Why are you worried about the government recording your usage of Sudafed? What is anybody going to do with that information? Serious question! I understand the principle involved; I just want to know if there's some practical concern.
From there, it's not too far of a stretch to imagine the government assigning someone to review the list and to expend additional investigative resources into merely "suspicious" cases. Plenty of good tragedies start this way.
If the government has an interest in preventing drug manufacture then this is the absolute worst way to go about prosecuting that agenda. It harms the wrong people and it offers no impediment to actual producers.
The information cannot possibly be useful, it may become a liability, and I didn't ask to be protected from myself.
Otherwise, what right is it of the government to enact this rate limit? What interest are they protecting? How is the rate limit decided? What can I do if I disagree with the rate limit? Why is a private business being burdened with the governments agenda here?
I get where you're coming from, it _is_ a /small/ thing, but the implications immediately become onerous if you think about their meaning inside of a "free" country.
This isn't the primary concern anyways, the point was, in order to implement this seemingly simple action, many liberties have to be sacrificed and the boundary between innocent and criminal and government and private business become significantly marred.
Perhaps those sacrifices are immaterial to most lives and could be ignored without consequence, but the originalist in me says this is folly, and as I've shown it's easy to think of the dangers that some innocent people might endure as a result. Worse, comparing these dangers to the outcomes of the system itself, the whole endeavor seems to have negative value.
Finally, as we've seen in history many times, now that this electronic logbook exists, it's use will naturally continue to expand until the government has secured for itself the right to view nearly every single "questionable" purchase you make at a pharmacy.
It's an entirely unaccountable act from the government. I'm not sure why anyone would expend effort minimizing it.
This particular "logbook" has existed for almost 2 decades now, and its scope hasn't creeped from there, so your second argument is pretty easy to shoot down.
I think the evidence pretty strongly suggests that this policy, which was put in place to create a rate limit on the purchase of a chemical that isn't so much a precursor to methamphetamine as it is a slightly tweaked version of methamphetamine, is in fact simply used to create a rate limit.
It would be interesting to know if the people concerned about the need to show an ID to vote share that concern about the need to show an ID for access to medicine.
> This particular "logbook" has existed for almost 2 decades now, and its scope hasn't creeped from there, so your second argument is pretty easy to shoot down.
The policy has proved ineffective at curtailing the availability of methamphetamine while inconveniencing honest people. That's not something the public is clamoring for more of.
But it never really was. It came about to begin with as part of the Patriot Act. The lack of expansion is unsurprising given the lack of any 9/11-style crisis to use as an excuse in the intervening two decades. The test is when the next one comes.
One of the failings of the existing style of government is that the "passage by both houses of Congress and signed by the President" system used to pass legislation is the same system required to repeal it, which rightfully makes it harder to pass bad laws, but wrongfully makes it harder to repeal them. And then they get passed during a crisis and inconveniently stick.
It's clearly because you can make methamphetamine out of it. But you can also make methamphetamine out of other things which limiting access to cold medicine demonstrably hasn't prevented.
But the justification is not the same. People were going to the drug store for cough drops and unintentionally ending up addicted to opioids. Nobody was going to the drug store for a decongestant and accidentally making meth out of it, and the number of people getting addicted to pseudoephedrine itself was neither large enough to justify the change, nor its explicitly stated rationale. Nor an effective means to bring it about if the claim that showing an ID isn't a burden is to be believed because it would have no effect on the small minority of people who might go to the pharmacy for a stuffy nose and thereby become dependent on pseudoephedrine, since they would still get it.
Meanwhile the stated rational of limiting availability of methamphetamine hasn't gone well either.
This before we even mention that the OTC replacement, phenylephrine, is not only ineffective, it's a more dangerous drug than pseudoephedrine from a cardiovascular perspective and the switch has plausibly killed some people.
Do you? You have to show an insurance card to file a claim, but I imagine there is a lot of overlap between the people without ID and the people without insurance. And there appear to be free clinics that don't require ID, implying that it isn't required by law.
The alternative is you don't buy any Sudafed in the first place. So you've basically told yourself "no" anyway.
I realize you dislike the government logging your purchases, but you haven't answered GP's question about why you dislike it.
You effectively are in many cases, just as predicted by most when these laws were put into place.
First, it became far less of a relatively benign "after the fact" logbook as it was when first implemented. It is now networked and real-time. Many chain stores implement their own interpretation of what they feel a rate limit should be. This tends to err drastically on the side of conservative, and might look back much further than you assume.
Second, it's added risk - many independents simply don't want to bother with such a risk, and thus don't bother stocking it. It also adds handling costs.
And third and most importantly - it completely and irrevocably ruined the supply chain. It is now legitimately difficult to find it in stock reliably - and if you run out of it at 2am, it's no longer just a minor inconvenience to run to literally any convenience store.
Most stores simply no longer carry it, and only a handful of 24 hour pharmacy options exist compared to 20 years ago. Those pharmacies also have consistent supply issues, so you better not have strong brand or dosing preference.
Prices went up, and availability plummeted. It's out of stock roughly a third of the time I've needed to go run out to get some, and is no longer just an afterthought item to stock up on at Costco. Typically you're settling on buying the smallest boxes they make since all other sizes are out of stock, and paying even more per dose.
And it absolutely is a slippery slope. Loperamide has now met the same fate in many states, and has become multiples of the expense it used to be and a very much pain in the butt to get. No more qty 120 bottles from Costco at 2 cents a pill - entire market killed because people got used to this new norm.
It's just one more chip away at the American quality of life. Not a huge one, but one that adds expense and friction for what amounts to a questionable amount of gain.
Edit: That is all to say - it's far more than "just a rate limit". Ruining the OTC market for cold medication might be worth it, but that's more or less what happened here. It wasn't like the top 5% of buyers got scraped off the top and sent to jail and everyone else carried on per usual. The cold aisle of your local supermarket took a giant step backwards from 20 years ago in price, availability, convenience, and effectiveness. That was the cost of these creeping regulations. Some may even say the chilling effect was the entire point.
Even if someone isn't doing anything illegal, since >90% of cases end in plea deals it's good legal hygiene.
It’s literally harder for me to buy cold medicine than a gun. I hate everything about that situation.
Much of which would be covered as PII and PPI, and, in combination with info from other other data breaches can tell someone a lot about you.
I'm not saying that makes it OK to assemble into a database, and I think the point about amassing PII is well taken, but I think people are probably overestimating the value/hazardousness of this particular data set.
We can and should do the things you're suggesting, but I can't get behind the logic that we should wait til we can accomplish those things, when we can take any other more straightforward measures to mitigate "people making meth at home next door to people who don't like meth labs".
Where in my post did I say we should stop taking IDs and then wait until all of those are 100% fully accomplished before trying something else? Re-read the post - it's not there.
I'm arguing a more robust fix would be to do all of those things. That's not incompatible with keeping the current system of checking IDs until we hit some critical mass where the fixes for the more systemic issues reduce the need for checking IDs.
I don't mean to dismiss that point, it's a valid point, I'm just considering it closely.
Usually no one even looks at it (so why have it even?!?), but when they do it’s a potential intro to a full on Brazil situation.
Luckily the whole thing is generally considered a waste of time, so usually nothing comes of it. But why make yourself a target if you can avoid it?
In the years after this policy was put into place, there were news stories about how effective it had been in eliminating backyard meth production. You don't see those stories anymore. I suggest, with weak confidence, that the reason you don't isn't that backyard meth has roared back, but rather that it's so decisively not a part of the equation anymore that stats about it don't really matter. Meth comes from overseas now, not from backyards.
That doesn't solve the meth consumption problem, but it does eliminate one significant meth externality.
Without having to give ID, find a pharmacist, etc. I remember those days. They're long gone, obviously.
But if cops will choke someone to death about selling a cigarette, do you really want them to know about you buying Sudafed?
It’s funny that there is no outrage about a national psuedophredrine database. But people go nuts about a national gun database
Sudafed PE is a much more salient and annoying topic than the behind-the-counter real Sudafed. I think it really does piss people off to get tricked into buying fake decongestant. But that's a separable issue from having to ask (and to show ID) to buy the real stuff.