Obviously retail pseudoephedrine was never a substantial contributor to methamphetamine production (tell me again why that’s illegal?).

Which raises the question, what what the real goal in preventing people from buying functional medicines?

Frankly I think the specific intent was exactly this. The main effect was to cause human suffering and Occams razor tells me the main effect was probably the intended effect.

> Occams razor

I think Hanlon's razor is more appropriate.

Somewhere there was a team of people in the government who worked untold hours studying this, proposing solutions and ultimately having change enacted. This would have been good for career progression for all involved, not because it was actually good, but simply because they did something. And therein lies government.

Hanlon’s razor is a thought-terminating cliche in most circumstances. Malice exists very frequently, as does profit-seeking or other motives that are indistinguishable from malice, and it's not at all the same thing as occam's "don't say god did it when there's a perfectly good mortal explanation" razor.

In the DEAs case it was literally confirmed to be operating on malice since at least the Nixon and Reagan years, when it was deliberately wielded as a weapon to disrupt hippies and black communities, specifically.

> methamphetamine production (tell me again why that’s illegal?

Because it ruins people's lives, that's why.

And the vast majority of people who make it don't have proper chemistry training, lab equipment, PPE, or pure chemicals to make pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine with no impurities or unreacted reagents.

I'm all for medicine that helps people and amphetamines absolutely can, but methamphetamine doesn't help people. It enslaves them.

Get the govt to make it properly, give it out for free in treatment centres where they have to consume it, giving an interface to the addicts for mental health and drug rehab staff (or have a trapdoor that sends the addicts to a gator pond when they walk in the door)

Shall the addicts stay in the treatment center while they are high? Or will the treatment center release them after checking vitals to allow them to go do what they want to when high (which for many addicts is "have as much sex as time will allow")

Maybe they go into the gator pond _after_ getting high and the staff can take bets on it

Over-criminalization of society, and the fall out from the "war on drugs" has ruined far far far far far more lives then illegal drug abuse ever could or would

That is with out getting into the debate on if it is even ethical for a government to regulation what a person consumes, even if you believe it is the current method of criminalization and prohibition is not effective in the stated goal of reducing drug use/abuse, a lesson we should have learned as a society with the passage of the 18th amendment and its repeal the 21st amendment

Of course that is not the real goal but .....

Ah yes, the old criminalization doesn't reduce usage misconception. Prohibition reduced usage of alcohol and is not why it failed. Prohibition failed for all of the other problems prohibition caused. Usage of alcohol declined, by quite a bit actually.

So do alcohol, gambling and bad relationships.

>Obviously retail pseudoephedrine was never a substantial contributor to methamphetamine production

I don't know how it compares to organzied production, but people certainly do cook meth from retail pseudoephedrine. In my neck of woods, it's a fairly popular pasttime, since all ingredients can be purchased in a single trip to a shopping mall.

There’s some places where you can’t get it at all without prescription.