DEA: Fascists without the Jack Boots

A good summary of recent 'war on drugs' outrages.  Why anyone supports these violent, extraconstitutional thugs is beyond me.  An excerpt:

In a story that would be touching in the ordinary context, an 88 year old man and his 85 year old girlfriend built a portable water purification business from a dream to a reality. Nothing wrong there; such things are supposed to be part of the American Dream.

But now, their business is being ruined by one of the most unaccountable and tyrannical bureaucracies in the history of government, the DEA:

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.
The DEA says meth heads are interested in Polar Pure’s key ingredient, iodine crystals.
Too lazy to go after the meth heads, they have to go after perfectly legitimate business, destroying the dream of two honest elderly Americans. You don’t have to be opposed to the Drug War to be opposed to such tyranny.
Wallace and Ottenberg’s business will of course be ruined, because they cannot possibly comply with the laws demands that they pay huge regulatory fees, plus “register with the state and feds, report any suspicious activity and keep track of each and ever person who bought a bottle of their product.”  Nor can their customers, which included camping stores and online outlets that stocked their product. They are being wiped out, and the DEA dismissively calls this “collateral damage”:
Instead of dealing with the new regulations they just dropped the product, effectively killing Wallace and Ottenberg’s business.
“Any time you deal with a government it’s a hassle,” says Ottenberg.
A spokeswoman for the DEA told the San Jose Mercury News that Wallace was “collateral damage.”