Illinois Mulls Requiring Prescriptions for Cold Medicine. Thanks Meth and the War on Drugs!

As if it’s not hard enough to
get an appointment to see a doctor already these days, Illinois
lawmakers are considering requiring prescriptions to purchase cold
medicines that contain pseudoephedrine, because of meth.

Bryant Jackson-Green of the Illinois Policy Institute
notes how oppressive the government already is to citizens
looking to buy common medications in its relentless war to stop
people from getting high:

In fact, laws already on the books for these substances already
impose burdens on businesses and consumers. The federal Combat
Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 (passed along with the
Patriot Act) mandates that medicines with ephedrine or
pseudoephedrine be sold only to customers 18 and older and be kept
behind the counter, and that pharmacies take down the name and
address of everyone who buys them. Anyone who buys more than an
arbitrary amount now—3.6 grams of pseudoephedrine base per day and
9 grams per month—has committed a federal crime.

The experiences of ordinary people trying to take care of their
families show how these laws are an example of drastic government
overreach. In 2006, for example, an Illinois man was arrested and
charged with a federal misdemeanor for buying his son “too much” Claritin-D
before he went to summer camp. Authorities don’t even have to show
criminal intent, but merely that someone bought a certain amount of
allergy medication, to charge a person with a crime.

Two states, Oregon and Mississippi, have already taken the route
of demanding prescriptions for these cold medicines. Despite adding
costs and misery to the lives of average, non-meth-using Americans,
there’s little sign that the additional barriers to access will
amount to much. The Cascade Policy Institute, an Oregon-based think
tank that promotes free markets and individual liberty, looked at
the impact of Oregon’s law and was unimpressed:

Our study looked at meth trends in Oregon from 2004 to 2010 and
compared what was happening here to similar states and the country
as a whole. We found that while the number of meth lab related
incidents in 2010 is down 97 percent from 2004, that doesn’t speak
to the success of the prescription requirement.

Why not? Because six nearby states that don’t have a
prescription requirement, including Washington State and
California, experienced similar declines in meth lab incidents. In
addition, almost all of Oregon’s 97 percent drop occurred between
2004 and 2006, before the prescription law even took effect.

The decline in illegal meth manufacturing also has not
corresponded to a decline in meth use or availability in Oregon.
The sad fact is that the reduction of one source of methamphetamine
only leads to the increased availability of the drug from other
sources, including Mexican super labs.

Furthermore, a new study by Jane Carlisle Maxwell of the
University of Texas at Austin and Mary-Lynn Brecht of the
University of California at Los Angeles found that Mexican meth
manufacturers (in a country that imposed a ban on pseudoephedrine
in 2008) are increasingly using alternative methods to make the
drug, including the P2P method, which doesn’t rely on PSE.

This analysis was written in 2012, and yet at least one police
chief in Illinois still
thinks pseudoephedrine is required to produce
methamphetamines.

While Illinois is considering these harsher methods,
Reason’s Jacob Sullum recently wrote about
neuropsychopharmacologist Carl Hart’s report arguing the dangers
and addictive potential of meth have been exaggerated.