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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

The only liberty being sacrificed here is showing an ID at a pharmacy counter to get Sudafed. I'll stipulate that's a liberty being sacrificed, but it isn't "many".

This particular "logbook" has existed for almost 2 decades now, and its scope hasn't creeped from there, so your second argument is pretty easy to shoot down.

I think the evidence pretty strongly suggests that this policy, which was put in place to create a rate limit on the purchase of a chemical that isn't so much a precursor to methamphetamine as it is a slightly tweaked version of methamphetamine, is in fact simply used to create a rate limit.

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> The only liberty being sacrificed here is showing an ID at a pharmacy counter to get Sudafed.

It would be interesting to know if the people concerned about the need to show an ID to vote share that concern about the need to show an ID for access to medicine.

> This particular "logbook" has existed for almost 2 decades now, and its scope hasn't creeped from there, so your second argument is pretty easy to shoot down.

The policy has proved ineffective at curtailing the availability of methamphetamine while inconveniencing honest people. That's not something the public is clamoring for more of.

But it never really was. It came about to begin with as part of the Patriot Act. The lack of expansion is unsurprising given the lack of any 9/11-style crisis to use as an excuse in the intervening two decades. The test is when the next one comes.

One of the failings of the existing style of government is that the "passage by both houses of Congress and signed by the President" system used to pass legislation is the same system required to repeal it, which rightfully makes it harder to pass bad laws, but wrongfully makes it harder to repeal them. And then they get passed during a crisis and inconveniently stick.

You already need to show ID for most medicine! This is such a weird discussion.

Name an over the counter medicine you need to show ID for.

Sudafed isn't an OTC medicine; it's a BTC medicine. Most medicines aren't OTC. But there are, obviously, OTC products that require ID; for instance, every alcoholic beverage.

Purchases of alcohol at the grocery store are not individually logged and tracked by personal ID. I’m certain that is not what happens when I show my birth date to a cashier.

Most large retailers (e.g. Target, Walmart) now scan the barcode on your ID at the POS when buying spirits.

Because it's required by law, or because they want to track you for their own purposes and if you don't like it you can patronize someone who doesn't do that?

That's just begging the question. The only reason it's BTC is that you have to show your ID to get it.

It's weird to me that we've completely normalized having to present ID to buy any medicine at all, especially one that has an excellent safety and efficacy record that I was buying without an ID for a decade. Why should I have to ask the government's permission to cure a runny nose?

The problem with Sudafed isn't that it's ineffective or unsafe for its users; it's that it has the same or higher abuse potential as codeine cough drops did. We took codeine completely off the market, but you can just go buy Sudafed whenever you want.

Significant numbers of people are not going to the pharmacy and buying Sudafed because they have a cold and consequently getting addicted to Sudafed, which is what had been happening with codeine.

It's clearly because you can make methamphetamine out of it. But you can also make methamphetamine out of other things which limiting access to cold medicine demonstrably hasn't prevented.

When Sudafed was put behind the counter, it was likely that a plurality of all Sudafed purchases in California were abusive.

More than likely, I would think, since plurality just means more than one.

But the justification is not the same. People were going to the drug store for cough drops and unintentionally ending up addicted to opioids. Nobody was going to the drug store for a decongestant and accidentally making meth out of it, and the number of people getting addicted to pseudoephedrine itself was neither large enough to justify the change, nor its explicitly stated rationale. Nor an effective means to bring it about if the claim that showing an ID isn't a burden is to be believed because it would have no effect on the small minority of people who might go to the pharmacy for a stuffy nose and thereby become dependent on pseudoephedrine, since they would still get it.

Meanwhile the stated rational of limiting availability of methamphetamine hasn't gone well either.

This before we even mention that the OTC replacement, phenylephrine, is not only ineffective, it's a more dangerous drug than pseudoephedrine from a cardiovascular perspective and the switch has plausibly killed some people.

> You already need to show ID for most medicine!

Do you? You have to show an insurance card to file a claim, but I imagine there is a lot of overlap between the people without ID and the people without insurance. And there appear to be free clinics that don't require ID, implying that it isn't required by law.

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