Prison Bars

With a just a little more technical know-how, cajones of steel, and the right connections, I could have become the Bill Gates of the illicit drug trade. Let me explain why I believe this could have been.

During a meeting recently, I was having a conversation with a woman who is very entrepreneurial. I often like people who are entrepreneurial, though I frequently come to loathe them shortly thereafter for their deep Republican views and their psychopathic love of material things. But that's beside the point.

This woman and I were chatting about Internet wonders who had made a killing by introducing bad ideas, selling them quickly as raw brilliance, and then taking the money and getting out before reality set in. I offered my own concept of something that might have the potential of making me a very wealthy and very wanted man. The way this particular idea came about, incidentally, was that she mentioned something about an news story about someone who had been caught making and selling crystal meth, after he had made an enormous pot of money. He was doing it the old fashioned way. I had an idea.

"What about this," I said. "Meth, as I understand it, is very easy to make with readily available products, right? People seem to get caught when the meth labs blow up or catch fire. What if you were to minimize the risk of spontaneous combustion on your premises and, even better, have the product made directly by the end user? What if you changed the entire business model for drug distribution? What if you really turned it on its ear?!"

By this time, my mind was in overdrive, dreaming up all sorts of ways to take manufacturing technology into the 24th century. "Imagine this. You carefully and safely prepackage the individual chemical ingredients that today's meth labs mix. But instead of mixing them and risk explosions and fire, you create a device that will allow the end-user to do that."

I went on to describe, as best I could, the way ink-jet printers work> They mix the black ink and the magenta and yellow and blue, using precise instructions delivered to the printer by the computer, using printer-driver instructions unique to that printer. "What if our little device mixed the meth components with similar precision and, instead of jetting the ink onto a page, the device jets the mixed chemicals into a little packet desiged to capture and seal them?"

"We could call it the Meth-Jet," I said. "We could distribute it only to prequalified buyers and we'd only sell over the Internet."

"We could establish assembly plants for the Meth-Jet devices all over the country. We'd exhibit it at trade shows for more "mainstream" products. There's no question there would be other uses than for meth production," I enthused. "We could quickly leave the modest risk of imprisonment behind us as we mainstreamed the product and began collecting royalties, which would of course be sent to our offshore accounts"

As I finally returned to my surroundings from the flight of fancy in which I had been engaged, I saw that my acquaintance was looking at me with wide eyes and a sense of stark terror about her. She laughed nervously and cleared her throat, saying "Yeah, that sounds like a plan. Let me know how it goes. I have to catch a plane." With that, she turned and walked away, wheeling her carry-on bag behind her.

Oh, well. I didn't really want to take the risk, anyway. But I did think it was a clever idea. And when I learn that someone has taken it and run with it, I'll be annoyed with myself. But I'll be on the outside of the prison bars.