Last and least linkable is the front page story on Wall Street Journal today about the booming heroin trade out of Afghanistan. The Afghans used to just grow the poppies, but now they’re doing the whole process in house. Just making it up as they go along. Guys out in the absolute epitome of BFE using wood burning fires to cook the junk and electrix mixers plugged into god knows what to stir the junk up.
It’s the contraptions that stick in my mind. The mixers and the guys crossing the border into Tajikistan via sea (one guy with twenty bags of skag floating down a river for days on an inner tube) and by air (another guy rigged into a machine that uses a propeller to blow air into an open parachute. He climbs up a mountain, revs the thing up like a Toro mower, and then jumps off the mountain. What the crap.) It beats cubicle life.
