluminum foil and Kitty Litter. Walgreens agreed this week to pay $1.3 million for failing to monitor the sale of over-the-counter cold medicine that was bought by a methamphetamine dealer in Texas.

But the case here is also complicated by culture. Prosecutors have had to drop charges against one defendant they misidentified, presuming that the Indian woman inside the store must be the same Indian woman whose name appeared on the registration for a van parked outside, and lawyers have gathered evidence arguing that another defendant is the wrong Patel.

The biggest problem, defense lawyers say, is the language barrier between an immigrant store clerk and the undercover informants who used drug slang or quick asides to convey that they were planning to make methamphetamine.

"They're not really paying attention to what they're being told," said Steve Sadow, one of the lawyers. "Their business is: I ring it up, you leave, I've done my job. Call it language or idiom or culture, I'm not sure you're able to show they know there's anything wrong with what they're doing."

For the Indians, their lives largely limited to store and home, it is as if they have fallen through a looking glass into a world they were content to keep on the other side of the cash register.

"This is the first time I heard this - I don't know how to pronounce - this meta-meta something," said Hajira Ahmed, whose husband is in jail pending charges that he sold cold medicine and antifreeze at their convenience store on a winding road near the Tennessee border.

But David Nahmias, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said the evidence showed that the clerks knew that the informants posing as customers planned to make drugs. Federal law makes it illegal to sell products knowing, or with reason to believe, that they will be used to produce drugs. In these cases, lawyers say, defendants face up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

Now this article deals more with whether the largely Asian immigrant clerks and owners of convenience stores should know what the purchaser's intention is when buying such items. But with states now proposing laws that would require a sworn affidavit in order to buy Sudafed, can requiring a License for Kitty Litter be far behind?

And what responsibility does a store clerk have to listen intently to everything every customer says?