In a move that will almost certainly fatten the wallets of the law enforcement special interests (from the private prison contractors to the prison guard unions to the law enforcement unions) not to mention the increasingly pro-Democratic doctor lobby and titillate nanny statists everywhere, the Democrat govenor of Oregon Ted Kulongoski (not to be mistaken for the statutory rapist former governor of Oregon, or the statutory rapist current governor of California) today decided that the people of his state can no longer be trusted with over-the-counter cold medications.
"Gov. Ted Kulongoski today signed legislation that will make Oregon the first state to require prescriptions for cold and allergy medications that can be converted into methamphetamine.
The requirement applies to any medication containing pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient in meth, the highly addictive street drug."
Methampehtamine is to be sure the most powerful variant of a powerful drug, a drug which put a close friend of mine in cardiac arrest (he lived), and is largely responsible for a rather dark period of my own life (I lived too, or did I?).
It is also a drug that has been used by millions of Americans since the end of the second world war: housewives trying to lose weight, drag queens trying to lose weight, college students trying to cram for final exams, presidents trying to govern the country (or the empire; were we a homeland in the 60s? just checking) on little sleep, fighter pilots trying to bomb someone else's country, also on little sleep.
The drug (usally as dextra-amphetamine) is still perscribed today for ADHD, narcolepsy, weight loss, and probably for other reasons as well. It is still used today by athletes and truck drivers and housewives and drag queens.
Most of those who have used amphetamines for whatever reason have not ended up addicted or dead as a result, nor have most of those who have used the drug ended up tweaking and splitting their neighbor's dog's skull in half with a blunt ax (the psychosis associated with the drug has less to do with the drug itself than with the sleep deprivation it causes). But as with nearly every other aspect of drug policy in America, reason does not prevail.
Indeed, when amphetamines were legal and available over the counter until the 1950s, the incidence of addiction and addiction-related violence and death was low. It was only after a legislative clampdown on the funneling of legally and safely produced amphetamines in the 1960s into the black market, and ultimately a decline in the willingness of doctors to write perscriptions for the drug, that production and use of the more potent and dangerous form of the drug - methamphetamine - became more widespread (although as Jack Shafer pointed out in a recent piece in Slate it can hardly be described as an epidemic.
As with so many other fronts of the war on drugs, the solution is obvious: make (at least) the more mild form of amphetamine available over-the-counter again, and use the taxes on the drug to fund a perpetual public awareness campaign about its dangers. Once a drug enters a society it is very difficult to purge it from that society (unless one is prepared to go all Mao and execute the addicts), and our experience with alcohol prohibition suggests that legalization actually decreases the use of a parrticular drug (to say nothing of the environmental benefits of safely produced amphetamine). But until there is real political reform in this country, purging the system of corporate and public employee union money alike (the prison guard unions, law enforcement unions, and bureaucrat unions are as much responsible for perpetuating the drug war as the pharmaceutical companies and private prison lobby), we cannot even begin to have an honest national dialogue about the failed war on drugs, and will continue to see dumbass nanny state panderers like the current governor of Oregon increasing the power of government, and restricting our liberties.
There are more than two million Americans in prison today, a higher percentage of the population in prison than in red China or Saddam Hussein's Iraq or any other country on earth. Hundreds of thousands of those prisoners of are there for drug crimes, living in conditions often as bad or worse than many third world jails. Rape, stabbings, and beatings are epidemic, and barely reported by the news media. Is this the solution Democrats have in mind? Will anyone stand up for liberty and humanity anymore?
And what is this governor going to tell the hundreds of thousands of Oregonians without health insurance seeking relief of cold and allergy symptoms: let them eat phlegm?
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