It’s gotten considerably worse over the past 20 years; we’re asked to present ID and tracked in government databases when purchasing allergy medicine.

That's because the allergy medicine might as well just be methamphetamine. Nobody cares about your allergies, and if you go to buy Sudafed, they're just going to sell it to you. The only thing that will trip you up is if you go from store to store collecting lots of it.

> Nobody cares about your allergies, and if you go to buy Sudafed, they're just going to sell it to you. The only thing that will trip you up is if you go from store to store collecting lots of it.

That's not true. First they don't just sell it to you, they take your ID, record your information, send that to the state, and then sell it you. Going to one store after another after another collecting lots of pills isn't the only thing that will trip people up either. I've had times when I was told I couldn't purchase allergy medication because I'd purchased some already. I had recently, for the family, but I was traveling and didn't have the medication with me.

I wasn't going around to a bunch of stores buying mass quantities of allergy medications, I'd made a purchase once and several days/weeks after tried to make a second purchase. I can't imagine I'm the only person alive who has failed to bring a medication with them while traveling, or suddenly had need for it when they didn't have some immediately on their person, or made a purchase and soon after lost it, and discovered that a pointless restriction brought about by a failed war on drugs prevented a simple purchase fully intended for treatment of a medical condition when it was needed.

Maybe a more sane threshold for treating people like criminals would help the situation, but honestly the entire program seems like a waste of time of money at this point.

How much Sudafed did you buy?! The daily purchase limits are pretty high. Did you max out your monthly limit in your hometown before traveling?

Really, if we're this wound up about the situation, the answer is simple: just make Sudafed require a prescription, like a zillion other medications. The problem with Sudafed is extremely straightforward: it is a very trivial chemical reaction away from being methamphetamine.

Only one box each time, what specific number of pills were included I couldn't say, but these were normal packages and not some costco-esque barrel full of bulk drugs.

Some states have made the requirement for prescriptions, but it hasn't done them much good https://www.huffpost.com/entry/meth-laws-oregons-prescriptio...

I'm no fan of meth labs, but this just seems like a bad solution being made worse by poor implementation.

It's also the dumbest, worst kind of meth: the kind you make in a 2-liter bottle using camping gas as a solvent, carefully burping it every 5 minutes so the ammonia gas buildup doesn't rupture the bottle. It could be rational to regulate Sudafed even if lab meth was widely available on the street; the lab meth isn't setting huge building fires.

The daily limit where I live is 1/2 the monthly limit. Purchasing this amount every two weeks will eventually result in a violation.

Requiring a prescription for common cold medicine raises the price of cold relief from $12 to $100+.

And yet this has had no effect on the meth epidemic.

We also have an out-of-control opiate problem, but you can't buy codeine over the counter in the US.

Yes, if you mean pseudoephedrine, that's to stop the production of meth.

I thought it was to prevent competing with the cartels?

Just as a note, this didn't work at all. They came up with a better chemistry and now there's more meth than there was before. Breaking Bad dramatized this aspect of it (though their chemistry wasn't correct on purpose).

fentanyl I think is what's replaced meth at this point.

No there’s plenty of meth around, don’t just guess about things. They’re making meth with a new process at industrial scales these days, by the ton. Fentanyl gets a lot of air time on the news these days but don’t confuse that for prevalence in reality, problems aren’t proportional to the amount of attention they get.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new...

... which is totally in keeping with the war on drugs' track record. Efficacy was never quite their strong suit.

Mexican superlabs put an end to the shake-and-bake method of making meth. And the biggest problem with shake-and-bake meth was the externalities of people making it at home, including bottles that would burst with caustic chemicals, and properties being condemned from the phosphorous in leaching into the walls.

Yeah, and it didn’t.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of people buying allergy medicine have the sniffles, not a meth lab.

There’s always a “safety” justification for further privacy intrusions by the police.

If they can’t do their job without intrusive, non-targeted government monitoring of the general public, the police need to get better at their jobs.

How is that working out?

Do you understand why, or just want to yell at strawmen?

Like... meth exists.

To be fair, criminalizing meth (and pretty much all recreational drugs) has always been trying to solve the wrong problem.