Meth trash? That goes in the blue bin, right?

We’re always a little behind the curve when it comes to controlling dangerous-stuff-while-driving behavior.

We wait until a lot of cars blow up (Corvair, Pinto) or take off on their own (Toyota) or roll over (early SUVs) before we regulate ‘em. We get all pissy toward people (Ralph Nader in the ’60s) who try to help us stay safe (seat belts).

We’re weak-kneed when it comes to regulating things that any fool can see are dangerous, such as texting and talking on cells while driving. Some states with new laws against the latter are just handing out warnings to folks who work out of their cars, like on-the-road salespeople. Oh, please. Unless you’re a mobile day-trader, there is no job that won’t allow you to pull over for 4 minutes and make a call.

Now, according to Susan Saulny in  The New York Times, there’s a lot of meth cooking going on in back seats. Of moving cars.

What better way to stay under the radar, so to speak? You buy such small amounts of pseudoephedrine that no alarms go off at the store, and you cook it in the car, where nosy neighbors don’t get suspicious and turn you in. As long as you keep within the speed limits, wear your seatbelts and are not on the phone, the stretched-too-thin cops might miss the fact that you and your smurfer buddies are making–and indulging–in product. And then tossing the resulting trash out the window.

That meth-littering is the main point of the NYT story. And my only hope is that here in the Pacific Northwest, at least, people will nip this activity in the bud.  In this part of the world we are on trash like, well, flies on trash.

In Portland especially, we sort it. Boy, do we sort it. Our coffee grounds are composting before we set the mug down; our old tires are sneakers. I bought a sun hat the other day thinking it was straw. Wrong, it was made of recycled phone books. People here are terrified of losing daily newspapers, not because they read ‘em, but because they can be turned into bricks and then sports stadiums. (I made that last thing up, but it’s almost the truth.)

If there’s a new kind of trash in town, we’ll find a way to spin it into something else. And, in a couple of years, we’ll have a law on the books that forbids cooking in the back seat. Of course, by then it will have moved to light-rail cars.