I haven't purchased pseudeophedrine, but my understanding was that you just walked up to the counter and had to sign your name at the pharmacy. Is that not the case? Doesn't seem like a big pain if that's the case.

The prescription line is always fun. I remember some dude coughing on everyone, picking up his cell phone, "oh it was positive? great, I'm in line to get the medication" referring to COVID. In my opinion, the easiest place to get sick is waiting in the prescription line. Yet another tax on congestion sufferers.

Having said all that, your doctor can write you a prescription and all the restrictions go away, including the ID check. It has always delayed my fills even further so we don't bother anymore.

The most positive outcome from buying pseudoephedrine in line was being told "hey, your ID expires tomorrow" which was a good catch. I wasn't paying any attention to that. (I don't drive, so it's just a piece of plastic with my name. But necessary for paying taxes online in NYS.)

Source: I've been paying taxes in NY with a learner's permit that's been expired for well over a decade.

Edit: I've also used said expired permit to buy pseudoephedrine. In my experience, they get frustrated and put random garbage into the tracking system when the card doesn't verify, demonstrating that it's all theater. It did take a while, though, so your point about this being a waste of time holds.

In what reality? You were not being paid $60 to grocery shop or whatever else you might have done with that 15 minutes. Nor did it actually reduce your bank account by $60 to wait 15 minutes. If you applied this logic to everything in life, reading this very comment probably "cost" you a dozen bucks too. What a fun way to live?

> Meanwhile, other drugs are just mailed to me, including my prescriptions.

How often are your anticipating needing pseudoephedrine? For most people it's a once a year, at most, thing.

A simple google search before posting would have made your fictitious scenario a little bit more believable.

Technically true but it is often paired with loratadine in, e.g., Claritin-D. Many allergy sufferers also get congested sinuses.

The side affects of prolonged pseudoephedrine use (usually defined as more than 7 days, btw) are far more serious than a stuffy nose.

You cannot even purchase enough pseudoephedrine to use every day over a full month. The government restricts maximum grammage per month - and no doctor is going to prescribe long-term use of pseudoephedrine to "help with allergies".

That is to say I don't believe your story at all. But I get it - googling these things before you posted would have "cost" you approximately $24 or something something something...

If one can treat the symptoms just as easily as the cause and pseudoephedrine doesn't make them feel like a drugged-out zombie, just guess which drug people are going to take...

...and yes, doctors actually will write prescriptions for pseudoephidrine because they're generally pretty sure their patients aren't using it to make meth. I know three people who've gotten such prescriptions, and I've been tempted to do the same thing myself.

No, that's the inflated list price that's only paid by people with an emergency while out of network or similar unfortunates -- not insurance companies.

That phenylephrine (which everyone with sinuses knows doesn't do a damn thing) was perpetually being touted as a substitute was just adding insult to injury.

It also means you can't get it delivered, can't stock up, might have trouble sending someone else to get it, etc.... It's a big pain for some people, and particularly for people who already have a harder life than average.

> Some people stopped buying pseudoephedrine entirely, either because they were offended by these rules or because they were afraid that they could wrongly be implicated in meth investigations if they appeared to buy it too often.

This has actually happened [0], and I seem to remember more instances (at least when the law was first passed). I know I have also gone to buy it in a headache-induced fog and found that I've forgotten my ID, and on at least one occasion the national drug whatever system was down and they refused to sell it. Because it has to be run through the specific national database, it has to be run through one department and I have been unable to purchase because that department has closed for the day.

These are just what comes to mind when I think about purchasing pseudoephedrine over the years; it's just generally become a pain to get. It makes me wonder if it'd be quicker and easier to just buy meth and reintroduce the hydroxyl group to get my cold medicine.

[0] https://reason.com/2009/09/28/hoosier-grandmother-arrested-f...

Relevant: “A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine from Meth” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33444852 https://maggiemcneill.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/synthes...

If aliens were to visit they'd likely bypass contact on grounds that the planet's inhabitants are low-IQ nut cases.

Damn stupid isn't it? I'd be funny if it weren't serious.

What's more most of these sympathomimetic amines are both simple organic molecules, and in numbers/types they're a dime-a-dozen so to speak—there are hundreds of them. Any number of which can be altered or 'metamorphosed' into others that have different physiological and psychological effects by almost any competent chemist.

I'm certainly not advocating the use of meth but it's clear to me that the regulations that control the distribution and use of these amines are not working. Essentially, all these brute-force/unsophisticated laws have done is to inconvenience legitimate users and have drug barons streamline the production of more efficient precursors such as phenylacetone (P2P).

We really do need a better way of approaching the problem. For instance, many drug users turn to illicit amines and other street drugs to overcome medical and psychological problems. It would make sense to have these people identified and then be treated by the health system before they turn to the street to 'help' them. Moreover, I'd reckon it'd be much cheaper than the millions now spent on enforcement.

Trouble is moral panic and an almost complete lack of understanding by both lawmakers and law enforcement of the problem and its underlying causes is significantly impeding progress.

Because of US restrictions on pseudo, bizarrely other countries have followed suit - it’s next to impossible to find a decongestant with pseudo here in Ireland, they will sell you the useless phenylephrine shit instead, and the packaging is almost indistinguishable unless you spend a while looking and arguing with a pharmacist who is convinced phenylephrine works just as good.

Replace pseudo with cannabis and the statement remains true.

It's much less convenient than going to the nearest 24-hour store and grabbing it off the shelf. And I'm a doctor married to a doctor; I don't have to get an appointment to get a prescription for a non-scheduled drug, but I do have to go during pharmacy hours and wait to pick it up.

Claritin-D 24-hour caplets come in boxes of 10. You need 3 boxes to get a full month's supply. Each caplet has 240mg of pseudoephedrine – 2.4g per box.

In my state, individuals can purchase up to 9g of pseduoephedrine per month, but only up to 3.6g per day.

So, while I can technically purchase a full month's supply of Claritin-D, I can't buy more than one box at a time.

These sorts of rules are minor inconveniences for an individual compared to the rest of life's challenges, but they exist in a special category of stupid that make them all the more frustrating.

But, here's a thought: what if I had children who needed the same medication? Who's going without?

There aren't exactly signs that say "Hey, the good stuff is behind the counter and you don't need a prescription to get it".

So he has to drive around to ~5 pharmacies to occasionally score a a box.

He does try to stock up during low season, but it's hard to do.

That stuff's toxic AF even if the labs don't blow up.

It's cheaper and pure than it was ever been since the ban.

Even more if the professional labs close down due to lack of customers.

The professional labs would absolutely not close down due to lack of customers, there would just be even more meth available, more contaminated, with the bonus of hazmat sites peppering communities.

There might be an increase in people making tiny batches for personal use if pseudoephedrine became easier to get, but nothing on the scale of 20 years ago.

But, hey, we beat street meth, right?

This is a bit hyperbolic. You just have to ask for it at the counter and show ID.

There are certainly 10s of millions of people who don't have direct access to this drug.

https://bluenotary.us/how-many-american-citizens-don-t-have-...

https://www.brennancenter.org/media/6697/download

I could easily have missed a better or more recent study, so if anyone has one please post it!

I cannot think of another significant country that hasn't had this figured out for decades.

After all, imagine if the government had a database with every person's name in it! You'd have like 300 million rows? Nobody's built a computing machine that could do that. And then how would you get the cards to people? You'd have to send out horses and buggies to every corner of the nation. And where would you find enough coachmen to do that, and roads to drive the coaches on???

No, clearly it's unpossible.

So we have to reserve the use of government IDs for really important things, like checking if you can buy cold medicine, and voting must remain insecure.

In fact, as a rule, ID is reserved for things that aren't important, because it is a point of failure.

Oh, wait, it must be the latter, because finding problems with India's government ID scheme takes five seconds: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/21/n...

Identifying people is not hard, even for the poorest countries, and it's quite easy to do with modern technology. There is no good-faith reason to oppose it, any more than there is to oppose driver's licenses.

Consider for instance the people who currently exist, don't have government ID, and don't have an accurate record of their birth. Such people exist. Should they just die, or something?

The cost of these regulations is millions, perhaps billions of dollars in extra effort, bookkeeping and security by tens of thousands of businesses, not to mention lost productivity and frustration on the part of everyone else evolved, and moats of the costs and inconvenience is borne by people outside the government, who are not committing a crime.

It’s bat shit crazy that bureaucrats are allowed to steal this much productivity from the economy.

It seems trite to someone in the middle class, but it genuinely is not a priority to certain demographics, given the challenge of getting it. That challenge may seem trivial to a frequenter of Hacker News, but we're a diverse society.

The only barrier to getting a decongestant should be: having the money to pay for it.

It's hard to find a pharmacy which even sells pseudoephedrine based decongestant if you're in the UK, for example.

It's the same for codeine-mixed products. Recently I got denied a simultaneous purchase of pseudoephedrine and ibuprofen/codeine - I was I was only allowed one.

I'm not sure if it's policy, law or I just looked suspicious.

It’s all fentanyl now so in a weird way, maybe?

But, while there have been some instances of accidental fentanyl poisoning from use of other classes of drug (eg if a careless dealer/distributor is mixing fentanyl into heroin and doesn't clean the surface before moving on to weigh out bags of cocaine, or whatever) absolutely nobody is choosing to use fentanyl as a replacement for stimulants like meth (which is the drug being discussed above) or cocaine. They're complete opposites.

Of course, there are also trends over years/decades as drugs become more or less popular, either as part of societal trends (eg Ketamine in the UK, having spent a decade or two being forgotten about by the majority of recreational drug users, has apparently made a comeback and is very big in the party scene now especially among younger people), or because of the reasons people take drugs (eg the more people going to nightclubs/raves, the more people will use drugs like cocaine and MDMA; while more people getting depressed and not going out will lead to more people using drugs like opiates, eg heroin/fentanyl, to take away their mental pain - and some drugs, like Ketamine, are actually popular for both those examples, it's a popular party drug and it's often used alone by people wanting to bury their feelings).

So it's possible that the state or the world has led to more people choosing opiates than stimulants, and in the US fentanyl is all over the illegal supply of opiates. But I'm not aware of any logic that would say the increase in fentanyl has or would lead to meth users making the switch.

Side note that I think worth mentioning considering the topic: by FAR the most dangerous aspect of using these illegal drugs is the fact that they are illegal, not the fact that they are drugs. The majority of fentanyl users in the US are either trying to buy heroin but being sold fentanyl (or heroin+fentanyl mixes), and the majority of people actively choosing to use fentanyl illegally are doing it not because it's a nicer drug to use than heroin, but because the supply chain logistics lead to it being significantly cheaper (which is also why it's dangerously used by dealers to make their heroin batches seem stronger).

Heroin itself can of course be life ruining, but if taken on its own (not at the same time as other CNS depressants such as alcohol and benzodiazepines) then it's actually extremely unlikely to cause accidental fatal overdoses, and when it does cause overdoses (with or without whatever drugs being involved) it's 90% because the user didn't know how strong it was and expected it to be similar in purity to what they had been using before, and 10% because of lack of harm reduction education about how much to use to be safe, what drugs to avoid mixing it with, etc. (90/10% are just my ballpark guesstimates). Because we spend all the money interesting and locking drug uses up, rather than educating and supporting them in minimising risk while they do use and offering as much support as needed to those ready and wanting to beat their addiction.

If illegal drugs were, instead of being criminalised, treated like tobacco - highly taxed (but not so high that more than a few percent of people choose to buy from illegal sources), made by professional companies (more like other pharmaceuticals in this case than like tobacco m), and therefore possible to buy knowing both that the drugs are pure and knowing their precise doses - then the combination of taxes raised and money saved on the law enforcement side (everything from policing to court costs to prisons) could both fund huge amounts of mental health & addiction treatment and support options, not just for existing drug users but also as a preventative measure to reduce the number of people turning to drugs due to problems in their life or in their mind, AND leave a huge amount more money to be spent in other areas for the good of society. (Sorry for the long sentences, I'm too lazy to properly edit my comment right now).