Grandma's First Aid Kit: Another Casualty of the War On Drugs

A friend of mine who works at a local grocery store was recently complaining how he had to keep ordering iodine as they were suddenly running out. Seeing how this product was one of those bottom-shelf items that usually expire before anyone actually buys them, it did seem a tad odd.

I told him my experience with iodine was that it seemed like only people born before 1940 had it in their medicine cabinets. And, if memory serves, the bottle almost always seemed just as old. If you had a scrape, it depended on whose house you were at when it came to treatment. Mom used Bactine, Grandma iodine. It was one of the rare times a kid actually wished they were at home instead of their grandparents.

So could it be that once in a generation time when grandmothers everywhere decide to finally replace that decades-old bottle with some new tincture of iodine? Or, perhaps, was it some rogue mountain climbers looking to save a few dollars.

Besides stinging the hell out of kids' scraped knees, iodine is also a world class water purifier. My brother and I spent a week in the backwoods of Kings Canyon National Park drinking liter bottles of tell-tale yellow-tint water courtesy of Potable Aqua tablets. It was great at killing the giardia. Of course, it also was great at killing the fresh taste of mountain spring water too, despite the addition of the "Plus" tablet. After five days in, and slowly going mad fighting mosquitoes and drinking a water that couldn't quench a thirst, we found a ranger with a jar of Gatorade powder. One Backpacker's Pantry Chicken w/Rice later, I had acquired enough powder for two liters of lemon-lime electrolytes. Nothing tasted sweeter.

But, let's face it, even the most dirtbag-oriented mountaineer wouldn't need more than a bottle for even an entire season on the Pacific Crest trail. So what else could explain the great iodine run?

How about tweekers, I joked.

But, alas, the joke was on us. It turns out iodine is an essential ingredient in the production of hydriodic acid, "the preferred reagent in the ephedrine/pseudoephedrine reduction method of d-methamphetamine production the cooking of meth," according to the National Drug Intelligence Center. And while industrial iodine crystals are the preferred form, bathroom cookers can make their own, albeit inefficiently, with bottles of iodine tincture and hydrogen peroxide.

A few days later, all six freshly-stocked bottles were gone before his shift was done. Needless to say, no clerk rang up a posse of little old ladies looking to replenish their first aid kits.

So the end result?

Iodine moved behind the pharmacist's window, where you now have to ask for it, and "sales" have returned to their usual tepid pace. Oh, and demand for hydrogen peroxide has also mysteriously slumped.