What do matches, charcoal, antifreeze, coffee filters, aluminum foil, cold medicine and cat litter have in common? If you have them all on your shopping list, you could spend the next 25 years in prison.

Those, it turns out, are the ingredients for a homemade meth lab.

Nevermind if you are actually planning a summer barbecue, drink coffee, own a cat, and have a cold and a leaking radiator in your car.

And if you work in a store, and you sell all of the above items to someone, you too could go to prison, whether they’re planning a cookout or a meth lab.

Last summer, for instance, state and federal agents arrested 49 convenience store clerks and owners in Georgia on charges they sold pseudoephedrine and other supplies to informants posing as meth cooks.

The supplies, including matches, charcoal, antifreeze, coffee filters, aluminum foil, and cat litter, were all perfectly legal. The charges, carrying penalties of up to 25 years in prison as well as fines and asset forfeiture, are based on the doubtful premise the defendants knew or should have known what the fake customers pretended to be planning.

All but a few of the defendants are Indian immigrants, and many have a weak grasp of ordinary English, let alone the slang of black-market meth manufacturers. Several said they assumed the guy who bought matches and camping fuel, saying he needed to “finish up a cook,” was having a barbecue.

This is the logic of the war on drugs. By criminalizing possession of a substance readily manufactured using innocuous everyday products, the government created the illicit labs it is trying to shut down by criminalizing the sale of those innocuous everyday products. — Jacob Sullum

Stephen Gordon had this to say, and I couldn’t say it better.

Thomas Jefferson defined tyranny as “that which is legal for the government but illegal for the citizenry.” If in doubt about whether we live under a tyranny today, I’d recommend that you go purchase a case of Sudafed, some coffee filters and a few gallons of antifreeze. Before you begin your shopping spree, I have one simple recommendation: Please consider donating your house and other assets to charity. — Stephen Gordon

He then exposes where the money seized from such innocent (and, to be fair, some not-so-innocent) people goes.

According to David McClintick (Swordfish: A True Story of Ambition, Savagery, and Betrayal), in the late 1980’s, the FBI and DEA set up dummy corporations to deal in drugs. They funneled into these corporate fronts money from drug-related asset seizures.

The idea was to infiltrate global crime networks but a lot of the money in “Operation Swordfish” may have ended up in the wrong pockets. Government agents and sheriffs got mysteriously and filthily rich and the whole sorry affair was wound down. The GAO reported more than $3.6 billion missing. — Sam Vaknin

Oops!

And if it couldn’t get bizarre enough, the government has started another disinformation campaign aimed at teenagers.

“Their new claim is that weed causes AIDS,” Gordon writes. Indeed, a public service announcement shown on the site shows a female saying, “She got high, she got stupid, she got HIV.”

“When you use drugs or alcohol, you might be more willing to do things that are risky to your health. This is because drugs can change the parts of your brain that you use to weigh risks and benefits before making decisions,” the site tells teenagers. But it doesn’t say what those risky things are. I wonder why?

I have a cookie for the first person to figure out what they allege the “risky” behaviors are. While you’re thinking about it, read this incredibly humorous comparison between a drunk and a stoner, and I have another cookie for the person who correctly guesses which is less hazardous.