Via the NYT: Cultural Differences Complicate a Georgia Drug Sting Operation

When they charged 49 convenience store clerks and owners in rural northwest Georgia with selling materials used to make methamphetamine, federal prosecutors declared that they had conclusive evidence. Hidden microphones and cameras, they said, had caught the workers acknowledging that the products would be used to make the drug.

But weeks of court motions have produced many questions. Forty-four of the defendants are Indian immigrants - 32, mostly unrelated, are named Patel - and many spoke little more than the kind of transactional English mocked in sitcoms.

So when a government informant told store clerks that he needed the cold medicine, matches and camping fuel to “finish up a cook,” some of them said they figured he must have meant something about barbecue.

To be honest, I study drug policy (although almost exclusively drugs that come from outside of the country) and I was unaware that referring to “a cook” was meth-talk. How in the world would an immigrant working in a convenience store know drug slang? Having lived in another country, and even been more fluent in Spanish than your typical convenience store worker is in English, I had a hard time dealing with idiom and slang. I frequently had to rely on context to work out the meaning of a word, and forget double meaning of words. If I were at the local Circle K in line to pay for gas and a dude was buying Sudafed, charcoal and aluminum foil and he mentioned something about “a cook” I would assume he was having a cook out and he had a sinus headache. (At least I would have so done prior to reading this article).

And to re-state, the language issue is quite key here. If you are going to jail someone over all of this, it seems that it is quite unfair to do so over what may well be lack of understanding:

In some cases, the language barriers seem obvious - one videotape shows cold medicine stacked next to a sign saying, “Cheek your change befor you leave a counter.” Investigators footnoted court papers to explain that the clue the informants dropped most often - that they were doing “a cook” - is a “common term” meth makers use. Lawyers argue that if the courts could not be expected to understand what this meant, neither could immigrants with a limited grasp of English. [Indeed-Ed.]

“This is not even slang language like ‘gonna,’ ‘wanna,’ ” said Malvika Patel, who spent three days in jail before being cleared this month. ” ‘Cook’ is very clear; it means food.” And in this context, she said, some of the items the government wants stores to monitor would not set off any alarms. “When I do barbecue, I have four families. I never have enough aluminum foil.”

What I find highly problematic about all of this (which is linked to the whole business about limiting law-abiding access to pseuodephedrine), is that because catching the methheads in their meth labs is hard, that law enforcement focuses on legal products and innocent citizens:

“This is the first time I heard this - I don’t know how to pronounce - this meta-meta something,” said Hajira Ahmed, whose husband is in jail pending charges that he sold cold medicine and antifreeze at their convenience store on a winding road near the Tennessee border.

I don’t have a problem trying to control access to this stuff, if done in a reasonable fashion, and I don’t mind if the police want vendors to report unusual activity, but 7-11, Wal*Mart and such aren’t law enforcement entities (but, of course, defining “reasonable” is difficult).

The case of Operation Meth Merchant illustrates another difficulty for law enforcement officials fighting methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug that can be made with ordinary grocery store items.

Many states, including Georgia, have recently enacted laws restricting the sale of common cold medicines like Sudafed, and nationwide, the police are telling merchants to be suspicious of sales of charcoal, coffee filters, aluminum foil and Kitty Litter. Walgreens agreed this week to pay $1.3 million for failing to monitor the sale of over-the-counter cold medicine that was bought by a methamphetamine dealer in Texas.

There are some anecdotes in the story that may indicate wrongdoing by some of these convenience store owners/workers, but the whole thing makes me very uncomfortable–the criminals are the guys making, selling and using meth–not some immigrants working hard to try and provide for their families. Trying to turn store clerks into some sort of front-line defense against drug traffickers is ridiculous. I can see putting Sudafed behind the counter, and I can even see curtailing the amount one can buy, but if we are talking about anti-freeze, aluminum foil, charcoal, kitty liter, coffee filters and the like, I mean please–it isn’t reasonable to expect people making near minimum wage to be the guardians of society against meth labs.

Aside from execution, the worst thing that a government can do is imprison someone. Not only does it violate their basic human freedom, but it disrupts their lives and the economic viability of their families. So, if we are going to jail people, it should be done for the right reasons. In this case it seems that police are overly zealous is getting “somebody” over the clear problem that is meth, so they are going after the easy target. The criminals here are the guys making the meth, not the guys selling tinfoil–yet, 49 store clerks were jailed.