In the 1980s, 88-year-old California dreamer Bob Wallace invented Polar Pure: a plastic bottle that contains crystallized iodine at the bottom to purify water. Flood victims and campers love the things, but so do meth cooks (an outcome that Wallace probably should have anticipated).

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and California regulators, meth cooks use the iodine to produce crystal meth, which they sell to meth users—who inevitably put on Oakland Raiders jackets, scratch their arms and faces bloody, get arrested, and end up on Faces of Meth (usually in that order). Okay, that's BAD, but don't most people who buy Polar Pures use them to avoid diarrhea and dehydration when they go backpacking or get stranded after storms? Perhaps today that's true, but what about tomorrow? Concerned about Tomorrow, the feds have declared the Polar Pure to be a meth-making tool and won't allow Wallace to buy the iodine or receive the permits he needs to continue making the bottles. And so now his business is ruined.

Hey now, don't blame the DEA. The agency had nothing to do with Wallace's problems:

"Methamphetamine is an insidious drug that causes enormous collateral damage," wrote Barbara Carreno, a DEA spokeswoman. "If Mr. Wallace is no longer in business he has perhaps become part of that collateral damage, for it was not a result of DEA regulations, but rather the selfish actions of criminal opportunists. Individuals that readily sacrifice human lives for money."

Under that line of thinking, all other potential meth ingredients should be abolished as well. These include:

Matches

Drano

Rubbing alcohol

Coffee filters

Paint thinner

Table salt (you can see this ingredient in the above photo)

The feds should also ban plastic soda bottles, jars, and pretty much every other vessel used to sell food and beverages, because any of them could be turned into meth cookware by anyone, at any time. Your newborn could be building a lab out of your discarded Mountain Dew jugs at this very moment! If you happen to own any bottles or jars, or any of the items that appear in the above list, please throw them away immediately before they seduce you or your baby into using them for meth-making purposes.

[Mercury News. Image via AP]