Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business | Hacker News Reader

Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business

motherjones.com

25 pointsguildwriter28 comments

Pseudoephedrine is the most effective chemical we have to alleviate flu-like symptoms. The alternatives such as phenylephrine simply don't work.

I believe in cognitive liberty, but meth will mess you up. If I believed any drug should be illegal, meth would be at the top of the list. But illegalizing something for which we have no reasonable alternative is absurd.

Of course, making less destructive amphetamines legal so people don't feel the need for meth, that's just crazy talk.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylephrine#Questions_about_e...

I don't think people are proposing making pseudoephedrine illegal. Just slightly more difficult to obtain.

It appears that the data supports that changing the drug's status has a positive impact on meth production. However, there was no data about how people in Oregon or Mississippi deal with their flu-like symptoms.

Right. But many people have neither the time nor money for prescriptions. Especially when OTC medicines claim to work. Especially in lower income states like Mississippi.

I grew up in rural blue-collar America. My father had health insurance through his work, but we seldom had the money for the co-pay to see a doctor. (anecdotal, I know)

One real problem (that this article got factually wrong) is that phenylephrine (the 'PE' in Sudafed PE) doesn't really work. The literature goes back-and-forth on it, but the consensus seems to be that it's only marginally more effective than placebo. Pseudoephedrine is significantly more effective than both (which, of course, is partly due to its close chemical relationship to methamphetamine...funny how that works).

Agreed. For entertainment, see the satirical article "A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine" which notes the difficulty of obtaining psudoephedrine from pharmacies and gives a simple chemical synthesis of it from "readily available" meth.

"We expect that the simultaneous trends of restricting pseudoephedrine sales while N-methylamphetamine becomes less expensive and of higher purity will make the methods presented here increasingly attractive."

http://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf

"which notes the difficulty of obtaining psudoephedrine from pharmacies and gives a simple chemical synthesis of it from "readily available" meth"

Ha! It certainly would be a good bit easier to put that hydroxyl group back on than to strip it off in the first place....

The article argues hard that making pseudoephedrine a prescription drug would magically solve all this... and never once floats the idea that making methamphetamine itself a prescription drug would work much better.

Once addicts can get cheap, safe maintenance doses to feed their habit, there's no more need for homebrew meth labs, and no more burn patients, toddlers drinking drain cleaner, kids in foster care because their parents are in jail, police teams in hazmat suits and all the massive costs this imposes on society.

Also, I can't believe this is a thing: "a one-to-five-year sentence for buying pseudoephedrine with intent to make meth".

Better yet, legalize or prescriptionize less destructive amphetamines, so people have no reason to use meth.

(yes, I just coined a neologism. You can thank me later.)

They are legal. Dextro-amphetamine and mixed amphetamine salts are widely prescribed for ADD.

Methamphetamine is already an FDA-approved prescription drug, called Desoxyn.

Holy mother duck! If I were roughly the size of a barge, I still wouldn't take meth to lose weight. I think you'd be trading your mind for your body.

http://www.rxlist.com/desoxyn-drug/warnings-precautions.htm

"Methamphetamine should be administered at the lowest effective dosage"

"For treatment of children 6 years or older with a behavioral syndrome characterized by moderate to severe distractibility, short attention span, hyperactivity, emotional lability and impulsivity"

I am not opposed to the treatment of ADHD, and I understand the difference in purity between prescription amphetamines and street drugs, and the difference in effect from treatment dosage vs recreational use, but.. even so, it's a little hilarious to read, given my preconceptions regarding the drug.

True but irrelevant, since it can't be legally prescribed for treatment/maintenance of addiction.

On the one hand you deride one solution that's actually been proven effective as magical. On the other hand you propose a solution and then proceed to enumerate its magical effects.

Addicts who start on a street drug aren't typically in the habit of going to the doctor for their fix.

Not sure that's true if you factor in decent quality. In fact it's demmonstrably untrue if you look at mmj users or the heroin programs in the Netherlands.

They would as soon as it was cheaper to go to the doctor instead.

The problem with drug addicts is not what happens when they have sufficient money to fuel their addiction (except in the case of a number of drugs, including -ironically- the one under discussion here : meth. Making it cheaper won't work : dosage must be continually increased to keep the effects, resulting in the need for exponentially increasing doses, and the money to buy them. And that's ignoring psychological addiction. Few people start out doing 5 doses on a work day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methamphetamine#Long-term

Some tidbits: Methamphetamine use has a high association with depression and suicide as well as serious heart disease, amphetamine psychosis, anxiety, and violent behaviors. Methamphetamine also has a very high addiction risk.[12] Unlike cocaine and amphetamine, methamphetamine is directly neurotoxic to midbrain dopamine neurons.[27] Moreover, methamphetamine use is associated with an increased risk of Parkinson's disease due to the fact that uncontrolled dopamine effluxion is neurotoxic.[11][28] Long-term dopamine upregulation occurring as a result of methamphetamine abuse can also cause neurotoxicity, which is believed to be responsible for causing persisting cognitive deficits, such as memory loss, impaired attention, and decreased executive function. Similar to the neurotoxic effects on the dopamine system, methamphetamine can also result in neurotoxicity to serotonergic neurons.[29]

Meth use as a whole, according to a 2009 RAND Corporation study, costs the nation anywhere between $16 billion and $48 billion each year.

I call BS. Even $16 billion is totally ridiculous. According to Wikipedia, NASA's budget was $18 billion in 2011.

This article is just a straight ahead Moral Panic, trying to polarize a situation, and then punish some party while there's a big fog of crapaganda around. Mother Jones should be ashamed.

And just a side note: how many Moral Panics over drugs do we have before we just get over it?

I'm old, I can recall a late 60s moral panic about LSD - it supposedly made you have babies with lobster claws, if you survived the mandatory dive out of a 2nd floor window. There was an early 70s panic over heroin, and then the Angel Dust thing in the early 80s. After that, it was Free Basing, and then Crack. It's been Evil Meth for a while now, isn't it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?

Sources? Mother Jones clearly has theirs, otherwise I would have to accuse you of "trying to polarize a situation".

> I call BS.

I am making no statement of support for original numbers but if you "call BS" then you need to provide something to back you up. NASA budget comparison is pointless.

"I'm old, I can recall a late 60s moral panic about LSD - it supposedly made you have babies with lobster claws, if you survived the mandatory dive out of a 2nd floor window. There was an early 70s panic over heroin, and then the Angel Dust thing in the early 80s. After that, it was Free Basing, and then Crack. It's been Evil Meth for a while now, isn't it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?"

I grew up in a very poor part of the country and this statement is ridiculous. These drugs (save maybe LSD) are still massively destructive forces in society that still kill people today in poor, uneducated sections of the United States. Your statement makes it sound like people are just afraid of these drugs because they don't understand it, but once they come around to it, they'll see how it's not so bad.

That is an insane position on drugs.

disclosure: I'm actually for legalization but I have my eyes open about what they do and how they destroy families and lives.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not that the drugs are "not so bad", it's just that the fog around something so horribly stigmatized prevents any sensible treatment program.

The only thing society does if there's a major drug Moral Panic is to punish the offenders severely. Putting people in prison just causes huge problems all around, even for those not in prison. We end up with a prison-industrial complex and a militarized police force.

Illegal drugs do indeed destroy families and lives: but prison is almost certainly not any help for those issues. We've got AA for booze, Narcotics Anonymous for heroin, etc etc. Those actually seem to make a difference. The Moral Panics around particular drugs keep us from helping the people involved.

isn't it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?

Here you are, a new X/MDMA, just in time for the end of Q3:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/28/us-usa-drugs-molly...

More seriously, I had thought that meth was over-blown as a danger until I saw a business truck advertising: Mold Specialist / Meth Lab Cleanup then did a Google search for similar companies, and got 200K hits. http://biomethdecon.com/

People choosing to use drugs is one thing, but people exposing their minor children, neighbors, or subsequent tenants to drug, solvent, and feedstock residue is quite another.

That would be "bath salts", which are actually rather scary. Not that they should be illegal, just remove the need by legalizing their herbal counterpart: cannabis.

Oregonian here. Although the incidence of meth labs here in Southern Oregon has certainly dropped, which is a good thing, I doubt the number of meth users has changed much if at all. The meth is now coming from Mexico, much higher quality, and a straight shot up I5.

If you make psuedoephedrine too difficult to get, meth cooks will start with extracts from Ephedra sinica (containing ephedrine). That may or may not be a good thing.

There are too many legal plants anyway؟

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