The police probably can’t demonstrate reasonable suspicion for a car search based on somebody not turning on headlights as they leave a parking lot.
I’ve encountered two different types of police responses when I’ve done that. One (mainly from older cops) is “Hey, you forgot to turn on your headlights.” The other (mainly from younger cops with too much unused testosterone) is to get aggressive and harassing for no obvious reason. “Maybe you left your lights off cause you’re drunk or hiding something!” Both happened when I was younger, with a beard that was not yet gray and an old van that had a light switch that made it easy to turn on just the running lights without actually turning on the headlights, which you wouldn’t notice in a brightly lit parking lot or under streetlights.
Thankfully my parents were more level-headed about my childish eccentricities.
I, to my delight, discovered that(at least at the time) some major supplier of modified starches for culinary applications had a web site and shipped free samples on request. For some project I forget now, I was looking for a variety of ‘gel/jello’ type effects; but more varied than I could get from just the store-bought stuff. I leapt at the opportunity.
About a week later, a more or less anonymous looking cardboard box arrived, containing 6 plastic jars of fine white powder, 1 pound each, with labels that had been laser printed but hand applied, obviously a short run item. My parents got to the package first. As it turns out, the trade names for food starches do not…always set the mind at ease…(“Purity Cloud 21-D” FDA approved ingredient most likely to share a name with a white supremacist biological weapon? We report, you decide!).
Thankfully, they accepted my(true) explanation of the contents being simple modified starches for some texture tweaking I was working on.
That’s the point I was making above. If you extract or isolate just about anything, it looks like some crystals. Powder and shards differ only in size. Some might be pink, blue, yellow, or some other shade - but most things, once you isolate and purify them, just look like some white/clear crystals with no identifying characteristics. There is no practical way to say that it looks like meth, when meth itself doesn’t distinctly look like anything. It’s just another transparent instance of cops ignoring facts because they hope to score a bust.
It’s a US legal contrivance of the “war on drugs”. Many drug charges are automatically classified as violent crimes even if there was no violence nor any weapons involved. This is rationalized in unclear ways by saying that drugs are somehow inherently linked to violence, that police need to suspect that the people concerned are armed anyway, or that other interested parties in the area make the arrests more dangerous than usual. It’s basically a crock of BS which they use to exaggerate the bail and to tack extra charges and penalties onto.
How exactly do you buy prescription vitamins (?) in an unmarked bag? I guess it could be a thing, but the vendor should definitely review its procedures – but if they’re selling vitamins for shoulder pain, what sort of establishment could it be? (Come to think of it, I bought a bag of creatine once, and even the people in the shop jokingly referred to it as “cocaine”. But then, I’m not in the US.)
Of course, one would also expect the police to recognize the need to review their field-testing practices.
That presumes that propaganda needs be positive, which is not at all the case. Modern propaganda aims to create fear an mental instability, and even to make it difficult to discern what is true and what is a lie.
Don’t know a lot about it, because I’ve never done it, but you can buy vitamins in powder form in bulk online. I would think that the bag would have some kind of markings though.
I had the same thing happen to me in Savannah, GA. Had a massive headache and nothing in the house to take for it. Rode over to the Parker’s Market on Drayton and bought some aspirin. When I pulled out of the parking lot, I forgot my headlights and was pulled over immediately upon leaving the lot. Standard questions from the officers (were you drinking, etc., etc.). They asked to search my car and I said “good luck” and popped the trunk (my car was a complete mess). Then they sent my on my way.
I would assume he bought it in bulk from the store - like scoping it into an unmarked bag to be measured by the cashier. I’m surprised the police didn’t ask for a receipt, but maybe that was too easy.
I’m not an expert on all matters medical distribution channel; but my understanding is that(in the US) you actually have pretty wide latitude.
For convenience sake, lots of drugs, OTC and prescription, come in little sealed bottles with printed labels and foil seals and whatnot. Others(presumably the stuff where varying dosages/quantities per day make a small number of package types impractical) are dispensed as individual pills into little pharmacy pill bottles. If they aren’t pills(liquids, filled syringes, powders, etc. those get measured out and packaged up. And that’s at the standard pharmacy. The ‘compounding’ pharmacies, that mix preparations from ingredients to order have wide latitude, mostly dictated by controlled substance laws and/or getting caught on some really egregious hygeniene/quality control issue. If it’s sold as a ‘supplement’, even that generally gets a pass.
A bag of anonymous looking powder would be mildly atypical, if only because most pharmacies would slap it in a branded bag; but would hardly be an illicit distribution channel(if QA and weights and measures were being adhered to).
A friend gave me a tablespoon of Metamucil in a baggie for my cat (if cats don’t poop for several days, it’s very bad for them). Imagine the fun the police would have had with that.
In Dallas, several years ago, a good number of people were arrested for having what turned out to be ground up gypsum hidden in their cars. The “drugs” were planted as part of a scheme that involved payments by the city of up to $1k for tip on drug dealers. Nearly everyone who was arrested was poor, and took a deal rather than go to trial.
I immediately thought of the jar of crystallized vitamin C in my kitchen. If I dumped half of it into a sandwich bag, for travel purposes, I could very easily see an outcome like the one described.
Why would a printed label make any difference to a cop? If it did, illicit drug distributors would just package everything in bags marked “Vitamin C” or “Instant Water” or whatever.
I wouldn’t say that’s a presumption implied by my comment, but an endless parade of BB article touting how awesome life in the Unites States is would qualify as a form of propaganda, whether it’s accompanied by articles explaining why I should be afraid of foreigners or not.
