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Comment by nekoashide | Hacker News Reader

There's a very good reason it's behind the counter. I'm not talking about the people who need it as cold medicine, it's the people who buy it to make drugs and get high.

Before it was placed behind the counter you couldn't even find it on shelves due to the amount of theft.

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with the chemists selling useless cold medicine but the streets EVEN MORE full of meth-heads than before, obviously this particular "war on (some) drugs" measure is a pathetic failure.

That’s not how logic works. It could be that it saved us from an even worse epidemic.

That's also not how logic works, if you want to claim that this measure was successful you need to offer convincing evidence in favor of that. The benefit of the doubt doesn't go to failed war on drugs policies.

I'd imagine you'd still need a cost benefit analysis if this inquiry were done in good faith. Which in politics, especially when it comes to controlling drugs, it never is. The exception possibly being prohibition itself—but prohibition actually worked, in the sense that the rate of binge drinking dropped drastically. No such efficacy is obvious here and it seems like a really useful medicine.

The problem there is that alcohol is relatively high-volume, I mean a barrel of pure ethanol is still a barrel of pure ethanol. By contrast fentanyl for example can be effectively shipped, in commercial quantities, in the back of a sedan or human-portable luggage.

Stopping binge drinking meant reducing the amount of available alcohol, a substance requiring large scale shipping and production, storage and so on. Modern drugs really don't have that problem, and for the ones that do, synthetic alternatives would just take over.

What is your suggested solution?

There's no solution to drug use. There's only acceptance of this unwavering human reality.

Now all the junkies on the street corner? Lock them up

Improving folks economic reality tends to lower drug use. We could try not further ruining lives by putting them into the "justice" system and instead close the gaps they fell through while helping them up.

That’s the whole point of this discussion—that the reason it’s behind the counter (which everyone already knows is because of meth) is NOT actually a good reason to have it there.

Rationing it so people who need it can have access to it is a bad reason?

As someone who has bought it twice in the last decade, I'm glad it was available the day I went to the store looking for it. The price however is bananas, but I feel that way about all non generic brand name pills.

It wasn't put behind the counter because meth makers were buying out the entire supply and leaving people with colds with none. It was put behind the counter to attempt to minimize meth makers buying it at all.

If the reasoning was to prevent theft, why can I only buy one box at a time, and why does my license get scanned, preventing me from buying twice in the same week (or whatever) from different stores?

I was between 18-25 years of age and the Idaho pharmacist wouldn't sell to me with an out of state ID. Luckily my dad was perusing the magazines and they let an Idaho adult buy me my medicine.

I just wanted a single box of Mucinex with pseudoephedrine for my cold.

Not to mention every time they scan your license it goes on a list. XKCD made light of this very fact.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/cold_medicine.png

Always post xkcd with the full link so that people can see the alt-text.

Posting mobile version because mobile people dont't have alt-text on hover: https://m.xkcd.com/1618/

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/duty_calls.png

Always post xkcd with the full link so that people can see the alt-text.

Posting mobile version because mobile people don't have alt-text on hover: https://m.xkcd.com/386/

Meth is now insanely cheap because it’s manufactured in industrial size Mexican labs with precursors from China and smuggled into the US, there’s no real incentive to manufacture it yourself when high purity meth is available for dirt cheap prices.

How do you know meth is cheap? Nothing is cheap anymore.

Except it doesn't stop that at all. That's the whole point. Modern meth is just made in Mexico using industrial chemicals.

Alarms have been raised that this could be even more harmful for the users.

In places with low rates of shoplifting (i.e. most places), this never seemed to be an issue.

In any event, the restrictions on pseudoephedrine had huge societal costs (as a proxy, apparently at least $1.7B/yr is spent on useless “decongestants” [0] as a result), and I would hope it at least had corresponding benefits. But it doesn’t seem that meth has gotten any less available.

[0] Presumably more. After all, if people have trouble buying a decongestant that works, might as well buy a homeopathic “decongestant” instead, which is probably safer than phenylephrine while being no less effective.

It's more available and cheaper than ever, can be made in bulk cheaply, resulting in a more harmful product.

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