There I stood at the pharmacy counter, with a head cold, sniffing away, and begging for some product that contains Pseudoephedrine, which works like a magic nose unclogger. The stuff you can get off the shelf now contains the similar-sounding drug called Phenylephrine, but it might as well be a placebo. It just doesn’t work, and most everyone knows this.
You can still get the good old stuff from the pharmacist but you will be suspected for this grave action. The government, you see, says that people have been buying the old stuff and turning it into methamphetamine. This is why Congress and the administration passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, which rations the amount you can buy and requires that you prove your identity and sign a special form.
And, yes, this act is now part of the monstrosity called the Patriot Act. I went over this whole subject last year, but this year, I really began to smell a rat, about which more below.
“Thanks Bush” I muttered as I signed the form under the glare of the pharmacist who has been trained to treat me like a possible criminal. FULL ARTICLE
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gary- in his defense, I posited the relatively broad question of “what is the matter with adopting totalitarian esque policies…”
8- thank you, that is a more concise version of what I was trying to say.
ron- so what if stores started doing this voluntarily? then you’d have a bunch of maniacs outside the last store at 5 am waiting for it to open!
Lester: “so what if stores started doing this voluntarily?…”
Well, if the ingredients for meth were more readily available in bulk quantities there would be less “home cooking” going on, and thus lower demand for it in pill form at individual stores.
It’s certainly possible that some stores would restrict the availability of (pseudo)ephedrine voluntarily. A community may put sufficient pressure on the local drugstore to enact some measure to do so, at which point the store’s owner would have to make a choice between bending to the will of the community (his customers) or risk suffering loss of profits as people go elsewhere. In the end, however, it is the choice of the store owner, and no one has coerced him into a certain behavior. Government makes the choice impossible.
8,
It’s not difficult for Libertarians to understand at all. The point is that one must look at the bigger picture and realize that restrictions on liberty always do more harm than good.
I live in Oklahoma, and I don’t see a big meth problem. Yes, there was plenty of media coverage for a while to hype the so-called meth crisis, but that’s all it really is: hype.
Besides, if it’s not one drug, it’s another–a lot of the druggies I know (not that I know THAT many) prefer crack to meth.
The problem with restricting things like pseudophedrine is that government generally makes it harder for people to legitimately get what they need, but does little to stop people from illegally getting it. Plus the unintended consequences of such restrictions. It’s certainly understandable that people don’t want to put up with drug abusers, but the government prohibitions just don’t do that good a job of stopping it. We’d be better off looking at the reasons normal people have a hard time avoiding the druggies, such as all the other restrictions that make it harder for normal people to live their lives as they choose: licensing (all forms), zoning, taxes, tax returns, discrimination laws, difficulties in starting and running businesses, etc, etc. Or for that matter, why don’t we look at the drug abusers and figure out why they’re so miserable that they turn to drugs in the first place? Especially since prohibition and punishment doesn’t seem to stop them from doing drugs.
ron- what if the store owners are PART of the community and want to run a regular store not a meth supermarket? and have their own children and property they want to protect
Pj, you wrote:
“”
You are using standard Conspiracy think.
“”
Governments are the biggest promulgators of belief in conspiracies–witness all the laws against “conspiracy” and all the criminal charges of “conspiracy” brought against people. The offical U.S. government story regarding such events as, e.g., the Pearl Harbor attack, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 9/11 attacks, etc., are charges by the U.S. government of conspiracy having been conducted against it by other governments or by non-government terrorist groups.
A conspiracy is simply when two or more people take part in a plan which involves doing something unrightful or untoward to another person or other people (of which plan may or may not be kept secret, i.e., secrecy is not a necessary component for actions to be a conspiracy). This makes government itself the largest corporeal conspiracy to ever exist (given that it exists via a double-standard of doing unto others what it does not want done unto it), or that could ever exist.
Furthermore, conspiracies are ubiquitous (again, witness all the laws on the books against conspiracy, and how many people are routinely charged under said laws), and the most egregious perpetrators of murderously brutal conspiracies are governments upon their own innocent citizens. More than six times the amount of noncombatants have been systematically murdered for purely ideological reasons by their own governments within the past century than were killed in that same time-span from wars. From 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes murdered from 3.5 million to over 4.3 million of its own Armenians, Greeks, Nestorians, and other Christians. The Soviet government murdered over 61 million of its own noncombatant subjects. The communist Chinese government murdered over 76 million of it own subjects. And Germany murdered some 16 million of it own subjects in the past century. And that’s only a sampling of governments mass-murdering their own noncombatant subjects within the past century. (The preceding figures are from Prof. Rudolph Joseph Rummel’s website at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ .)
All totaled, neither the private-sector crime which government is largely responsible for promoting and causing or even the wars committed by governments upon the subjects of other governments come anywhere close to the crimes government is directly responsible for committing against its own citizens–certainly not in amount of numbers. Without a doubt, the most dangerous presence to ever exist throughout history has always been the people’s very own government.
Of course, all of these government mass-slaughters were conspiracies–massive conspiracies, at that.
If someone commits a crime, you punish them for it. I do not see why people who consume drugs and do not commit crimes should be penalized for the activities of those who do. Preventive ‘justice’ has to be the biggest load of rubbish I’ve ever heard of.
Lester: “what if the store owners are PART of the community and want to run a regular store not a meth supermarket? and have their own children and property they want to protect”
Then the store owner is perfectly free and well within his right to do so. The point is that it’s a voluntary action, undertaken by an individual with the freedom to choose based on his own set of values. No one has the right to force the store owner to modify his otherwise peaceful behavior, for any reason…not even government.
Pseudoephedrine?
That’s kids’ stuff, man. The problem started when they made SKF take the Benzedrine inhaler off the market.
Man, that stuff really cleared your head!
Sloppy, very sloppy.
The Boehringer Ingelheim spending figures are for “lobbying” not “contributions.”
Lobbying tends to be more effective than contributions.
Tucker’s text doesn’t agree with the opensecrets.org graph; he seems to have skipped over the 2006 figure.
Plus, I’m pretty sure the 2007 figure isn’t for a full year, so it’s possibly wrong to say that spending declined this year.
If Tucker had gotten all of this right, it would have strengthened his argument.
But these are still pretty small numbers. Total spending per year on lobbying passed $2 billion a few years ago.
Just out of curiosity, I checked to see how much Pfizer (the maker of Sudafed) spent on lobbying during those years, and it was several times as much:
http://opensecrets.org/lobbyists/clientsum.asp?year=2005&txtname=Pfizer+Inc
So we know Tucker was about five seconds away from data that would have largely invalidated his argument. I wonder if he saw it but chose not to mention it.
From the comments we also see that while Boehringer Ingelheim makes phenylephrine, this compound is no longer under patent protection, so the financial benefit to Boehringer Ingelheim is no longer all that strong.
To address a couple of other points in the earlier comments, the explosive that can be made from ammonia and iodine is nitrogen triiodide. This material is so sensitive that it simply can’t be used for any practical or criminal purpose.
Only Mucinex D contains pseudoephedrine. Mucinex and Mucinex DM do not. Tucker was sloppy here again.
There is no “Sudafed Extreme Cold” product. Sudafed Severe Cold does not contain pseudoephedrine. It has phenylephrine instead.
. png
Peter, nothing you said here refutes my facts or theory. I never said that phen was under patent. Dominant producers have incentive to lobby for restrictions even in their absence. All I claimed is that BI is the main beneficiary of the switch from pseudo to phen, and that in the year this occur, BI ‘s lobbying budget soared to new heights. Might there have been other reasons? Maybe. One reader suggested that maybe BI’s lobbying ended up forestalling a complete ban on the product, which might also be true but I’ve not seen the evidence. I only reported the facts as I have them.
Yes, we absolutely are. In each of these cases, freedom is restricted for the supposed greater good. That you set the problem aside so readily, without asking “at what cost?” shows that you possess the same blind faith that the people who supported those regimes possessed. Whether you give up 1% of your freedom a hundred times, or 100% of it one time, it is the same end result.
Feel free to convince a drug addict to go in for treatment, but don’t put a gun to his head when you do it. Is that too much to ask?
What you describe is the trajectory of most illegal drugs, as producers find ways to make it more cheaply and increase its potency. That last factor is crucial, since the more potent the drug is, the smaller the quantity required for use and so the easier it is to hide. And use has remained steady since about 2002. Is there a “success” hidden somewhere in there?
Let’s explore this a bit, shall we? Why does that “tweaker” go to the trouble to steal someone’s identity? Is it because he/she is strung out and therefore a “bad” person? Or is it because the stuff requires so much money that, for most people, crime is the only means to acquire it? You rightly identify a problem, and then support a solution that has no bearing on the original problem, but heck, it’s tough and uncompromising, so it’s sure to work.
After reading over all of these comments the only conclusion I can personally come to is there are valid points for both sides presented here. However, as a Military Policeman stationed in Germany from 1975 till 1977 Amphetamine was legal to buy in any german “drugerie” (pardon my spelling, it’s been a long time) 20 marks bought about 2 ounces of a clear liquid in a brown bottle. The germans I hung out with, one being the local dj at the local discotheque “Moby Dicks” right on the Neckar River asked me once why Americans used it so much? He said all his friends preferred “other things”.
As a pretty naive 21 year old MP I told him “HelI ain’t got a clue”. (BTW Rheinhold spoke pretty good english.)
I’m 53 now but it sure makes any intelligent person wonder about human nature …..and telling them they can’t have something.
Only the some drugs will be good. If some drugs we will taken in over dosage it will be very dangerous to our health. All the pharmacist will be first approved by government then only it will be released into market.
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brucely
california dui
Only the some drugs will be good. If some drugs we will taken in over dosage it will be very dangerous to our health. All the pharmacist will be first approved by government then only it will be released into market.
=========================
brucely
california dui
Remember when you could walk into a store and grab 4 boxes of 48 120mg “today’s health” or “great value” or any other store brand for $5 a box and be set for 3 months? Sure, it was no substitute for the mysteriously missing and highly effective phenylpropanolamine, but it was the only thing left that worked. $20 and you can avoid 50 antibiotic pills and a sinus surgery…good deal. Now most pharmacies here don’t even carry pseudoephdrine, and those that do carry ineffective 30mg tablets for $1 each. For this you get on the DEA list, FBI list, probably have travel restrictions added to your FBI portfolio, and who knows what else? Aren’t we proud to be Americans, where at least we know we’re free? I feel bad for all the men and wome n who gave their blood only to be betrayed on a bipartisan basis. So this is going to prevent another 9/11? yay. I think I’d rather take my chances with the terrorists than go through this annual sinus surgery/agony. Do they stille have 120mg pseudophedrine in the middle east?
Last time I was sick, it was such a pain in the butt to jump through all the hoops to get the medication I needed. Things are starting to get out of hand. Its just such an inconvenience for people to deal with when they are ill.
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