You can see this coming. Even some idiots in Indiana want it: to effectively deny the mast majority of people access to an effective drug for combatting cold symptoms because a tiny minority of people misuse it. Yes, we are talking about pseudoephedrine (PSE), the active ingredient in Sudafed, which is often used by meth heads to cook up meth.
We already have the incredibly stupid requirement that puts Sudafed behind the pharmacist's counter, and restricts how much you can buy. Annoying and frankly insulting, but manageable. To people such as
Professor Keith Humphreys, however, that simply is not enough:
Methamphetamine cooks cannot operate their labs without easy access to the cold medicines that contain pseudoephedrine (PSE). This has resulted in a long-running political battle across the U.S. Many state legislators want to make PSE-containing medicines prescription-only, which as the Oregon and Mississippi experience shows, virtually eliminates a state’s meth labs. On the other side, the cold medicine industry, which makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year selling PSE to meth cooks, opposes such a restriction.
The industry’s response has been to propose an electronic cold medicine purchasing system called NPLEx. The idea is that if someone tries to buy too much PSE-containing cold medicine, the system would notice and block the sale.
From the point of view of stopping meth labs, the system is worthless. South Carolina put it in last year rather than create a prescription-only requirement, and saw meth lab incidents increase by 65%. Kentucky, where the NPLEx system was invented, has had it in place statewide since 2007 and seen meth lab incidents increase by 500%. Meth cooks easily thwart the system by using false ID or by hiring people to buy the cold medicine. The NPLEx system is thus worthless from the point of view of actual effectiveness.
Prof. Humphreys does not come out and say it, but you can see where he is going with this: he wants pseudoephedrine made prescription only.
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