Yesterday a woman came into the store to buy equipment for her meth lab.
Meth labs are, I believe, the main source of crime in the area where I live. I tried to check this belief by googling, but was offered “Find [my state] Meth!” as though I were shopping. When I found local crime statistics, I was happy to see that we had had no murders in the past six years (actually, there has been one this year, so the statistics were old), but sorry to see hundreds of meth lab seizures. Stories in the local papers about knife fights, lost children, and robberies also tend to mention meth.
I don’t know how to make the stuff myself, but I know that it involves decongestants (because we now have to prove our innocence in order to buy them) and lab equipment. The local college’s chemistry department has a lot of theft problems (the faculty have been told not to try to stop scary-looking people who come to take away their beakers), but we are the only place in town that still sells lab equipment. The other likely places have quit selling it because, as one of the workers explained to me some years ago, people buy it for their meth labs.
This hadn’t occurred to me before, but once he pointed it out, I began noticing the number of surprising people who came in to get lab equipment, often with way too much explanation. Now, we are the laminator of choice for the local tattoo parlors, so we are not alarmed by heavily-tattooed men with chains and piercings. They are there merely to use the laminator. Men in suits have come in to buy presents for their nephews, or to get their shopping wives to hurry up. Silly overdressed girls are getting paper for their sorority house decorations (I don’t know why they are all so silly; maybe it is a rule, but I figure they will grow out of it, and try to enjoy them). Women in long dresses and prayer caps are getting their homeschool supplies, and will probably want some exotic item like triangular pencils. People clinging to hippy dress are buying toys and books as a result of our ads in the Free Press. Elderly people are grandparents, and they will generally need the same sort of assistance as the guys in suits.
But most of our customers are fairly affluent women between 25 and 55, casually dressed in stuff from the mall, with some men in the same category. Polo shirts abound, and capri pants are as common as blue jeans. They laugh a lot and talk on their cell phones and (the women) say things are “cute.” There are lots of children, and a high level of ethnic diversity relative to our population’s level of diversity, but we could gather up all the customers in the store and put them down at a nice barbeque without anyone noticing anything odd.
Well, I guess the whole transportation part would be odd, but once they were there, the other guests would find nothing amiss.
The ones who come in dirty, with oversized clothes and baseball caps, are almost always buying test tubes. Sometimes they want larger beakers than we carry. We have to keep ourselves from saying “Oh, yes, you’ll have to steal that from the chemistry department.” They often have stories about their nephews or their swimming pools. Sometimes they claim that they are buying the stuff for their mothers.
So yesterday I was trying to create alluring vistas with a new shipment of magnets, and this woman came in. Oversized clothes, baseball cap, stringy hair, smelly. I offered to help her, because it is always possible that a person with this self-presentation is just planning to brush up her calculus or tutor someone in German, but she refused.
When she came up to the counter with her glassware, I was seized with a desire to refuse to sell the stuff to her. “I know you are planning to use this in your meth lab,” I wanted to say. “Have you considered what you are doing to the lives of the people you sell that to? To the environment? To your children or your neighbor’s children? To yourself?”
Obviously, I didn’t do that. I just sold the stuff to her. I did not even, as I sometimes do, ask what kind of experiment she was working on.
But it stayed in my mind through the rest of the afternoon. Why, I first was asking myself, was I so sure that I could tell at a glance who was cooking meth and who was a bona fide user of scientific equipment? Perhaps I was being unfair to her, and to all the men and women who come in to buy lab equipment and just don’t happen to look like our typical customer. Maybe some of the folks in polo shirts and capri pants have meth labs, and I never suspect them of it. I imagine that I am above judging people by their looks, but that sure is what I was doing.
I also was troubled at the thought that I was supporting the meth trade — on a fairly regular basis, too. Here I am, a woman who won’t buy things from companies whose business practices I disapprove of, and I am actually providing equipment to people who make meth.
It’s a dilemma.
I really enjoyed this post. I don’t have time to make a more lengthy reply, but there you go.
the meth trade is based in a drug that cuts an unusually wide swath across the spectrum of those who could be users. The drug psuedephedrine (which is the lead chemical needed for meth) was literally walking off the shelves in some of our store locations costing us sometimes $1,000’s a month. It is an epidemic and I believe the key elements of meth because of so many home town labs should be restricted. I don’t know how else to start to stop the epidemic…
Wow. That is a dilemna – a disturbing one. The scope of the meth problem is difficult to wrap one’s brain around. And VERY sad. It’s sometimes very hard not to make assumptions based on how people look and behave. You’re right, some of the capri and cell phone mamas could very well be doing the same thing. That’s the scariest part of the whole deal. It’s so widespread and affects all types of people. Hard spot for you to be in, though.
That is interesting in an awful kind of way. I can imagine that you and your school’s administration, security and local police department could implement a few ideas about how to make the whole transaction more inconvenient and less desireable for ciminal types. I bet your intuition is on the mark.
Maybe you can barter for some meth!
Would not selling the glassware noticeably reduce the meth business? Probably not, as you pointed out they’d probably just steal it and with that the toll of hurt people could likely increase. What about the legit pharmaceutical businesses who push their legal drugs – there is a massive over-prescription of antibiotics and anti-depressants in NZ and I imagine it is not much different in the US. Also, the main drug of choice remains alcohol. What do we do about that? It causes more harm than any of the more fashionable drugs? Prohibition has been tried – it didn’t work. If there were no demand for all these drugs they would not be manufactured. The only way to diminish the problem is to diminish the demand, which means we first need to work out why there is such a demand. In general the demand is there because so many people hate themselves and their lives. Unfortunately that problem is by far bigger than any of the others as it is to do with society in general, not individuals, and no one knows how to fix this problem – or even if it can be fixed. It’s ironic, in Mary Poppins the song tells us that ‘a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’ but now sugar is bad and we pop pills of all sorts all the time – now it is ‘the medicine that makes the sugar go down’.
Not just decongestant, but Sudafed or other medications with similar ingredients, in particular. The stuff that makes you not able to sleep (my mom’s a pharmacist, so I know quite a bit about drugs legal or otherwise). There’s a limit to how much a single person can buy.
Do you recall HOW those people smelled? I’m pretty certain that if they came fresh from a meth lab or even not so fresh from a meth lab (without changing/showering/etc.), they will stink of it. It has a kind of ammonia-like smell. Here’s an interesting related link. http://www.jointogether.org/news/headlines/inthenews/2005/ill-wants-educators-others-to.html
Anywho, maybe you should keep a weapon handy, as meth also makes people crazy, and you never know when you might inadvertantly upset a person high on meth. Maybe a box-cutter, pair of scissors, broom with an extra long handle, etc.
Maybe you should also talk to the police and get some advice about what you should do. I mean I’d hate to think that I was supporting meth labs too.
Anyway, I think I came here to ask you to read a rather lengthy research paper I did for a Philosophy of Technology class that I posted, and to tell me your thoughts. But then I read this post and had more to say about meth labs. Keep it copasetic.
I understand your dilemma, and I think you shouldn’t judge yourself for following your instincts about people. Common sense dictates that if a person is not in the state of mind to even take a bath or wash their hair, then they are probably not making important scientific discoveries! I mean, sure there are probably scientists that stay up 36 hours working on something and DON’T eat, bathe, etc. but you can usually tell those people from your average junkie! 🙂
I, unfortunately, have very extensive experience dealing with dope fiends. My husband was addicted to meth for many years. If it were me, and I was in your position, I would single those people out and just tell them, “I’m sorry, but policy requires that you provide identification to buy this equipment unless you have a verifiable scientific reason for purchasing it.” I guarantee you the problem will slow down if not stop altogether. The last thing a dope fiend wants is to have ‘the man’ on his trail. Even if they still buy the equipment that day, they’ll be geeking for days, peeking out their windows wondering if the cops are watching. It’ll totally ruin their high. They won’t want to come back to your store again.
Sure, you won’t be stopping the trade, but you may make it HARDER for people in your area. Plus, you have accomplished the initial objective of not involving YOURSELF in selling lab equipment to people who will use it for such purposes. Just a suggestion, sorry for the long comment! 🙂
Piggybacking on the last idea, I know that if I were in your store to legitamately buy lab equipment, I wouldn’t mind putting my name/address/phone or whathaveyou down on a list. (As long as it was explained why this list was being kept.) Can your store get in trouble with the police for selling the equipment to a meth lab? (For example, a lab is busted and receipts for the beakers are found.) If so, that would bolster your request for their names.