Reuse, repurpose, recycle: it’s a mantra we’re all hearing these days, whether we want to or not. And, while there are some who claim that all the hype over going green is just that — “hype” — most of us realize that it makes financial sense to reuse what you can, rather than shelling out for more stuff.

But when it comes to those Priority Mail boxes from the U.S. Post Office, that’s a big no-no. Not even if you strip off the labels. Not even if you turn the thing inside out and re-tape it before mailing, so that only the brown cardboard side shows. Such recycling might get you slapped with charges of “misusing postal service property” (even though you pay postage to mail it), as one Colorado man has recently learned.

“Our Priority Mail and Express Mail boxes are, bottom line, supposed to be used for that service,” said Nicole Reiter with the Postal Service. “That is what they are intended to be used for.”

The Postal Service said it promotes recycling, as long as customers pay accordingly, even if the box is turned inside out.

“It is important that the customer uses it for the proper service,” said Reiter. Reiter said customers sometimes order their priority and express mail boxes online and then try to use them standard mail. She said that makes it difficult for the USPS to determine which boxes are new or reused.

According to a Post Office spokesperson, the ban against recycling helps keep postal rates “low” for everyone.

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Ever wonder what kind of mentoring advice such diverse personalities as Alan Greenspan and Charles Manson would give a 10-year-old kid who’s thinking about dropping out of school? So did “pop-culture historian” Bill Geerhart, who posed as “Billy” and wrote them both, along with several other notable names.

From serial killer Richard Ramirez, known as The Night Stalker came an odd request for a photo:

Billy,
Greetings. Got your letter. What school do you go to? Who’s your friend? You should stay in school. Send pictures.
Richard

(Ramirez later requested photos of Asian girls… but without “scenery”.)

The Unabomber, Ted Kacynzski, sounded surprisingly sane as he noted “I can’t advise you whether to drop out of school, because I don’t know anything about you…whatever you decide to do, I wish you the best of luck.”

Erik Menendez, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of his parents, apparently has a rather busy schedule in California’s Pleasant Valley Prison but that doesn’t stop him from trying to help a kid.

Dear Billy,
I apologize for the length of time it has taken me to respond. That will not happen again. […] It is hard for me to imagine that you should drop out of school. Fill me in some more on the details of your life.

I am here and would like to listen to you and do what I can to help you Billy. But I really need to know more about you. No need to send stamps or that sort of thing. Thank you though Billy.
Your Friend,
Erik

When “Billy” wrote to Alan Greenspan in search of advice about the fastest way to save up money for a speedboat, the then-Federal Reserve Chairman was apparently too busy to write back himself. His assistant (who kindly enclosed a photo of the unphotogenic Greenspan) explained in a neatly-typed letter that it’s never too soon to begin saving since “the longer you have to invest your savings the higher the return will be.”

And notorious, freakazoid serial killer Charles Manson’s advice? It’s as freaky as you’d expect.

Find out why the L.A. Times hasn’t sent my newspaper —Charles Manson.
P.S. O-yes HI BILLY
Easy easy EASSY

(Manson also attached the mysterious picture of a barn.)

I bet you don’t remember this —you dont [sic] even know where its [sic] at. HAHA. I got you there.
Charles Manson
Easy BILLY

But things get really interesting when Geerhart writes back 9 years later and tells Charles Manson he not only stayed in school but wants to become a prosecutor. Read it at Radar Magazine and be glad they haven’t let that sick bastard out.

Next time you’re strolling along in Wal-Mart, or any other store for that matter, make sure you’re wearing underwear.

Why?

Because, you see, once inside a store you have no reasonable expectation of keeping your privates private. Not even if you’re a teenage girl being surreptitiously photographed by a strange man.

OKLAHOMA CITY — A man accused of using a camera to take pictures under the skirt of an unsuspecting 16-year-old girl at a Tulsa store did not commit a crime, a state appeals court has ruled.

The state Court of Criminal Appeals voted 4-1 in favor of Riccardo Gino Ferrante, who was arrested in 2006 for situating a camera underneath the girl’s skirt at a Target store and taking photographs.

Ferrante, now 34, was charged under a “Peeping Tom” statute that requires the victim to be “in a place where there is a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy.” Testimony indicated he followed the girl, knelt down behind her and placed the camera under her skirt.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t in a million years think that, merely by stepping foot into a store, I’d somehow surrendered my right to exclude people from peeking at my panties.

Which kind of makes me wish those judges would stroll into Wal-Mart wearing their robes and see how they felt about someone sticking a cell phone beneath them to snap a few shots.

Twenty-seven years ago, Kazuyoshi Miura and his wife were shot in a Los Angeles car park. He was shot in the leg. She was shot in the head. Miura accompanied his injured wife back to Japan where she died a year later from her injuries. Naturally, the media was outraged that the couple had been so cruelly victimized in LaLa Land.

But then evidence implicating Miura began to surface. He’d taken on both a mistress and a huge life-insurance policy on his wife. He’d also, it turns out, had attempted to hire a friend to attack his wife with a hammer while they were staying in a hotel.

Not surprisingly, he was arrested and, since he lived in Japan at the time, was tried there for his crimes. The trial court convicted him but the conviction was overturned on appeal because, back then, Japanese law required a confession and Miura maintained he was innocent. He wound up serving time for attempted murder in connection with the botched hit-for-hire attack.

You might think that would be the end of it, but you’d be wrong.

Miura, it turns out, mentioned on his blog that he planned to do some business travel to a U.S. territory… where he’d never been tried for his crime. Not surprisingly, his lawyer advised against such travel but Miura didn’t listen. Now he’s facing trial for murder in the U.S. and here the Japanese court action doesn’t serve to trigger double jeopardy laws.

Anyone want to bet he blows off that lawyer’s bill?

Life is a stage for smokers at a bar in Lake Mille Lacs, Minnesota, and they’re all merely players. That’s the clever way the bar owners are getting around the state’s anti-smoking measure which provides a loophole for theatrical performances.

Ergo, on Saturday nights, the bar itself becomes a stage for a theatrical production, its patrons are actors, and the cigarettes in their hands are props.

Co-owner Sheila Kromer says business had been down and she wanted to test the law.

“Several of the legislators said, ‘You know, you’ve got to be innovative. Come up with something to get the people in your bar.’ Right? OK. What’s wrong with a theater night? Is that not being creative?” Kromer said.

I love it.

The law capping Medicaid’s nursing home benefits for senior citizens at $35 per day was created back in the 1980s. During that same time, inflation has nearly doubled. As a result, that $35 just doesn’t stretch far anymore, which means many low-income senior citizens in nursing homes are spending their “golden years” in misery.

Florida state Rep. Rick Kriseman has a plan to fix that by encouraging people to frequent strip clubs more often and buy more lap dances.

Kind of.

The proposed law, House Bill 751, would create a sales tax on “adult entertainment services” that would be fed to low-income nursing homes, the Sun reported. These funds would defray the cost of some services for senior citizens, including haircuts and trips to the movies.

Men throughout Florida may very well have good cause to rejoice if this Bill passes. After all, how can a wife complain when her husband announces he’s going to do something nice for his mother-in-law by stepping out for a quick lap dance?

Christopher Lee McCuin apparently has Hannibal Lecter’s tastes. Earlier this week the 25-year-old man from Tyler, Texas was arraigned on capital murder charges involving the death — and suspected consumption — of his girlfriend, Jana Shearer. He left the body for his mother to find in her garage.

But that’s not all he left at Mommy’s house:

Sheriff J. B. Smith said investigators found Ms. Shearer’s body with chunks of flesh cut out, one ear boiling in a pot of water on the stove and a plate of human flesh with a fork on the kitchen table in his mother’s brick home….

As if those facts weren’t drawing enough attention, PETA (the animal-rights activist group) wants to make sure McCuin never gets to indulge his apparent taste for flesh again. They’ve petitioned the jail demanding a vegetarian diet for McCuin, saying that it’s up to the Sheriff to keep McCuin from “contributing to any more suffering and death.” Moreover, PETA Vice President Bruce Friedrich warned, the consumption of meat might make McCuin commit further violence.

To his credit, the Sheriff’s response to PETA at least appeared to take them seriously. He cited the Texas Commission on Jail Standards which has strict guidelines for the care and feeding of prisoners, even cannibals. Absent a medical reason, he explained, prison officials may not intentionally alter a prisoner’s meal.

But it wasn’t easy, Sheriff J.B. Smith said. “I kind’ve said ‘pfft’ in a very nice way.”

Very professional. I, personally, would’ve used a different four-letter word than pfft.

The records surrounding 47-year-old Lori Drew’s cyberbullying of Megan Meier on MySpace, which eventually led to the young girl’s suicide, have purportedly been subpoenaed as part of an effort to determine whether Internet fraud was involved.

The LA Times reports that a grand jury has begun issuing subpoenas to establish whether Lori Drew defrauded MySpace by creating providing false information when creating the account she used to pose as “Josh”, a supposedly 13-year-old boy who first wooed then dumped Megan online.

Prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, however, are exploring the possibility of charging Drew with defrauding the MySpace social networking website by allegedly creating the false account, according to the sources, who insisted on anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

The sources said prosecutors are looking at federal wire fraud and cyber fraud statutes as they consider the case. Prosecutors believe they have jurisdiction because MySpace is headquartered in Beverly Hills, the sources said.

Prosecutors have declined to comment on the subpoenas which came as a surprise to Megan’s mother, Tina Meier. “We’ve been begging for someone — anyone — to pick up this case,” she told the LA Times. “If the Drews can be charged — and even get the chance to be convicted — it would be a day I could be happy with.”

Lori Drew maintains that she is neither responsible for Megan’s suicide nor the author of the message which prompted the girl to take her own life. She contends that she is, in fact, a victim of online harassment now and has been petitioning Google to shut down a blog entitled “Megan Had It Coming” which claims to be authored by Lori Drew.

Missouri officials did not file charges against Drew over the matter claiming that, although offensive, it violated no laws.

In response to last month’s fatal shooting at a Hooters in Tennessee, lawmaker think they have come up with a nifty way to ensure such things never happen again.

They want to make it lawful to carry a gun in establishments serving alcohol.

Oh, but there’s no need to worry that someone might get all liquored up and start shooting, folks, because the bill says you can’t touch the firewater if you’re packing heat. Besides, restaurant owners can post signs telling people that guns aren’t allowed.

Of course, that pretty much assumes that people in Tennessee can actually read….

The FBI is compiling the world’s largest repository of fingerprint, face, iris and palm scans, purportedly as part of its effort to help catch criminals and terrorists. The project, which carries a $1 billion price tag, will allow law enforcement worldwide to more readily identify and, presumably, apprehend bad guys.

But they’re not the only ones who’ll have access to the data.

At an employer’s request, the FBI will retain employee fingerprints and notify the employer if a worker has an encounter with law enforcement. As Wired points out, that’s the kind of service you’d expect from a private company, not from a tax-funded agency. Not even the courts or police bother to notify employers if their workers are charged with criminal activity, and yet the FBI is offering to perform this service regardless of whether someone’s been charged, much less convicted.

There’s no need to fear, says Thomas E. Bush III, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division. The FBI has “strict laws” regulating those who can access information stored in the system and, in case that’s not enough, they audit agencies with access every three years. Meanwhile, individuals can ask for copies of what’s in the system.

But what if the information in the system is not accurate? Well, the last time anyone raised that challenge it involved the National Crime Information Center database, which the FBI said was exempt from the Privacy Act’s accuracy requirements.

Pardon me while I go dust off my brown coat.

Thanks to a bill passed by Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006, any Massachusetts residents without health insurance by midnight tonight will lose their personal tax exemption of $219.

But wait, there’s more!

When the new year begins Tuesday, most residents who remain uninsured will face monthly fines that could total as much as $912 for individuals and $1,824 for couples by the end of 2008, according to penalty guidelines unveiled by the Department of Revenue on Monday.

The penalties are based on the cost of insurance plans available and are due as part of the 2009 tax return. According to lawmakers, only adults “deemed able to afford health insurance by the Health Insurance Connector Authority” will be fined.

The good news is that uninsured Massachusetts residents probably won’t need colonoscopies since the government will have already done a rather thorough job while it was up there, anyway.

Japanese prison inmates aren’t happy. Believe it or not, they’re complaining about too much rice and noodles and not enough bread. But that’s not the end of their list of grievances:

Japanese prisoners dislike their unstylish pajamas, feel their cells are too small and want better meals, a government survey has found.

See, that is the difference between Japanese prisons and those here in the U.S. where our inmates all complain about being in jail because they’re innocent.

A recent shooting outside of a Hooters “restaurant” has all sorts of folks up in arms. A man leaving the place was killed by gunshot while the manager, originally listed in critical condition, remains in the hospital.

Police are searching for a suspect with a rather uninteresting description, depending on where you come from:

Authorities said he is white with a dark complexion, is missing his front four teeth and is believed to be in his late 20s to early 30s and about 150 to 160 pounds. The unshaven gunman had a short ponytail. He had large-gauge earrings and double-pierced ears. He also wore rings on each finger as well as several necklaces, according to Knoxville police.

He wore dark blue, baggy jeans, black boots, and a black hoody with a white stitching pattern. He carried a large black backpack.

I’d started to call in a report about half of the male population of the town in which I live, but then saw that the shooting was in Tennessee.

That would explain why the man wasn’t described as having a mullet.

Or, maybe it doesn’t.

These days, I can hardly open my newsreader without finding yet another story about some company closing its doors or filing for bankruptcy. The latest? Harvey Electronics, which manufacturers status symbol electronics under the Bang & Olufsen name.

Good grief. If fancy-schmancy brand names like that one, favored by those folks capable of living off only the interest from their investments without ever touching the principal, can go belly up, then nothing is safe anymore.

Take my online brokerage, E-Trade, for instance. Shares in the company plunged last month after news of its poor earnings, and analysts quickly pointed out that bankruptcy couldn’t be ruled out. You can’t imagine the speed with which I sold my shares and withdrew our money.

VH duly lectured me on the transaction, claiming that I was too risk adverse, that it’s people like me who contributed to the stock market crash precipitating the Great Depression, and that no doubt someone would bail out E-Trade. He was right on at least one of those counts: Citadel bailed the brokerage out and some analysts feel E-Trade’s stock is one of the best stocks to buy in 2008.

Just as many, however, say that the bailout was a bad business move and that E-Trade is likely to go bankrupt in 2008, and now bankruptcy lawyers are circling the company like shark on chum.

Which is why I’ll most likely make my investment decisions in 2008 by flipping a coin… then promptly depositing that same coin into my piggy bank where at least I know it’ll be there when I need it.

Not that I’ll actually have any places where I want to spend it, mind you. Even venerable Macy’s is undergoing financial distress, closing eight of its stores and laying off nearly 900 jobs. They’re just part of a nasty trend, according to market watchers who point to the 40% jump in bankruptcy filings in the past year. Those same analysts forecast an additional 13% increase in Chapter 11 filings for 2008 from not only companies in the housing industry but also electronics makers, energy miners like coal companies, agriculture firms and makers of durable goods.

In other words, the only people likely to get richer in the New Year (aside from politicians who have the enviable ability to vote for their own pay raise) are bankruptcy lawyers. So for all of those who can’t resist lawyer-bashing, I suggest you switch your aim and start bashing the politicians instead. They’re the ones who can fix the problem, after all.

Not that I’m all that worried, mind you. I’ve been through this before. So have you, if you think about it. Seems to me the last time the economy was this bad we were also talking about war in Iraq and complaining about President Bush paying too little attention to domestic matters. Sure, that was under Bush Senior, but I have little doubt that Dubya is going to be followed by a Democrat in the White House just as his Daddy was before him.

Why?

It’s the economy, stupid.

Three years ago, Indonesia was hit by a devastating tsunami. Since then, a strange ripple effect has continued to work its way through the country as more women than men have begun filing for divorce.

Three-to-one, as a matter of fact, and both divorce lawyers and jurists alike are hard-pressed to explain it. One clerk attributes it to the number of quickie marriages that occurred in the tsunami’s wake.

“After the tsunami we had many newcomers in Aceh. Some married local women but then decided to return to their places of origin and a divorce is needed,” she said.

“Also, some couples tried to get their spouses to their hometown, but there were also problems there and so they had to end their marriage.”

Other reasons cited in the increased filings include men failing to support their families following the tragedy and, of course, polygamy. Oddly enough, though, the women filing for divorce come from all walks of life, from highly educated to the illiterate poor.

All of which makes me wonder if the post-tsunami divorce rates aren’t an Indonesian version of the advertising campaign thought up by a group of female divorce lawyers in Chicago which sparked outrage with their billboard ad reading “Life is short. Get a divorce.”

In a move certain to strike dread in the hearts (and wallets) of personal injury attorneys everywhere, Ohio’s Supreme Court just approved caps on damage awards in personal injury suits, declaring them constitutional.

The ruling was issued in a case brought by a Cincinnati woman against Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical company that manufactured the Ortho Evra birth control patch which the woman says gave her blood clots. The woman, Melisa Arbino, 32, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and had to have a hole drilled in her skull to drain the excess fluid. Arbino contends that she’s suffered permanent physical injury and threatened her ability to conceive in the future.

Arbino’s recovery in the case, which personal injury attorneys nationwide have been watching closely, was limited by caps approved by Ohio’s legislature in 2004 that restricted damages to $350,000 unless the person lost a limb or bodily organ. Punitive damages are limited to twice the amount of compensatory damages.

Big businesses have strongly supported the damage caps which the spokesman for one business group says will fairly compensate victims while providing a “reasonable and predictable system for Ohio’s job creators”. Arbino’s personal injury lawyer says that such predictability really amounts to favoring the financial bottom line of out-of-state businesses over the rights of injured people.

Although my days of practicing law are long behind me, I have to admit that I’m rather outraged over Ohio’s law myself. Sure, there are plenty of ridiculous examples one can point to to justify damage caps, like the woman awarded $2.9 million in the McDonald’s coffee case. Those sensationalist cases are exceptions to the rule, however, and that’s why they become sensations.

But, as the dissenting justices in the Arbino case pointed out, legislatures don’t hear evidence. Juries do. They are never informed of how severely a person’s quality of life has been hampered, how much pain or agony they experienced. That’s never been their job: that is the right and the purview of the jury, and it is because we have juries to hear evidence on a case-by-case basis that justice is actually worked in the majority of such lawsuits.

So, if you can strain your ears to listen beyond the applause of the big businesses and their insurance companies who are overjoyed at this ruling from Ohio’s Supreme Court, perhaps you’ll hear the same thing that I do behind all of that financial glee: the death song of the jury system in the civil justice system.

Lori Drew, the meddling Mom who cyber bullied a teen into committing suicide now has her own Wikipedia page.

Drew and her family, meanwhile, have become the target of cyber-bullying themselves, with internet sites calling for vigilante justice (video)* since Missouri prosecutors won’t be filing charges against Drew.

There is, however, an investigation into a blog that chronicled the entire situation leading up to and including Megan’s death. The horrifying title? “Megan Had It Coming“. The title of the first entry? “I’m Lori Drew,” a long attempt to claim that Megan Meiers had actually cyber-bullied Drew’s daughter to the point where the author felt obligated to step in:

That’s when I decided I would have to teach Megan a lesson and give her a taste of her own medicine.

I decided that I would shut down the Josh account, and not be nice about it. Megan’s feelings be damned, and to hell with her consequence! I was going to protect my daughter no matter what. So I sent the break up e-mail to Megan saying that Josh didn’t want to be friends because Megan was very cruel to her friends. Naturally, Megan freaked, and I tried to keep the messages short and sweet. As a last resort bargaining chip, I figured that if she really loved Josh then maybe he could pressure her into stopping her lies. But it didn’t work, and the situation devolved lightning fast.

The sheriff’s office is investigating the blog to find out whether Lori Drew was actually the author, a move which Megan’s own family welcomes.

Meanwhile, news reports now say that Drew was not the one who wrote the final message that prompted 13 year-old Megan Meiers to commit suicide. In the new American tradition, Drew had outsourced that task to a temporary employee* who’s been under psychiatric treatment in connection with Megan’s death. Drew’s attorney claims she had “absolutely, 100 percent” no involvement in the cruel messages or even the creation of the MySpace page through which Megan met “Josh”, and was unaware of them until after Megan’s death.

This, of course, contradicts Drew’s own prior statements to prosecutors along with those of witnesses to whom she confided the details of her scheme, but I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that Lori Drew is once again trying to toy with reality. After all, she’s proven herself to be deadly good at that game.

(* Thanks to Venomite Tom for emailing me the links.)

The story of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old Missouri girl who committed suicide after being spurned by the person she thought was her online boyfriend, just keeps getting stranger and more infuriating by the moment.

Megan had transferred schools earlier this year after being excluded from the “popular crowd” because she was overweight. In the process, she decided she no longer wanted to maintain some of her old friendships. But at her new school she blossomed, dropping 20 pounds and joining the volleyball team. She even met her first-ever boyfriend, “Josh”, through her MySpace page.

Only problem? Josh was actually 47-year-old Lori Drew, the mother of one of those friends Megan had stop hanging out with, and she was determined to “mess with Megan”. That’s what she told a neighbor, at any rate. What she told the police is that she wanted to gain Megan’s trust so she could find out what Megan was saying online about her own daughter.

So Drew, pretending to be Josh, flirted with Megan for a full month. Then, just as Megan began thinking of herself and Josh as a couple, Drew-as-Josh typed: “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.” A day later came the fatal message: “The world would be a better place without you.”

Later, Megan told her mother that hateful MySpace messages about her were being posted. Some called her a slut. Some called her fat.

Megan hung herself in her closet. Her mother found the girl and cut her down from the belt she’d wrapped around her own neck. Megan died the next day still believing that her first boyfriend had wholly rejected her.

Megan had been on antidepressants, a fact of which Lori Drew was aware since Megan had previously accompanied the Drews on family vacations. She’d also been diagnosed with ADD and had been under the care of a counselor. But those sensitivities were, apparently, not nearly as important to Lori Drew as teaching Megan a lesson that proved to be fatal.

All of this, because middle-aged Lori Drew couldn’t accept what normal adults figured out long ago: friendships end, and the best way to help our kids when they’ve been dumped by a friend is by helping them learn to make new ones. Megan Meiers mother didn’t get a chance to do that because Lori Drew abdicated her parental role and took matters into her own hands, posing as another child so she could — let’s face it — get petty revenge on the girl who’d hurt her little girl’s feelings.

Meanwhile, there’s nothing the law can do about it. As the St. Charles’ County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson says of Drew’s behavior, “It might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

Ironically, Lori Drew filed a report with the Sheriff’s department against Megan’s parents for damaging a foosball table belonging to the Drews. It seems Megan’s family had agreed to store the table in their garage at Lori’s request. Six weeks after Megan’s death, when they learned that Lori Drew was behind the hoax that led to her suicide, they took a sledgehammer and ax to it and dumped the pieces on the Drew’s driveway.

Yes, you read that right: Lori Drew all but caused Megan Meiers’ suicide, then wanted to press charges against Megan’s family for taking their grief out on a foosball table.

You know, that woman ought to be damned glad she’s not my neighbor. I’d have skipped the table and gone straight after her with the sledgehammer and ax.

A convicted pedophile in Germany is back in jail for abusing two more children. Unfortunately, that’s not such a surprising story: recidivism among sex offenders is a rather sad but reliable fact. What is surprising: the new offenses were committed while the man was working under his sentence of community service… at a kindergarten.

The man was allowed to work as a janitor at the Evangelical Kindergarten St Petri in Melle, near the northern city of Osnabrueck, because a court worker missed three prior pedophilia convictions on his record, said Alexander Retemeyer, spokesman for the Osnabrueck prosecutor’s office.

The man, identified only as A.B., had been sentenced to 720 hours of community service earlier this year for working on the sly while collecting welfare payments.

“The colleague didn’t pay attention and didn’t see he had a sexual conviction, so she allowed him to serve in a kindergarten,” Retemeyer said. “She didn’t read the file.”

The prior convictions date from 1988-1990, when the man was living in the former East Germany, Retemeyer said. Though the convictions are listed in the man’s criminal record, the details are unclear because prosecutors cannot access his East German police file.

I can’t recall Germany’s stance on the death penalty, but I’d suggest they make an exception for the lynching of this guy… and the court employee, as well.

Medical marijuana users in California will now have to satisfy their munchies in a lawful fashion like the rest of us now that the Feds have shut down Tainted, Inc.

The company, which sold “enhanced” products like pot-laced candies and BBQ sauces, was the subject of a DEA raid yesterday. Agents found 460 marijuana plants and various products scheduled for shipping to California and Seattle; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Amsterdam.

Although California state law authorizes marijuana use for medical purposes, Federal law does not.

This isn’t the first California-based “enhanced” candy company shut down by the DEA. Earlier this year the owners of “Beyond Bomb” — an Oakland-based company that produced candies such as “Stoney Rancher” and “Rasta Reese’s” — pleaded guilty to marijuana charges in federal court.