BLADDER CONTROL

Sometimes you've got to fight for your right to potty. While it isn't exactly Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected a South Carolina man's bid to overturn a law that prohibited him from selling his urine online. The Justices upheld a state Supreme Court decision and declined to review Kenneth Curtis' challenge of a law banning pee-commerce for the purpose of defeating a drug-screening test.

In 1996, Curtis started Privacy Protection Services, hawking his drug-free urine at $69 a pop via his Web site, www.privacypro.com. Each kit contains a small pouch, tubing and “warming packets” that heat the fluid to a temperature that would pass a urinalysis. The site boasts that the kits are easily concealed and that users cannot be detected cheating on a drug test.

Curtis paints himself as a Larry Flynt-like freedom fighter who doesn't encourage drug use but who is interested in improving workplace safety by demonstrating how effortlessly drug tests are subverted and protecting constitutional rights against unlawful searches.

His business has never been about making a fortune, he said, and he has spent almost everything he's earned on legal fees. He lives modestly in a singlewide trailer in a remote, wooded area of rural Marietta, S.C., and describes his largely jeans and T-shirt wardrobe as a product of affordability rather than sartorial choice.

Each drop of urine Curtis has sold has been his own, and he's stockpiled an inventory should the legal tide turn his way. He carries a refrigerated receptacle everywhere because each drop not saved literally is money flushed down the toilet.

“I have well over 500 gallons of my own urine stored in freezers awaiting our appeals process,” Curtis said. “It's liquid gold to me, so I'm not going to waste my assets.”

While his legal battle continues, Curtis said he would sell the kits without his urine sample, but instead would include a filling apparatus, allowing customers to gather a drug-free urine sample on their own. He also recently announced his candidacy on the Libertarian ticket for lieutenant governor of South Carolina, running against Republican state Sen. David Thomas — who wrote the legislation against Curtis in 1999.

Critics, including talk show host Bill O'Reilly, have admonished Curtis's efforts, calling him a charlatan and criminal. But Curtis said he plans to keep up his privacy fight. “Privacy protection is definitely my major interest,” he said. “I have other nonrelated business interests that I'm pursuing, but I intend to stay controversial and into privacy rights issues.”

Evidently that is his No. 1 priority.
— Chris Sewell

Fair warning

“Verizon does not have a pride and dignity package.”
— Comedian Janeane Garofalo, on the perils of making inadvisable late-night cell-phone calls