Dangers of Iodine and Old Folks

A friend of mine sent me the following story after reading a posting here:

I looked up your new blog and thought you would appreciate (perhaps not the right word) this (outrageous but true) story.

In December, my grandparents got raided by a SWAT team. Not kidding.

Someone knocked on the door in the middle of the day, and my grandfather went to answer it. It was an FBI agent (or maybe an ATF agent, I can't remember). He showed my grandfather his ID, and simultaneously ten or fifteen men appeared all around him, guns drawn. (They had left their vehicles way up on the main road, hidden.)

The agent drew my grandfather outside into the driveway while the men in their flak jackets swarmed into the house. They went back and got my 91-year-old grandmother out of her bedroom and put her under guard in the driveway too, while they searched every inch of the house.

Pretty scary for my grandparents (who don't even get traffic tickets).

Why did they do this?

My grandparents live by a lake. They have a water system, that draws water for the house out of the lake. Every house on their street has an individual lake water system. My grandparents' water system (which they built with the house) uses iodine to purify the water. (Most systems built today use chlorine instead.)

For 45 years, my grandfather has regularly bought iodine, which he puts into the water equipment each month. (Very small amounts, mind you.) In recent years, as iodine has become increasingly hard to find at hardware stores and such, he has been ordering the iodine by mail order. Last fall, the supplier he was ordering from stopped carrying iodine. He found another mail-order supplier, and ordered the usual amount of iodine.

Apparently the fact that he had ordered a small amount of iodine was enough to give the feds reason to believe he was running a meth lab. (I thought you needed *probable* cause for a warrant? I could be wrong.)

There appears to have been no investigation done beforehand. No questioning or inquiries, no checking with the neighbors, certainly no surveillance - or the authorities would have seen that the only traffic in and out of my grandparents' driveway was two very elderly people going out together to the grocery store occasionally, and some weekends a minivan of great-grandchildren arriving for a visit.

The SWAT team found no meth lab or anything else of note in their search, and the leader was apparently quite apologetic to my grandparents. Just following orders, you know. Had to check it out.

Needless to say, my grandparents arranged to have a whole new water system installed pretty quickly. They use chlorine now.

Who knew elderly people could just buy vials of iodine on the open market? Think what they could have done with it! Fear not, law enforcement is on the job.

What price do we pay for the "War on Drugs"? Perhaps just as steep a price as we pay for the "War on Terror". We pay with our freedom and our dignity. How can we claim to be the land of the free and home of the brave? We have become a country so addicted to affluence that we have sacrificed both freedom and bravery in favour of our 72 inch flat screen televisions.