The other day I went into the pharmacy to get some Claritin-D because I had been congested for a few days. The pharmacist informed me that not only was it behind the counter, but that he would need my ID to enter my license number along with my signature. Knowing a little about drugs I asked him if that information was due to the production of Crystal Meth. Of course it was.
Apparently now there is a federal law that states that in order to buy Claratin-D, Sudafed, Advil cold and sinus, Aleve cold and sinus, Drixoral, Mucinex, and even childrens Motrin, each time a driver license number and a signature must be procured. I spent a few minutes talking with the pharmacist on duty to try to understand the logic behind this new law.
Pseudoephedrine, the active ingriedent in Sudafed (and all the others) is what the ‘cookers' are after. Although he never personally sold any amount of pseudoephedrine-containing product to anyone, he has heard of the ‘meth epidemic'. I asked him, as a pharmacist who has a degree in chemistry, how many packages of Sudafed would be needed to make , say, 20 dollars worth of crank, and he though about twenty. Twenty boxes of Sudafed, ephedrine, or Drixoral. Not one, two, or even five. Twenty.
I then consulted a friend of mine who is an ex-tweeker. He was on and off with crystal for ten years (fortunately, he still has all his teeth.) He said, "...even though I never cooked it myself, it would take at least 48 tablets to make a few lines, and that is IF you can decrease the rest of the necessary ingredients enough at the right ratio to do it."
Making a personal batch like that is practically unheard of? "It could be done, but no one would. It's [a] waste to make so little for that ammount of work."
So, how many boxes does one need to cook up an entire ‘batch' of sellable product? A lot. Its not as if you go home and open the package and you're ready to go, there is an entire process and more ingredients than I could remember, even my friend couldn't remember everything and he was on it for a decade. So I consulted Google, Wikipedia, etc., and found this site (
crank_manufacturing_info). Very helpful. One thing I can guarantee you is that
I will not be the one attempting to extract the necessary ingredients for this high. It is harder to make than crack. One practically has to be a chemist to do so. Iodine crystals, phosphorus, and Pseudoephedrine? Sound like too much work for me. Not to mention, is is extremely likely that if you do not know what you are doing, you can easily blow yourself sky-high. All the base ingridents have to be extracted, and there are six more things to add.
Anyway, the point being, does this law do anything useful, or is it just another attempt by some committee of some administration to get good press and help catapult another election. I believe it is the latter, and here is why.
Logically and logistically, the drug war is a metaphor for waste of time. Personally, I believe that if the federal or state government cared about what people did to themselves they would examine the root cause of the desire to get high, and not the symptoms.
Right dick-heads. Fantastic idea. Laws such as these lead to what I call drug-displacement. It's a phenomenon that occurs when areas that are affected the most by narcotics or other controlled substances ( a physical area or a specific demographic of the populus) are targeted acutely by law enforcement agencies. In essence, they try to take away the means to get high (the tools, or the dealers themselves) but they never pay attention to the underlaying causes of what makes people want to use those hard narcotics/controlled substances in the first place. This is our failed legacy called the "war on drugs."
Either way, preventing people from buying Sudafed without showing their drivers license is not a cure for the problems that make people want drugs. Nor is making it harder for the crank-dealer to manufacture the final product by restricting his/her access to what they need. All that does is drive up the value of the finished/street product. When the street product becomes more expensive, do you believe that the addict sits down and says:
No. This leads to drug-displacement. Now the supply is lowered and the demand is the same. It doesn't take an economics major to explain that this creates an increase in price in the relative market.
Let us use a pie-reference. So, you have more people fighting for a smaller pie. The fighting gets nastier and the pie becomes worth more monetarily. Therefore, the crimes that are committed to obtain the funds to get said piece of pie become more frequent, more grand, and more treacherous (more 'competitive'.) This leads to the companies that make the products that are involved to either have skyrocketing sales or large amounts of theft. This also leads to the people that are selling the drugs making more money. Finally, it leads to more incarceration for the users. What part of that process makes peoples lives better so that they do not want to use the narcotics/controlled substances again? If you said ‘absolutely none of it', then you are correct. Decreasing DEMAND should be the goal of any long-term remedy, of course that route produces far less revenue for police, F.B.I., A.T.F., D.E.A., municipalities, judges, lawyers, jails, jail guards, A.O.D.A. counselors, etc.
Oh, and by the way, the pharmacist told me that they are data basing the names of all people that purchase these products that contain Pseudoephedrine. So when you go into a Walgreens to get your sick kid a box of children's Motrin, your name will be entered into a data bank. Maybe some day you will get a ‘knock-n-talk' from the feds (Are you SURE you have a sick child? Not cooking any methamphetamine in here, are you?)
Give me a fucking break. You want to put sandwich baggies behind the counter too? Should I need an ID to get a tire pressure gauge or a cleaning/scouring pad? If I had not met so many stupid people in person I would think that the United States government was just fucking with us. But alas, this is no joke.
E-mail:embittered@catharticlament.com
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