A few years ago, as my semiannual respiratory debility drifted into pneumonia, a doctor finally told me I had to take better care of my allergies. I say "finally" because this doctor in a neighborhood clinic was the first MD to draw my attention to the issue—that because my sinuses continually sluiced microbe-friendly mucus, I regularly developed respiratory infections. You'd think I could have figured this out for myself, but I was 14 before someone told me about shampoo.
In any event, the wise doctor prescribed an over-the-counter antihistamine-decongestant. I've been taking a version of it since, and I've been sick once. Pseudoephedrine is my friend.
Unfortunately, the active ingredient in many over-the-counter cold and allergy remedies also is the basic chemical needed to make methamphetamine. And in a bold flanking maneuver in the War on Drugs—hah! got 'em this time!—my government decided to make allergy-sufferers suffer the additional indignity of registering each time we buy our sinus-drying relief. When I buy the medicine I've been taking for nearly three years, I have to ask the pharmacist for it, show my driver's license and write my name and address on a list.
This expedient was a key feature of the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, passed by Congress last year with, as they say, "broad bipartisan support." It somehow got itself attached to the renewal of the Patriot Act, and thus was lost in all the attention paid that sorry affair.
Doubtless some will argue that registering my name and address is a small price to pay—a corollary to the arguments heard in favor of the Patriot Act. And I do not dispute that we have duties as citizens. People scoffed at Miss Nevada when she suggested Silver Staters "take one" for the nation on Yucca Mountain, but I thought her sentiment, at least, was noble.
Nonetheless, it is an indignity, not to mention an inconvenience. And I cannot help imagining that if authorities bust a meth lab anywhere nearby, I will find myself defending my allergy-management to them. Even this I would not mind were I convinced that my sacrifice mattered. But, of course, the "meth epidemic" trumpeted by so many news outlets in recent years is not quite that. It is a problem, and addicts and their families and friends suffer because of it. But the depths of the scourge are measured in the mistakes of the U.S. Government, motto: "Unintended Consequences Are Our Specialty!"
As Slate's Jack Shafer pointed out last year, blasting Newsweek for a "Meth Epidemic" cover package, people were popping amphetamines, legally and illegally, like Peanut M&M's in the middle of the last century, most of them consuming safe pills made by pharmaceutical companies. By 1971, the nation produced 12 billion tablets annually. But the Federal Drug Abuse Control Amendments of 1965 put an end to that, guaranteeing a robust market for clandestine chemists. Further legislative intrepidity in the 1980s—"Just say no" just wasn't enough—succeeded in driving the bulk of amphetamine manufacturing to Mexico.
A recent Frontline, the PBS investigative program, looked into this mess. (Its FAQ webpage http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/faqs/ links Shafer's article.) Only nine factories around the world produce pseudoephedrine, according to the Frontline report, which drew heavily on a series in the The Oregonian newspaper. It also noted that the Drug Enforcement Administration has sought to control the manufacture of pseudoephedrine since the 1980s, but the pharmaceutical industry has stymied those efforts. Research into alternatives to pseudoephedrine that cannot be used to make methamphetamine has foundered. Meanwhile, attempts by states to control retail sales of cold and allergy medicines have opened up the market for "superlabs" in Mexico, so it's hard to imagine the new federal law will do anything but accelerate that process.
So there you have it: Once again, small problem, transformed by the magic of get-tough legislation into a real doozy. But only that, so far. Shafer noted that DEA seizures of "labs" and actual methamphetamine have been trending downward, along with the numbers of teens, surveyed annually, who say they've tried amphetamines. "Some epidemic," he concluded.
But, hey, we're working on it. Or so I tell myself every time I sign my name at the pharmacy counter.