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

Pseudoephedrine is the most effective chemical we have to alleviate flu-like symptoms. The alternatives such as phenylephrine simply don&#x27;t work.<p>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.<p>Of course, making less destructive amphetamines legal so people don&#x27;t feel the need for meth, that&#x27;s just crazy talk.<p>source: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylephrine#Questions_about_effectiveness" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Phenylephrine#Questions_about_e...</a>

One real problem (that this article got factually wrong) is that phenylephrine (the &#x27;PE&#x27; in Sudafed PE) doesn&#x27;t really work. The literature goes back-and-forth on it, but the consensus seems to be that it&#x27;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).

The article argues hard that making pseudoephedrine a prescription drug would magically solve all this... and never once floats the idea that making <i>methamphetamine itself</i> a prescription drug would work much better.<p>Once addicts can get cheap, safe maintenance doses to feed their habit, there&#x27;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.

<i>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><p>I call BS. Even $16 billion is totally ridiculous. According to Wikipedia, NASA&#x27;s budget was $18 billion in 2011.<p>This article is just a straight ahead Moral Panic, trying to polarize a situation, and then punish some party while there&#x27;s a big fog of crapaganda around. Mother Jones should be ashamed.<p>And just a side note: how many Moral Panics over drugs do we have before we just get over it?<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;s been Evil Meth for a while now, isn&#x27;t it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?

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 <i>Ephedra sinica</i> (containing ephedrine). That may or may not be a good thing.