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This kind of legislation won't really hurt the big huge labs who buy supplies in bulk from shady suppliers who are acting illegally. But I bet all or at least almost all the people busted in the 166 labs found in that one county were getting their supply of pseudoephedrine from local stores, either buying it or stealing it. What you have out there are a bunch of tweakers with recipes and buddies from jail who know something about cooking dope and they get together and cook the stuff. These aren't the type of people the guys who supply raw materials to the huge labs are going to want to deal with. They'd rather keep their big organized crime connections who pay well and don't get them busted, unlike tweakers off the street.

Oklahoma saw around an 80% reduction in the number of meth labs since they passed their laws requiring pseudoephedrine to be kept behind counters in pharmacies. This severely limited the number of possible sources for pseudoephedrine making it far more difficult for people to keep a lab going by running all over town buying or stealing their pseudoephedrine. They probably would have seen a greater reduction in the number of labs if Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, and other bordering states had similar laws restricting pseudoephedrine sales. Now most of the labs they are finding are near state lines. They are down to finding less than twenty labs per month from over a hundred labs per month. They estimated they were spending well over $300,000 per meth lab after factoring in the costs of building finishing the cases and appeals and imprisoning these people, cleaning up messes made, child services costs they end up having to cover, and so on. If they are right on their numbers they might be saving tens of millions per month now.

In reality, these labs are not producing meth in these quantities using OTC cold remedies. If OTC stuff ceased to exist it would have a minimal effect on the production of meth.

Polk County Florida (where I live) is the meth capitol of the state & they sure aren't doing it with Sudafed.

Do you have to pass a stupid test to get into public office?