Replies

The one thing they have to have is psuedoephedrine

They use psuedoephedrine because we banned natural ephedrine. Before ephedrine they used other amines. We keep banning substances and they just go to another method. They could just start harvesting ephedera from the wild, but that wouldn't be as easy as switching to another available chemical, and there are many.

Banning substances that can be used for making drugs does not work and it raises the cost of living for all of us. A good example is leather. American leather was not only high quality, it was inexpensive. We tanned with methylamine gas. Methylamine was banned because some were using it to make methamphetamine. Now that we tan with chrome, leather is expensive and very low quality. If you want to work with good leather you now have to buy imported. But, I guess that's ok if you like plastic shoes from WalMart!
...

I am not suggesting that we ban psuedoephedrine, or anything else for that matter. All I am suggesting is that we put it behind the counters in pharmacies to make it more difficult for people to go all over town buying or stealing it from this store and that store collecting enough to go out and cook batches of dope. People would still be able to get psuedoehedrine, it's just that for some psuedoephedrine products they'd have to go to the pharmacy counter. That's not such a big deal. But in Oklahoma meth lab seizures are down about 80% since they enacted those laws. It's working.

Look, there are not that many things that can be converted into meth. The reason all the little kitchen meth cooks use psuedoephedrine is because that's the one thing left that isn't controlled and/or prohibitively expensive. I think it would be possible for people to grow ephedra and then extract ephedrine from the plants, but that would be a hell of an involved process that would take too long, require too much work, and end up costing too much in the long run for most of these people out there cooking up all the small batches dope in their homes, hotels, or wherever they can find a place to cook up a batch.

As we can see with Oklahoma's results, putting psuedoephedrine tablets behind pharmacy counters substantially reduces the number of little small batch kitchen meth labs. They saw an 80% drop and instead of seeing more people go to prison for cooking dope, they saw a huge drop in drug lab arrests. That's good all the way around. Why you get your feathers ruffled over something like this is beyond me.