Reason Magazine: 'The Real Breaking Bad: How the Drug War Creates Collateral Damage'

Source:Reason Magazine- meet Bob and Marj. 

"88-year-old Bob Wallace, and his 85-year-old girlfriend, Marjorie Ottenberg fell in love 35 years ago backpacking to the tops of the highest peaks in the world.

Wallace is a Stanford educated engineer and Ottenberg is a former chemist and decades ago they came up with a water purification product for backpackers like themselves called Polar Pure out of their garage in Saratoga, Calif.

"For an old guy with nothing else to do, this is something that keeps us occupied," says Wallace.

Today, Wallace and Ottenberg are fighting the Drug Enforcement Administration and state officials to continue to operate their business. Why? The DEA says that drug dealers are using their product to make methamphetamine... 

From Reason Magazine 

What this couple is going through represents exactly what's wrong with the War On Drugs where you not just treat addicts the same as dealers, but you treat developers as the same as hard core criminals. 

What Bob Wallace and Marjorie Ottenberg are doing here is not even illegal under the U.S. Controlled Substance Act. What the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has hold them is that they can continue to produce their product, but just under Uncle Sam's control and rules that make it so expensive and hard for private developers to do any business in this country. 

Narcotic laws if you are going to have them at all, should target predators to prey on addicts and juveniles. Not developers who make a legal, legitimate product.