Make Cold Pills Harder To Get, Officials Urge

It's cheaper to buy medications you use frequently in bulk packaging. Now if they are buying 3000 pills via 20pill packages, I'd raise an eyebrow. I doubt I would raise an eyebrow at someone buying a 500 pill bottle though anymore than I would if they bought a 500 pill bottle of Tylenol. If you have allergies badly and use it a lot, you would save yourself money to buy a few bulk packages when they were on sale.

Unfortunately, this whole thing is a case of innocent people (the retailers and drug company) being punished for what the bad guys do. If they restrict sales on the product, it hurts profits for both innocent parties and the bad guys will still find what they want someplace else. If someone wants to get high, there isn't much anyone can do to stop them.

I am one of those people that believes that the War on Drugs is a catastrophe and that our drug laws need to be reformed. That being said, I still don't have a problem with states restricting access to pseudo-ephedrine and ephedrine. The harder they make it to get that stuff, the harder it will be for all of these meth heads to go from store to store collecting boxes of sinus medicine so they can cook up their next batch of meth.

If it were up to me, these drug would either be prescription only or there would be some sort of ration card for them. Nobody needs to by thousands of these tablets a year. Nobody needs to buy several boxes at once either.

Meth is really easy to cook. You can get recipes for it anywhere, and any toothless idiot can cook it. Where I live they bust several meth labs a week. Most all of them are tiny operations where these people couldn't be doing much more than cooking enough for themselves and maybe a little to sell. They usually work in teams of three to five or so with one more experienced cook doing the cooking while others are out scavaging more cooking supplies. A car load of people will go into each store one after the other buying up their limit of pills (Three boxes each where I live) and then it's off to the next store to do it over again.

We can't keep people from cooking meth if they really want to do it bad enough. But the more difficult we make it to find the ingredients, the less people there will be willing to go to the trouble of cooking their own.

Notice that I am not saying that we should put more junkies in prison. All I suggest is that states make it harder for people to buy large quantities of pseudo-ephedrine and ephedrine.

For the country's 15 million asthmatics -- not to mention the tens of millions of others who suffer from emphysema, chronic bronchitis, and other respiratory diseases and allergies -- being decongested can literally be a matter of life and death. But I guess their lives matter less than the few tens or hundreds of thousands of people who are stupid enough to use crank.

Screw this stupidity! Let the few tens of thousands who are dumb enough to snort meth do what they will with their lives, and let the millions who positively need decongestants to breathe freely when they have colds have access to them.

Where I live over-possession of ephedrine is a felony punishable by up to six years in prison. If the person has other meth cooking supplies and the prosecutors can prove there was intent to manufacture meth he or she would be facing up to twenty years and they'd have to do at least 70% of their time before being eligible for parole.

I don't know exactly what the cut-off is for over-possession, but it amounts to several boxes of pills.

Let's not forget the other innocent parties, the landlords and storage unit companies that have their properties ruined by meth lab junkies. Here in WA, every store I go into, you have to ask for the over-the-counter drugs in question from a clerk. They limit the amount that can be sold in one transaction. I suppose if a person has a special need for sizable quantities, then they have a pharmacist at the store contact their doctor, and a special accommodation can be made.

This isn't your typical pot farmer, whose property crimes are usually theft of electricity. These meth lab Clymers are economic terrorists to people trying to make an honest buck out of providing a place to live, or to store your stuff.

"This isn't your typical pot farmer, whose property crimes are usually theft of electricity."

Actually, it's rare that pot farmers steal electricity. The small timers growing a little for personal use and maybe some extra to sell don't use much power so they have no need to steal it and most don't. That's something the big indoor growers are much more likely to do. The typical pot farmer is probably not committing any property crimes related to his dope growing.

Your husband and son don't need more than 5 grams of ephedrine or 9 grams of pseudoephedrine at a time. That's several hundred pills at a time.

As for your question about meth cooking supplies, the State would have to prove intent to manufacture. Just having some of the supplies needed to cook meth is not enough. There have to be other factors tying it all together. In most of the cases I see, there is a good deal of paraphernalia put together from previous cooking sessions along with the ingredients. There will often be dozens of boxes or even cases of pseudoephedrine, coffee filters that have meth and pseudoephedrine residue in them, mason jars full of chemicals, a hot plate, beakers, tubing attached to a bottle, Red Devil Lye, Draino, muriatic acid, dozens and dozens of boxes of matches often with the red phosphorous already removed from them, iodine crystals and on and on. And more often than not, they'll find meth pipes and/or syringes and bent spoons with meth residue in them when they make the bust. Often one or more of the parties will admit they'd been cooking it or were getting ready to.

It's usually plain as day what these people were doing, and if the government doesn't have enough to prove intent to manufacture, often we can get the manufacturing charges dropped. If it's borderline, there might have to be a trial. But it's rare that most prosecutors will take a case to trial unless they have a pretty sure-fire winner on their hands. My experience has been that most prosecutors hate to get whipped at trial and they'll fold before they take an iffy case before a jury unless they have to proceed for political reasons. Still some people, even innocent people, will plead guilty because they don't want to face a jury who might give them a much harsher sentence than the prosecutor is offering. But I can't say that I have ever had a client plead guilty to possession of paraphernalia with intent to manufacture meth unless it was clear that that is what they or the people they were with were doing. Iffy cases are usually pled down to a lesser charge or dropped entirely.

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.