August 2002

HEY, URINE POLITICS NOW!

“Many of our best customers are in the trucking industry,” says Privacy Protection Services founder Kenneth E. Curtis of Marietta, S.C. Since 1996, the business has sold anyone sweating a drug test a pouch of drug-free urine and a tube apparatus for dispensing it. His customers have included truckers and fleet officials who help drivers pass, Curtis says.

As he told Katie Couric on Today and Bill Maher on Politically Incorrect, Curtis believes workplace drug testing is an unconstitutional invasion of privacy and a lucrative sham. He instead advocates sobriety tests “every time a driver checks into work or climbs in his rig.”

Convicted in December of breaking a new state law against urine sales, Curtis lost his appeals. Inspired by his legal battles, he’s running for lieutenant governor on the Libertarian ticket. His slogan: “Are you pissed yet?”


SATELLITE RADIO FUELS FOUR-WHEELER’S FANTASY

“It may just be the exhaust fumes talking, but I think I’m in love,” says Entertainment Weekly columnist Chris Willman about XM Satellite Radio.

As a commuter doomed to “two to three hours daily in L.A. gridlock,” Willman admires the diversity of XM’s “100 channels of often extremely idiosyncratic programming.”

Willman says Open Road, XM’s trucking channel, “helps me fantasize I’m hauling a load through Texas at 90 mph instead of staring at SUV brake lights in Sherman Oaks” and represents “the only place we city folk will ever get to hear Lee Greenwood’s diesel lubricant jingle.”


FAIR WARNING

For two days, the public-address system at the county courthouse in Tylertown, Miss., broadcast snatches of CB conversation as big rigs drove by.

As one judge took the bench for the start of a trial, for example, a trucker’s voice said through the loudspeakers: “Look out!”

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