Baking soda menace

Science Fair season at the elementary schools. Outside his home, a young boy runs final testing on his papier mâché volcano, complete with baking soda/vinegar eruption. A police cruiser happens by. The boy is 10 years old, too young to have come by baking soda legally. A jittery cop, a panicked kid. Shots are fired and childhood wonderment spills onto the city street like dropped pineapple chicken. Impossible? Not if a St. Louis, Missouri legislator gets his way.

Rep. Talibdin El-Amin has introduced a bill that would require presentation of a photo ID, as well name and address registration of people who buy baking soda. In El-Amin’s head, this is the crippling move the war on drugs needs to halt the production of crack.

While drugs containing pseudoephedrine, used in meth manufacturing, are tightly regulated in the state, critics say doing the same thing with baking soda is quite different—and not just because baking soda isn’t necessary to make crack.

As St Louis-division DEA Special Agent Tom Murphy points out, a list of baking soda users “pretty much includes everyone.”

The bill has yet to come under committee consideration.

by Scott Saxon