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The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

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Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#191

Post by dragonwriter »

tshaddox wrote: post #179
tyingq wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mostly right, but it's not reported to anyone. It came from the "The Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005" . If you want to sell pseudoephedrine, your org has to "self certify", keep a logbook purchasers have to sign, require ID, enforce the purchase limits, train employees, etc. But, the logbook doesn't go anywhere unless some investigation or audit prompts that. So, if you're a really determined cooke…

> So, if you're a really determined cooker, you can still go to a bunch of different stores...though you're leaving a paper trail. Isn't meth a lot easier to come by these days? I have to imagine it's more convenient to cook street meth back into Sudafed to fix your stuffy nose than it is to cook Sudafed into meth to get your fix.

> I have to imagine it's more convenient to cook street meth back into Sudafed to fix your stuffy nose than it is to cook Sudafed into meth to get your fix.

Maybe, but more people are willing to do felonies to get/sell meth than to do the same thing for pseudoephedrine, and its just as illegal to by meth to cook pseudoephedrine as to cook meth from pseudoephedrine.

Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#192

Post by p_j_w »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #77
akira2501 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't fight a war against inanimate objects. You can fight a war against drug addicts. You cannot possibly win a war against drug addicts without addressing the fundamental problem.

Most of us cannot make these drugs ourselves. To restrict them effectively would certainly curtail their abuse?

"We just need to wage the war on drugs harder, then it will surely work."

Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#193

Post by tyingq »

alex_young wrote: post #165
tyingq wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mostly right, but it's not reported to anyone. It came from the "The Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005" . If you want to sell pseudoephedrine, your org has to "self certify", keep a logbook purchasers have to sign, require ID, enforce the purchase limits, train employees, etc. But, the logbook doesn't go anywhere unless some investigation or audit prompts that. So, if you're a really determined cooke…

Doesn't it take a ton of the stuff though? I thought people stealing pallets of it was the only viable way to source enough of it. Seems like just having some inventory control is a sufficient deterrent.

Googling around a bit, a typical 20-count box of pseudoephedrine (2.4 grams of "active ingredient") yields roughly 2 grams of "high quality" meth with the shake-and-bake/one-pot method. Not the only ingredient, of course, but close to 1:1 of in/out.

Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#194

Post by fnordpiglet »

badRNG wrote: post #155
dzdt wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same stores sell completely ineffective homeopathic "medicines" alongside real medicines already. There are no signs. Its already up to the consumer to determine what may or may not actually work at the pharmacy.

A few years back, I came down with the flu and went to CVS for medicine. I purchased what I thought was a non-prescription alternative to Tamiflu. It was a bad case, and I dutifully followed the dosing instructions and took the medication throughout the whole illness. It turns out the product and the supposed function is complete homeopathic nonsense. It was sold in a medicine isle along with known "functional" cold…

If you bought it at a for profit pharmacy, then it did work precisely as they expected it to.

Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#195

Post by post_below »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #146
underlipton wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "fundamental problem" is the breakdown of community (drug abuse being primarily being a function of the existence or lack of interpersonal involvement and responsibilities that would preclude spending time and money on them). People who are comfortable huddling in their cars, homes, and exclusive social clubs, and who would rather spend money on cops rather than social programs, aren't going to like the fix for t…

Do you have a source for this? > drug abuse being primarily being a function of the existence or lack of interpersonal involvement and responsibilities that would preclude spending time and money on them AFAIK there have always been addicts in every culture. Alcohol, various drugs, and strongly self destructive behaviors are not recent additions to the human experience. But I don't know any if the numbers or the rese…

I suspect they're referring to experiments like the famous "Rat Park". There is clearly a strong social and environmental component to addiction susceptibility, at least in rats.

I don't know if I'd go as far as to say it's the fundamental problem, but definitely a major factor.

Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#196

Post by tptacek »

fragmede wrote: post #183
tptacek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way did it backfire? It's a useful decongestant. But it also basically is methamphetamine, with just a couple easily-reversible Rubik's turns to make it a decongestant instead of an ultra-powerful stimulant.

Water, consisting of hydrogen "basically is" and explosive, as is table salt, consisting of Sodium, which explodes when coming into contact with water. How can we let these two dangerous substances go unregulated! Think of the children! who will get to have interesting high school chemistry labs, that is. That Sudafed "basically is" meth misunderstands chemistry, and the resourcefulness of the real life Walter Whites…

No, this analogy isn't plausible.

Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#197

Post by tptacek »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #110
tptacek wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same company sells both compounds. I don't think this was a huge moneymaker. I think the PE thing was just there to retain the sales that moving Sudafed behind the counter sacrificed. That doesn't make it OK, but it does sort of argue against the idea that the regulation was just a moneymaking scheme.

Agree with that. Just more failed war on drugs stuff.

Only if you judge the outcome strictly by how many people are consuming meth, but there are other important endpoints to this policy, like "reducing the number of backyard meth labs", which are problems in their own right.

Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#198

Post by tptacek »

lazide wrote: post #156
tptacek wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're just going to say "no", right? They're not going to "automatically make you a drug trafficker". They're just trying to enforce a rate limit.

[flagged]

Respectfully, I don't believe you. This is another one of those cases where the Bayesian Base Rate Fallacy suggests that the "scary" version of this supposed DEA policy, where they pursue marginal cases of people with extra-stuffy noses, can't possibly work.

Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#199

Post by tptacek »

phone8675309 wrote: post #167
akerl_ wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the data is breached, an attacker learns... that sometimes you have a cough?

In addition to at least your full legal name, birthday, gender, home address, driver's license number, telephone number, location(s) you've been to buy medication, and possibly email address.

You do not in fact provide an email address to buy Sudafed. The rest of that information is for most people already a public record.

I'm not saying that makes it OK to assemble into a database, and I think the point about amassing PII is well taken, but I think people are probably overestimating the value/hazardousness of this particular data set.

Re: The Uselessness of Phenylephrine (2022)

#200

Post by tptacek »

akira2501 wrote: post #144
tptacek wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not being told "no". You can just go buy some Sudafed right now if you want to. It's not like there's an application process. There is a rate limit; that's it.

In order for a rate limit to be effective, at some point it has to apply, and at that point, I'm told "no." More concretely, in order to implement a rate limit, you have to sign an electronic log book, and the government can view that log book whenever it likes, without any sort of review or auditing, of course. This isn't the primary concern anyways, the point was, in order to implement this seemingly simple action,…

The only liberty being sacrificed here is showing an ID at a pharmacy counter to get Sudafed. I'll stipulate that's a liberty being sacrificed, but it isn't "many".

This particular "logbook" has existed for almost 2 decades now, and its scope hasn't creeped from there, so your second argument is pretty easy to shoot down.

I think the evidence pretty strongly suggests that this policy, which was put in place to create a rate limit on the purchase of a chemical that isn't so much a precursor to methamphetamine as it is a slightly tweaked version of methamphetamine, is in fact simply used to create a rate limit.

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