Need cold medicine? Keep your ID handy [will have to have ID logged to buy cold medication]

Get ready to give up a little bit of your privacy in exchange for certain allergy or cold medicines.

Starting in late September, just in time for cold season, consumers will be required to fork over photo IDs and list their home addresses in logbooks before buying Sudafed, Contac or other remedies containing the nasal-decongestant pseudoephedrine or similar substances.

Some retailers already are asking for the information, which law-enforcement officials hope will help them fight the illegal production of methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug that can be made, in part, by "cooking" pseudoephedrine.

Consumers in Florida and many other states have grown used to sales restrictions on pseudoephedrine-containing drugs -- including their placement behind pharmacy counters instead of on store shelves.

But the latest rules, which also call for limits on purchases of up to 120 pills a day, are part of a federal effort to combat meth addiction.

Methamphetamine abuse is an increasing problem in the United States, with a recent report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration saying the number of users admitted to substance-abuse clinics more than quadrupled from 1993 to 2003. The problem is particularly acute in rural America, though the Orlando area also has seen a rise in meth labs.

For instance, last year the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration seized 115 meth labs in Central Florida. In 2000, it seized two.

Tracking sales is critical to stopping the spread of meth labs in Central Florida, said Stephen Collins, who heads the Orlando office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Collins said it was "very common" for meth makers to comb the region's stores for cold medicine needed to make the illicit drug.

"We had individuals that would canvass up and down Central Florida and the East Coast and hit numerous stores, buying as much as they could get their hands on," he said. "By limiting this, we hope to see the decrease in the number of labs."

The new regulations, passed in March as part of the USA Patriot Act, are being phased in over the next several months. They are stricter than Florida law and will override it, the Florida Retail Federation said.

Dawn Townsend, a pharmacist at Maitland Rexall Drug Store, said she just recently learned about the logbook rule and is in the process of teaching her staff what to do.

Industry groups say they expect sales of medicines that contain pseudoephedrine to decline as a result of the law. Already, drug makers are selling reformulated cold medicines that don't need to be placed behind the counter, such as Sudafed PE.

"Most big retailers saw this coming," Walgreen Co. (NYSE:WAG) spokeswoman Carol Hively said.

The rise of meth labs prompted several states, including Florida last summer, to pass laws restricting sales of pseudoephedrine-containing medicine. But while consumers may not mind limits on how much cold medicine they can purchase at one time, they may bristle at giving up personal information to buy it.

"The question here is, is it the job of pharmacies and pharmacists to be a policeman on these products [and] what are the privacy protections for people who legitimately buy these products and have their name recorded somewhere?" said Arthur Levin, director of the New York-based Center for Medical Consumers, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Drugstores say measures are in place to prohibit the disclosure of consumers' private information, which retailers must keep for up to two years after a sale. The federal law, for instance, prohibits retailers from disclosing private information except when a legal request is made by local, state or federal authorities.

"We don't have any intention to use it in any way except to make it available to the authorities," Walgreen's Hively said.

And helping those authorities fight illegal meth production is why Lydia McNeil, 60, of Orlando is willing to give up personal information to buy the Sudafed she uses to treat her colds.

"I wouldn't mind signing anything to keep it out of the hands of the people who are using it for the wrong reason," she said, after shopping at a Walgreens on Michigan Avenue in Orlando.

Though the federal law does not provide for a clearinghouse, so purchases could be tracked from store to store, some retailers are working on that approach themselves within their chains. Walgreens and CVS (NYSE:CVS) -- two of the nation's biggest drugstore chains -- said they are developing systems to monitor sales. Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) says it already uses an electronic logbook that can track purchases at individual outlets but not from store to store.

Marianne Myers, 45, who was shopping at an Albertsons (NYSE:ABS) on South Orange Avenue in Orlando, said she understood the motive behind the new measures but lamented the implications.

"It's probably a hassle for us," the Orlando resident said. "It's sad that things have to be like that."

Another perspective on restricting drug purchases......

FROM: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114928891619270269.html?mod=opinion_main_featured_stories_hs

Whose Life Is It, Anyway?

By ROGER PILON
June 3, 2006; Page A9

In a little-noticed decision last month, the D.C. Circuit ruled that terminally ill, mentally competent patients have a constitutional right to seek potentially life-saving drugs -- whether or not the Food and Drug Administration has given its final approval for sale.

The case is far from finished, however: On remand, the FDA will try to show that its prohibition is, in the jargon of such things, "narrowly tailored" to serve a "compelling governmental interest." Still, the court's reasoning in the case -- Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Development Drugs v. Eschenbach -- is rich with implications for medical freedom and constitutional jurisprudence.

For most of our history, as Judge Judith Rogers explained (joined by Chief Judge Douglas Ginsburg), individuals were free to take whatever medication they wanted without a doctor's prescription. It was only in 1951 that Congress created a category of prescription drugs; and, in 1962, it began requiring drug companies to conduct extensive tests to ensure the efficacy of their products. That led to long delays in the release of potentially lifesaving drugs, and to the deaths of countless patients who would gladly have borne the unknown risks for a chance at life.

The Abigail Alliance (named after Abigail Burroughs, a 21-year-old college student who died of cancer) petitioned the FDA on behalf of its terminally ill members, seeking access to drugs that had cleared Phase I of the lengthy testing process. (That's the point at which a new drug is deemed sufficiently safe for more extensive human testing.)

When that effort failed, the alliance sued to stop the FDA from barring the sale of such drugs to its members. (It was joined in its action by the conservative public interest law firm, the Washington Legal Foundation.) The district court dismissed the suit, saying that under the Fifth Amendment -- which prohibits government from depriving people of life, liberty or property without due process of law -- it could find no such right as the alliance was claiming.

Not so, said the appeals court. It found the right -- and found it "in" the Constitution. Given the state of constitutional jurisprudence today, that was no mean feat. Here's why.

At the time the Constitution was sent to the states for ratification, several states balked, insisting that a bill of rights be added. But no such bill could list all of our rights. The failure to do so, however, raised the implication that only the enumerated rights were meant to be protected.

So the Framers gave us the Ninth Amendment, which states that we have unenumerated rights, too -- effectively giving the courts authority to fill in the blanks. But that creative power is hardly unique to the Ninth Amendment: Even enumerated rights -- such as speech, property, due process -- require judicial interpretation.

When they authorized judicial review, the Framers assumed that judges would have a grasp of the Constitution's natural rights and common law foundations. Unfortunately, today's judges are far removed from those foundations. The result is confusion, and divisive controversies.

Liberal judges, often hostile toward our founding principles, invent rights by drawing on their own conceptions of evolving social values. Reacting to the perceived judicial activism, conservative judges go overboard the other way, recognizing only those rights expressly "in" the Constitution -- thus ignoring the presumption of individual liberty at the very foundation of the document. Neither side gets it right. The Constitution no more authorizes judges to invent rights from whole cloth than it allows them to ignore rights plainly meant to be protected.

The D.C. circuit got it right in Abigail. Recognizing, first, that the Due Process Clause has long protected substantive rights, the court noted two distinct approaches in the Supreme Court's rights jurisprudence. One, based in "personal dignity and autonomy," has led the court (sometimes wrongly) to prohibit state intrusion in "the bedroom, the clinic, and the womb" -- e.g., abortion. The other approach, more restrictive, finds a right only if it is "deeply rooted in the Nation's history and tradition."

Carefully following this more restrictive approach (to avoid the charge of activism), the court noted the precise description of the right the Abigail Alliance claimed, and then traced the history in America of the more generally described rights from which it is derived -- the right to potentially life-saving medication, the right to control one's body, the right to self-preservation and the right to life.

Finding those rights in the centuries-old common law, the court concluded that, in contrast to those ancient principles, it is the FDA's regulation of access that is new. Accordingly, if there is a fundamental right to refuse life-sustaining treatment, as the Supreme Court had found in 1990, there is, equally, a right to seek life-sustaining medication free from government interference.

That's hardly pulling a right "out of thin air," as the Washington Post charged editorially in its defense of FDA bureaucrats. It is not the freewheeling stuff of Roe v. Wade, but rather the careful mining of Locke, Blackstone and Madison.

To the layman, such judicial hermeneutics must seem tedious, for a simple question should settle the matter: Whose life is it, anyway? That it doesn't is a mark of how far we've strayed from our founding principles. Statutory schemes today have replaced common law, policy has replaced principle -- and transient majorities tell us what our rights are.

Well, that may be changing. Last year the Canadian Supreme Court struck down two Quebec laws that banned private payment for services covered under its Medicare program (if you live long enough to receive them), as violating constitutional guarantees to life, liberty and security of person. In this country, with often well-to-do baby-boomers aging, access to health care will be a growing issue. Costs aside, demands simply for access -- and for medical freedom -- may yet breathe life into an ailing Constitution.

Mr. Pilon is vice president for legal affairs at the Cato Institute, where he holds the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies.

When are we going to stop the stupidity?

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.