"You should have come and visited our neighbors," my friend says cheerfully when I mention I'm writing about methamphetamine labs. "We had one across the street. But you missed it," her husband tells me with a sigh. "That nice young couple moved in." My eyes widen and I resist the urge to run across the street and knock on the neighbor's door and shout: Get out, as quick as you can! If anyone should be alarmed by the idea of a meth facility within spitting distance of their 3-year-old daughter's front yard, then it should my friends -- a professional environmentalist and a woodworker/contractor. [continues 981 words]
"It was a nightmare," says landlady Kyla Brooke of renting out a house in West Sonoma County. "They completely trashed the house -- they covered the floors with plastic, changed the electricity, added fans. They were pouring corrosive chemicals down the pipes. In the end, the walls were covered with mold. And then they threatened to sue us -- for mold." She pauses. "It had been a house in mint condition. If my husband hadn't been a contractor -- the damage they did would have cost us $25,000 or more." [continues 1304 words]
Why are reporters, those vigilant guardians of constitutional freedoms, cravenly unzipping themselves for drug testing? Fifteen years ago if you presented your prospective employer with a plastic cup brimming with your fresh, warm piss, chances are you might not land the job. Now such ritual offerings of bodily fluid are not only acceptable but practically mandatory as pre-employment drug testing spreads like a urine stain throughout our corporate culture. It isn't difficult to imagine why a company like Exxon -- with a disaster like the Valdez oil spill tarnishing its history -- would institute a strict drug-screening policy among its safety-sensitive workers. Or even a traditional consumer company like Clorox, whose corporate culture tends to mirror its product: all-American, old-fashioned and homogeneous. But the fact that drug testing has become almost ubiquitous at newspapers -- those bastions of free speech and individual rights -- is pretty damn strange. [continues 2010 words]
