I once accidentally walked into a cousin's house in Malaysia wearing shoes and her four-year old tried emphatically to push me out, screaming all the time.

mac wants to see Speed Racer

Vrrrrooooooooooom!

I still follow Betsy on LJ, but she hasn't posted here in ages. She should come back!

They lock up razor blades and baby formula.

ok, now my brain is doing all sorts of things with that involving mirrors. I need more coffee.

meara:

yes, they lock up razor blades and baby formula. And the last time I bought Mucinex D they wanted my birthdate because it's a controlled substance. WTF? (it was out on the shelf!)

msbelle, from the picture, mac wants to BE Speed Racer (adorable!)

On the radio this morning they said that there's a matzo shortage.

A lot of those things are locked up because they are precursor compounds for various illegal chemicals...

Buy Mucinex, spend a couple days in a kitchen lab and then you get DEA interested in what you are doing...

Yes, but it was out on the shelf - I could scoop up as many packets as I wanted (you could probably fit a bunch into assorted pockets). But since I was honest and paying for it, they wanted my birthdate ... which, huh? asking for ID I could understand, limiting the number of packages I bought I could understand, but leaving it out on the shelf and then declaring it a controlled substance?

Happy Day, Earth!

So my question is this. WTF???

No kidding! Especially I appreciate the ones where you actually can get the razor blades, but the alarm still goes off. You push the button, retrieve the box (I assume this is meant to keep you from getting more than one, oh the horror), and are on your way to buy Mucinex or whatever, when you hear "Assistance needed in the men's shaving aisle." Which is particularly irritating as you're buying women's razors. But what's the point of that? Just to come see that you retrieved your razors okay, or that you're not stuffing your pockets with them?

Ah, probably the result of the pharmacy industry and law enforcement agencies fighting it out in Congress.

The pharmacy industries want to sell things without limitations or registrations, while the law enforcement want to make these things impossible to get. Congress usually ends up in the middle making compromises that no one likes and are never effective.

I remember reading about one of the speed precursors, the DEA wanted to make selling large quantities a mandatory report, the manufacturers said, okay, but not for large purchases of it in capsule form. Who would go through the bother of breaking open thousands of capsules? Congress agreed that was a reasonable compromise. In some jurisdictions the end result was that the DEA and the police simply started asking the trash companies to contact them when they picked up dumpsters of popped pill capsules...

From the news this morning - lobbying expenditures are at an all-time high. The #1 industry - drug companies. #2? insurance.