triticale - the wheat / rye guy

The Tightening Noose

If Oleg Volk were Yakov Smirnoff, he would be telling us "In Russia the iodine can't buy you." Having lived without freedom, Oleg sees nothing funny about the absence of it or the incremental loss of it.

The really scary aspect of the crackdown on iodine is that it is legislation without representation. The public had no input; our soi-desant representatives had no input beyond having created the agency and authorized the war in which this reduction of freedom is an action. This isn't part of the War on Terror, an offshoot of the dreaded Patriot Act. The same reactivity which makes iodine a component of crude explosives also makes it useful to certain chemists who are already smuggling another chemical into the country so as to make the new inconvenience in buying cold medicine meaningless. You may think all illegal drugs are invariably destructive as the one these chemists are making. You may not be troubled by the creeping loss of accesses once taken for granted. You may even believe that the War on Drugs is a good thing. Just you wait until they decide to label medicinal shrooms an epidemic, and you have to start justifying your purchase of brown rice flour.