Repeal Cough Medicine Control Laws!

Personal Experience ^ | 12/30/2004 | Earl B.

[Earl B.]

Okay, so I call in sick yesterday because I woke up feeling awful. Stuffy/runny nose. Muscle aches, fever, chills, headache. I took a couple of Advil, but still don't feel well enough to drive an hour to the office.

Later, in the afternoon, I feel well enough to go to the drugstore to get some cold medicine. Pop into Rite-Aid and grab a box of Drixoral (which works very well for my congestion/sinus issues). I also grab a couple of boxes of Triaminic Soft-Chews, because my son is very congested too and they work well for him.

When I get to the register, the computer flags my purchase somehow, and the cashier informs me that I can't buy all three items. Huh? It really wasn't registering with me. In my weakened state, I thought that I didn't have enough cash, or my card was being rejected. But I hadn't tendered any cash or attempted to use my card, so how could the cashier know what I could afford? I asked for a clarification.

The cashier told me that I could by any two of the items I wanted, but not all three. Why? Federal Law. Federal Law dictates how mcuh cold medicine I can buy for me and my family? I ask to speak to a manager.

Manager confirms - they can't sell me all three items. Apparently the active ingredient in my chosen medicines (Pseudoephedrine HCL) can be used to manufacture methamphetamine or some such. So Federal law limits how much I can buy.

Flabbergasted and defeated, I buy the Drixoral and ONE box of Triaminic. I took my purchases to my car, then walked into the grocery store next to Rite-Aid and bought another Triaminic.

Another glorious battle in the nation's War on Drugs.

[stands2reason]

My husband was somewhat over 13 lbs, plus my MIL carried him for 11 months.

Do I even need to say his momma owns him? :-)

[Knute]

I just bought a bottle of wine with my toddler and infant in tow.......shhhh don't tell anyone. Heh...I've often wondered since then what the cut-off would be. If he had been just fifteen, would I have gotten away with it? What if I were over thirty? Forty?

A local grocery chain in Wisconsin has started carding EVERYONE that buys any alcohol or tobacco product. Granny with her yearly bottle of brandy may be 95 years old, she still has to show picture ID. 75 y/o Uncle Charlie has to pull out his license to buy a chaw of Brown Mule. It is SO ridiculous that I was asked to show ID to buy a bottle of sparkling lingonberry juice just before Christmas. It isn't even alcoholic, it is bottled to LOOK like champaign. I am 52 years old. I've been "legal" since before the little girl that is checking me out was born. The Politically Correct "let's make everyone jump through hoops to do anything" crowd is getting carried away!

[tet68]

Yeah, it's tough all right, but just try buying sugar
in bulk, say 500 lbs or so, you will find there are hoops to jump through there too. (Moonshine control laws)

My dad used to keep bees and sometimes had to feed them
over the winter, he had to do assorted paperwork, then
personally sign for the lot at the shipping point, providing
picture id etc.

[TKDietz]

It is not federal law. This is something John Edwards said he wanted to pass on a federal level if Kerry was elected president. He wanted the limit to be two boxes. In my state the limit is three boxes. I just plead two guys last week for possessing over the legal limit.

I for one like the laws passed in states like Oklahoma that require people to purchase psuedoephedrine products only from behind the counter at a drug store, and requiring people to sign for it. I know a lot of people disagree with this, but meth labs are out of hand in places like where I live and laws like that work. Meth lab busts in Oklahoma were cut in half (I think) in no time when that law went into effect.

I'm a public defender. I've worked tons of meth lab cases and I'm working several right now. These people are for the most part junkies. Hardly any of them are making any money cooking dope. They do it because they can't afford to buy it. Most of the dope on the market is coming from big huge labs in Mexico or out west. These guys with their little "labs" are usually just cooking up a few grams that they'll do up themselves and with the people who helped them come up with the supplies.

Cutting down on the numbers of rinky dink meth labs will not put a dent in the supply of methamphetamine, but it will have important benefits. These labs cause quite a mess that landlords or taxpayers usually have to pay to clean up. Also, these people cooking dope are generally way off in a different world on the stuff. They do crazy and dangerous things like cook dope in the home with their kids or when their utilities get shut off they'll go cook in a motel. This puts a lot of innocent people at risk. The chemicals and vapors are harmful and there is a great risk of fires. Most of these people aren't too bright to begin with and when they've been tweaking like crazy for several days without sleep they aren't exactly careful with what they are doing.

Aside from the toxic waste and the danger of innocent people being hurt, there is another big problem with these little meth labs. When you just have some guy dealing a little dope, he's not going to keep his friends in supply for free. If he's cooking dope, he's going to enlist people to go out and help him get supplies. In return, they get to stay high with him. But for the fact that they were helping out the dope cook, some of these people wouldn't doing so much dope because they wouldn't be able to afford it. In many cases the people who get caught up in this weren't even addicts before they started helping the dope cook, but after a while of doing all the dope they can do they become hardcore addicts, and a burden on society.

Another problem is that these meth cooking cases are really starting to burden the courts and the prison systems. The politicians don't know any other way of dealing with the problem so they just keep passing laws increasing prison sentences. These people get caught and when they start getting offers from the prosecutor they realize that they are looking at more time than people might get for killing or raping someone. They start balking at this and a lot of them want to take their cases to trial even though a jury will probably give them a whole lot more time. They generally don't think straight though because they are desperate drug addict types, and compared to other types of cases, a lot of these people force us to take their cases to trial.

This takes up an enormous amount of our time as public defenders, and it takes up a lot of time for prosecutors who also have to do plenty of pretrial work in addition to the time they spend in trial. At trial we are wasting the time of all of the people called in for jury duty, the judge, bailiff, court reporter, clerks, and attorneys. The state also ends up paying for all of the state's witnesses who have to sit around during trial waiting to be called for the case in chief or rebuttal. This is going to be people like the folks from the state crime lab, and all the officers who participated in the bust. Some of these guys will end up testifying even before the trial at suppression hearings and that sort of thing. Overall the whole process is a big darned expense for the state and then when the people are convicted they end up spending sometimes decades in prison, all the while with us taxpayers paying for their room and board and medical expenses. It's not a good deal for taxpayers, especially when you consider the fact that it is doing little to nothing good for the meth problem.

Without a good supply of psuedoephedrine we wouldn't have all of these knuckleheads out there cooking dope in their kitchens. Psuedo is the main ingredient. The whole process of cooking dope revolves around converting the psuedo into methamphetamine. There are other things that can be converted into meth but things are hard to come by. For instance, prescription amphetamines can be converted to meth, but they are much more expensive and much harder to find than psuedo, so no one does it.

If we make the psuedo in large enough quantities for kitchen meth cooks a lot harder to come by, we'll reduce the number of small time meth labs dramatically. The inconvenience most legitimate consumers would experience would be minimal, but the savings for the state and communities in general would be great.

[TKDietz]

"Traffickers purchase pseudoephedrine, often packaged in 1,000 count bottles from Canadian sources and then smuggle it across the U.S. border where it is diverted to manufacturers of meth."

The toothless wonders cooking up dope all over places like Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri aren't buying 1000 count bottles of psuedo from Canada. Most of them get theirs at WalMart, grocery stores, drug stores, and convenience stores. They load up the car with a bunch of meth heads and go hit every store, with each person buying a few boxes, whatever they can legally get. In many cases they just steal it.

[eno_]

Thomas for Chief!

[eno_]

I would have been very ticked-off if I were unable to buy the stuff

If they tracked your purchase with your discount card or your credit card, you could have been raided for attmpting to circumvent limits on the purchase of those drugs.

Land of the free, right?

[eno_]

None if they only cooked the stuff away from other people and stayed to themselves!

The Drug War costs $35billion in cash (that's right, pay for OIF in three year) plus the dead bodies, bad no-knock raids, and the largest prison population in the industrialized world. It does more harm than good.

[Dashing Dasher]

First I heard of it - but I don't doubt it....

I remember reading that wonderful document called, "THE CONSTITUTION" recently and don't remember cough syrup being mentioned. But, I could be wrong...

/sarcasm

[ShadowDancer]

Where I come from 'booze' means hard liquor, which is what I think she was referring to, not fru-fru drinks.

[Dashing Dasher]

Buckley's Mixture

It taste awful and it works

Created in Toronto in 1919, the largest size bottle of Buckley's Mixture is currently the top-selling cough syrup by volume in Canada. Now Buckley's products are being sold around the world! Buckley's Mixture is sugar-free, alcohol-free and based on herbal ingredients like Pine Needle Oil, Canada Balsam, Camphor & Menthol. No wonder it tastes the way it does...

Indications: Effective, non-drowsy relief of coughs, congestion due to colds, minor bronchial irritations, laryngitis, hoarseness, croupy cough and minor irritations due to smoking, dust or air pollution.
Why does it taste so bad?

Because Buckley's Mixture has a herbal base, ingredients such as Canada balsam, menthol, camphor and pine needle oil give Buckley's a taste which most people describe as awful.

[calex59]

Maybe we should teach all the meth makers how to make nitro and tell them to be sure and not use ice when they are making it. Then we could get rid of a bunch of them at once. Of course we would want them to cook it in a warehouse that was a few miles away from other buildings.

[calex59]

Wow, why couldn't a guy just go chew on some pine needles when he is feeling bad and save the cost of this stuff. That taste pretty awful to and has the same ingredients as most of the stuff in the Bucklys!

[antiunion person]

When I was a baby and teething, my parents used to dip a pacifier into whiskey and let me suck on that for a while. Now, I have a son and when he was teething, I did the same thing. I grew up to be a normal person in this society. **BURP** Oh, excuse me. It's time to go suck on another pacifier. lol

[petitfour]

I was telling my husband about this story, and he said the very same thing. Not the stuff about being raided, but about the purchases automatically being monitored.

[eno_]

I was telling my husband about this story, and he said the very same thing. Not the stuff about being raided, but about the purchases automatically being monitored.

The monitoring isn't for nothing. It is sufficient "probable cause" in today's America to break your door down and come barging in with guns drawn. Heck, if I had a grudge against someone, all I'd have to do is slip a couple hundred dollars to an informant (i.e. a criminal paid to snitch) to say the word and they'd be facing down masked men in black BDUs wielding submachineguns.

[Swordmaker]

Its not funny for some.

An employee of one of my client's stopped in a Long's Drug Store in Lodi, California, a couple of years ago. He had a cold and they were offering a buy two get one free promotion for psuedophedrin capsules. He bought two, they gave him one. He left the store and was pulled over by a Lodi Police Officer and arrested!

Apparently another police officer was in line behind him in line when he purchased his cold medicine and called in the illegal purchase.

This went on for months. They siezed his guns. They confiscted his car (used in a "drug" deal), and made life for him hell. It took almost two years to straighten in all out and to be exonerated and get his property back.

[Puddleglum]

What an awful story about your client having his property confiscated.

The drug war targets the innocent in droves to catch a few guilty (and snag some federal funds).

I hate psuedophedrin (makes my heart pound like a trip-hammer), but micro-managing its retail sale is too intrusive. I do not want government to get in the habit of tracking all my purchases based on some vague appeal to the common good. Outlaw the damn stuff if you want, or make it prescription-only.

Sounds like Oklahoma is eventually going to set up a database to track who purchases how much when, and if they exceed their legal quota. How sad. If they tracked state government spending half as thoroughly as this, the state might be less repellant to outside investment/better paying jobs. What are the demographics on meth use?

[TKDietz]

This isn't some "vague appeal to the common good." Oklahoma has seen a huge decrease in the number of meth labs since they passed their laws requiring that psuedoephedrine be sold only at pharmacies and only to people who will produce identification and sign for the pills.

I'm one of those people who thinks marijuana should be legal and regulated similar to the way alcohol is now and that no one should get a felony conviction for mere possession of a personal use amount of any drug. I see the "war on drugs" as it is being fought as causing an awful lot of unnecessary problems and unfair results. But what they are doing in Oklahoma is something that actually works to reduce the number of meth labs, and the inconvenience to the average consumer wanting cold medication containing psuedoephedrine is minimal. You can still get all of the medicine you need, but the laws have made it much more difficult for all of these thousands of kitchen meth cooks to get the psuedo they need to cook dope.

I wish they'd pass these laws in my state. We have thousands of meth labs operating at any given time. Even in the lightly populated county where I work as a public defender law enforcement are always busting someone for either cooking dope or possessing "paraphernalia" with intent to manufacture it. And for every lab they stop there are probably dozens more out there operating. The most hardcore addicts are the ones out there cooking all the dope, and the ability to make their own is keeping them high constantly. A lot of these people stay up for days and days on end and the combination of sleep deprivation, the effects of the drugs, and the paranoia about being caught makes them crazy and dangerous. And they're bringing a lot of people down with them because they always have several friends helping them get the supplies together and cook the dope and these people are shooting up or smoking just as much as the main cooks.

I represent these guys. I always have several meth lab cases going. These people are hardcore junkies. If they are able to make bond when they get caught, most will go back out and start cooking again. I always warn them that the police will be watching them because the police know these guys will go right back to it too. Invariably several who bond out will get busted again while out on bond. They aren't doing this out of some brazen disrespect for the law, they do it out of desperation. They can't leave the stuff alone and they can't afford to buy it. Their addictions need feeding and the only way to do it is cook more dope, or steal to get the money to buy dope. Most can't work to pay for it because they've built up a high tolerance to the drug and even with a good job they couldn't afford enough to feed their addictions. And the fact of the matter is that no one is going to want to hire them anyway with their drug problems and serious felony charges pending and even if they could get a decent job most couldn't hold onto it because their drug problems make them awful employees. So most of those who are able to post bond go right back to cooking and many end up busted again and back in jail with those who never made bond, teaching everyone else there how to cook dope.

Without a good supply of psuedoephedrine we'd have a lot fewer meth labs out there. In all these little kitchen meth labs, the way these people get psuedo is to go out with a bunch of friends buying or stealing it from all the stores in town. If we put it behind the counter at pharmacies and made people sign for it when they bought it that would make it a lot harder for these people to get enough to make cooking worth the trouble. That's liable to cut down on the number of addicts, and it would also reduce the risk that children will be harmed by meth labs in their homes or that innocent people will be harmed by the fires and explosions that sometimes happen when people cook this stuff. Not only that but it would save the state and the county an awful lot of money blown arresting all these people, jailing them, litigating their cases, and imprisoning them for years and years.

This just seems like a no brainer to me. The psuedoephedrine needs to be sold from behind the counters at pharmacies only.

[Puddleglum]

Thanks for your perspective on this. I can understand that Oklahoma's law might discourage people from starting up as meth addicts or manufacturers. But would it discourage the the hard core folks? If the source of meth dries up, will the addiction just wear off? Or will addicts seek another source and more violence means of satisfying their addiciton?