American politics might have bigger problems at the moment, but under normal circumstances, I consider this pretty important. I'm not sure what the solution is, but an expiration date on nearly all laws comes to mind as a start to an interesting discussion on the matter.
1. Roll out law to 2%, look for any obvious unintended effects (like we check for crashes)
2. Roll out law to 50%, study for effectiveness. Is the intended positive effect happening in the experiment population? Any effect on the control population?
3. Finally, roll out law to 100% and keep monitoring.
4. Be ready to roll back to 0% if failures seen at any stage.
5. Be ready to apply a zero day patch after it's at 100% if edge cases are found.
But, we don't do any of this! Lawmakers make a law and yolo it into production on a fixed date, and it's often impossible to roll it back or modify it.
California is the experimental group.
Even the Constitution. It was intended to be revisited for appropriateness and currency every 20 years.
Instead, a significant number of people, including some on the Supreme Court, believe that the Founding Fathers[1] could speak no wrong words and that the Constitution is the perfect document, to be taken at its word, with no deviation, until the end of time.
[1] Pop Quiz: "How old were the Founding Fathers when they signed the Declaration of Independence and crafted the Constitution?" You'd be forgiven for thinking they were world-weary, wizened old men. In fact, the majority were under forty. Indeed, it was also signed by a sixteen-year-old, a 21-year-old, two 26-year-olds, a 27-year-old, and a 29-year-old.
Once past your childhood, you had a good chance of making it to 60 at least.
Not like alcohol. I know you know, but to spell it out for those that dont: there is a universal registry. Each purchase is tracked and tallied by name and residential address. Best case scenario is you are denied access, but you could also be raided.
It doesn't just require any old ID. Many, if not most, will not accept military ID. No foreign ID is accepted. Essentially, if your ID isn't a recent scannable ID issued by a US state, you don't get it. And I can't go a week without hearing that ID is a kind of ism.
I'm not trying to needle you. It's just nothing like alcohol, tobacco, etc. It's not even really like opioids.
Anyway, I think your conclusion is reasonable, even if we come to different conclusions. Mine is based on common benefit. I think the benefit that comes from the drug far surpasses the detriment.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/pittsburgh/news/panther-pit-padl...
> Police also can look for people who might have purchased pseudoephedrine around the same time as the suspect, as a way to identify friends and conspirators.
ffs. is this what we want?
from the article:
> he showed up one day early to purchase his two-week supply.
Good thing he didn't show up in the next county one day early. Maybe that would've been enough for Goff to act.
The article also points out that pse remains non-prescription because if it were to become rx-only, the government would be prohibited from monitoring it. Here I was just thinking that prescription exists for the health and safety of the patient...
This whole thing is gross.
What's the significance of 2013?
You get that there are already detailed, retained records of your actually-sensitive prescriptions, right?
* While there can't be any defense for the marketing of phenylephrine as a pseudoephedrine replacement, restrictions on pseudoephedrine are not irrational (that doesn't make them right, though I think they are).
* Pseudoephedrine by itself practically is methamphetamine, just in an unproductive chemical configuration. It is extraordinarily simple (though: not safe) to convert pseudoephedrine into meth.
* Pseudoephedrine is widely, practically universally available in the US without a prescription. It's a "behind the counter" drug, and, because of rampant abuse, access requires ID, like alcohol. Further, because the point of restricting pseudoephedrine is effectively a "rate limit" (to prevent people from acquiring enough Sudafed to make meth production practicable), Sudafed purchases are tracked.
* We've hashed out on HN the argument about whether that tracking results in spurious prosecutions. The one case I've seen us come up with, the arrest and prosecution of William Fousse, concerned someone who had a pseudoephedrine addiction (he was using it to come up from habitual alcohol benders).
* Restriction of pseudoephedrine does basically zero to staunch the flow of high-quality methamphetamine, which is produced at industrial scale with more sophisticated chemistry in Mexico and Asia.
* But restriction of pseudoephedrine might reduce the incidence of garage meth labs, which pose their own distinctive dangers to communities.
The argument in favor of continued pseudoephedrine restriction would be that the cost of the policy is relatively low (it inconveniences allergy sufferers, but most of those sufferers only marginally) vs. the public safety benefit (which is also probably low, but also probably nonzero).