[hermitcrab]

>When in the 70s?

Lates 70s. Maybe 78 or 79.

The school wasn't overly obsessive about safety. They still us to regularly throw sodium into water to show what happened and that sort of thing. However it was a military school and the discipline was fierce. So perhaps they were more concerned about the theft than what was actually stolen.

I also despair about the public's general lack of education on scientific topics, to the point now where the word 'chemicals' is a synonym for unnatural or bad. Everything is made of chemicals and it always has been!