From the Springfield, IL State Journal-Register:
Southern Illinois family's syrup making mistaken for meth labDERP!
A southern Illinois family is finding their homemade maple syrup operation anything but sweet after investigators swarmed their property, mistaking their sap collection for a meth lab.
Laura Benson tells KFVS-TV that drug agents showed up at her home near Anna on Wednesday morning saying they fielded a report that a meth-making operation was on the Union County property.
When investigators pointed to buckets near some trees, 49-year-old Benson says she quickly explained the containers were collecting sap for the family's production of syrup.
The law enforcers quickly moved on, taking with them some homemade syrup the Bensons gave them.
Because ANYBODY who knows how to do something that involves more than driving to the mall and whipping out a credit card is now considered to be unusual and eccentric at the least, and subversive and illegal at the extreme.
I watch the periphery of the 'maker' movement and it always tickles me to see breathless articles where some pants-dragging Millennial discovers that you can melt plastic and saw wood and make things like it's a revelation.
Remember Heinlein's "one man's engineering is another man's magic"? It's like that
MC