Marines Chasin' Around Meth Addicts in Twentynine Palms

The Marine Corps does a lot of combat training in the Twentynine Palms area prior to deployment, which is located in the vast Mojave desert in southern California. It is home to the beautiful Joshua Tree National Park, coyotes, and a shit ton of meth addicts. Now, the Marines are having to interrupt their scheduled training to chase down scrap metal scavengers. From Breitbart:

Hundreds of Marines were conducting a combat training mission in the Mojave Desert when an air patrol spotted something kicking up dust: A civilian pickup truck speeding across the barren landscape. Behind the wheel was a suspected scrap metal thief who had been combing the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center for spent brass shell casings. His intrusion onto the base was the 12th time in six months that scavengers had inadvertently halted combat exercises.

Unsurprisingly, it seems a lot of these people hawking scrap metal are using it to fund their addiction:

The military said most scrappers arrested in the past several years appeared to be either illegal immigrants or drug users looking for easy money. If convicted on federal charges ranging from trespassing to theft, they face up to 20 years in prison.

I see a silver lining to this darkened cloud, because if a Marine can take down a tweaker running circles around the desert looking for spent brass casings, they can probably take out a more slow-moving terrorist weighed down with a suicide vest in Anbar province.

Meth: It puts the "classy" in Class A Controlled Narcotic