There's your problem.

Alberta and Saskatchewan are saturated with meth (Why? Because the people who work on the rigs are paid outrageous sums of money, and then proceed to throw it at things that allow them to largely forget about the shitty work they're 'stuck' doing, thus attracting a huge number of drug traffickers). Since everyone over here is also a nutty moralist, the meth problem is seen as much less a meth problem and more like a OMG TEH METH IS RAPING OUR POOR HELPLESS CHILDREN AND STEALING THEIR PRECIOUS FUTURE problem.

Seriously. I'd estimate that 3 out of 5 Albertans/Saskatchewanians actually believe that meth is some kind of magical evil substance that corrupts everything it even comes near.

House fire? Meth lab.

Homicide? Dude must've been on meth.

Migraine? All those meth fumes (No. I'm dead serious.)

Animal attack? Poor thing must've accidentally licked-up some meth.

As a result of this bizarre collective delusion, people have basically been screaming in the ear of the RCMP to DO ANYTHING, PLEASE, ANYTHAAAAANNNNGGGGG!!!!! to banish the evil meth menace back whence it came. And, as a result of that, the RCMP have been regularly embarassing themselves with situations like the one mentioned here - and after a while, they have to start backpedalling and making excuses for their ridiculous behavior in order to try and save face (thus the, 'Oh, well... he was still probably building explosives, though) line of reasoning.

Prohibition has never lead to anything good, and needs to be outright abolished. Moreover, people need to be actually taught in school what the fuck Methamphetamine does (not given some moralist diatribe from MADD) so they can make an educated choice on whether it's something they want to use or not (as well as other strictly demonized substances; coccaine, MDMA, marijuana, etc). The way things are right now, the moralist side lies about the negative consequences of a drug, the traffickers/enthusiasts lie right back about how wonderful it is, and then a bewildered dim-whitted consumer has to essentially choose based on how they feel about it (AARRRRGGGGGG!!!!).

Ahem. Anyway.

Here's what will happen with this young man: The RCMP will 'let him off the hook' with a bunch of stern authoritarian warnings, because they don't want to be sued (again) and stomping your foot and letting everyone know who's boss is a good way of doing that. After that he'll likely decide that pursuing Chemistry isn't worth the trouble, and future generations will thus have one less hard-working scientist to rely on.

But, hey - that's a pretty small sacrifice to keep little Timmy from growing up to be a meth head (duh duh duuuhhh), right?