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).
But, hey, we beat street meth, right?