Yeah, I was going to say that, they did changed the nome (sort of) in the US and you can still get the real stuff, you just have to submit to all sorts of privacy breaches and uncomfortable interactions.
Seriously though just a couple days of this last week headed off a sinus infection so i didn't need antibiotics. Win!
Edited to add: I'm not particularly up in arms about needing ID, and I feel like buying Sudafed got easier somehow recently, but this seemed like a place where I could help explain what sorts of things can be uncomfortable/difficult for some people.
Recent backlash against tech companies tracking users suggests that in general, people do not like being tracked. People may even prefer less effective OTC medications to prescriptions on the basis of anonymity. This may or may not be based on a rational concern about a more concrete negative outcome.
This may be an "exception that proves the rule", since William Fousse, the guy who got prosecuted, was addicted to pseudoephedrine and was buying large amounts of it, so large that the investigating officers found it implausible that he'd be personally consuming it (it turns out, he was; he was doing a see-saw thing where he'd get drunk and then use the pseudoephedrine to come up from it to get work done). He was buying from multiple pharmacies, apparently to avoid the limit.
This is not a case that makes me alarmed for my own safety when going to buy a 40-pack of sudafed, though I'm receptive to the argument that prosecution for an actual sudafed addiction was not the intent of the law and should not have been prosecuted in the first place.
Instead, let's take a look at scenarios where you might buy over 9000 mg in a month. The maximum recommended dose is 50mg every 8 hours, so 3 times a day. 9000/50/3 = 60 person-days. If it's allergy season and they're all taking the maximum dose, a family of four could hit the limit in 15 days.
Inefficient distribution (making sure there's always some in both of the cars, each kid's backpack, at each adult's work) makes it even easier to hit the limit. The largest size normally available is 96x25 mg. Four of those is 9600 mg. Just trying to get a box for each family member makes you a criminal.
Perhaps the limit should be higher? Certainly, I agree in advance that people not making meth and not reselling shouldn't be getting prosecuted. But the story of William Fousse doesn't really have much to tell me about the public policy value of pseudoephedrine restrictions or about the likelihood that an especially allergic family might get caught up in it.
If you find other cases where something like that happened, I'm happy to dig into the filings as best I can.
Later
There are also a couple surveys of the state laws easily Googleable, and most of them have "knowingly" (for evading the limit) or "intent" (to manufacture meth) standards for the offenses themselves.
https://reason.com/blog/2014/07/28/one-box-of-sudafed-over-t...
http://reason.com/blog/2009/09/30/put-down-the-cold-pills-gr...
Regardless, people often do use OTC drugs in ways that might not be advisable, but definitely aren't recreational (leaving aside the issue of whether criminalizing recreational drug use is a good idea).
If a family could reasonably anticipate being arrested or searched for consuming sudafed regularly for several weeks (bad allergies, sinus cold, whatever), I stipulate that's significant and problematic. What I'm contending is that in 2019, that's so unlikely to happen as to be implausible.
I don't know how likely prosecution is in 2019. There have been a few under much more restrictive state laws making pseudoephedrine prescription-only and criminalizing traveling out of state to obtain it, but that's not the original issue we were discussing.
It's probably pretty unlikely under Federal law, but it took several posts back and forth on HN along with a PACER lookup for us to reach that conclusion explains fairly well why many people are uncomfortable with having their purchases tracked in this manner.