Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/meth-pseudoephedrine-big-pharma-lobby

by guildwriter • 13 years ago

25 28 13 years ago

bediger40002• 13 years ago

Meth use as a whole, according to a 2009 RAND Corporation study, costs the nation anywhere between $16 billion and $48 billion each year.

I call BS. Even $16 billion is totally ridiculous. According to Wikipedia, NASA's budget was $18 billion in 2011.

This article is just a straight ahead Moral Panic, trying to polarize a situation, and then punish some party while there's a big fog of crapaganda around. Mother Jones should be ashamed.

And just a side note: how many Moral Panics over drugs do we have before we just get over it?

I'm old, I can recall a late 60s moral panic about LSD - it supposedly made you have babies with lobster claws, if you survived the mandatory dive out of a 2nd floor window. There was an early 70s panic over heroin, and then the Angel Dust thing in the early 80s. After that, it was Free Basing, and then Crack. It's been Evil Meth for a while now, isn't it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?

vrish88• 13 years ago

Sources? Mother Jones clearly has theirs, otherwise I would have to accuse you of "trying to polarize a situation".

rurounijones• 13 years ago

I call BS.

I am making no statement of support for original numbers but if you "call BS" then you need to provide something to back you up. NASA budget comparison is pointless.

ljd• 13 years ago

"I'm old, I can recall a late 60s moral panic about LSD - it supposedly made you have babies with lobster claws, if you survived the mandatory dive out of a 2nd floor window. There was an early 70s panic over heroin, and then the Angel Dust thing in the early 80s. After that, it was Free Basing, and then Crack. It's been Evil Meth for a while now, isn't it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?"

I grew up in a very poor part of the country and this statement is ridiculous. These drugs (save maybe LSD) are still massively destructive forces in society that still kill people today in poor, uneducated sections of the United States. Your statement makes it sound like people are just afraid of these drugs because they don't understand it, but once they come around to it, they'll see how it's not so bad.

That is an insane position on drugs.

disclosure: I'm actually for legalization but I have my eyes open about what they do and how they destroy families and lives.

bediger40002• 13 years ago

Sorry, I wasn't clear. It's not that the drugs are "not so bad", it's just that the fog around something so horribly stigmatized prevents any sensible treatment program.

The only thing society does if there's a major drug Moral Panic is to punish the offenders severely. Putting people in prison just causes huge problems all around, even for those not in prison. We end up with a prison-industrial complex and a militarized police force.

Illegal drugs do indeed destroy families and lives: but prison is almost certainly not any help for those issues. We've got AA for booze, Narcotics Anonymous for heroin, etc etc. Those actually seem to make a difference. The Moral Panics around particular drugs keep us from helping the people involved.

dmckeon• 13 years ago

isn't it about time for a New Drug to Panic over?

Here you are, a new X/MDMA, just in time for the end of Q3:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/28/us-usa-drugs-molly...

More seriously, I had thought that meth was over-blown as a danger until I saw a business truck advertising: Mold Specialist / Meth Lab Cleanup then did a Google search for similar companies, and got 200K hits. http://biomethdecon.com/

People choosing to use drugs is one thing, but people exposing their minor children, neighbors, or subsequent tenants to drug, solvent, and feedstock residue is quite another.

pstuart• 13 years ago

That would be "bath salts", which are actually rather scary. Not that they should be illegal, just remove the need by legalizing their herbal counterpart: cannabis.

jpatokal4• 13 years ago

The article argues hard that making pseudoephedrine a prescription drug would magically solve all this... and never once floats the idea that making methamphetamine itself a prescription drug would work much better.

Once addicts can get cheap, safe maintenance doses to feed their habit, there's no more need for homebrew meth labs, and no more burn patients, toddlers drinking drain cleaner, kids in foster care because their parents are in jail, police teams in hazmat suits and all the massive costs this imposes on society.

jpatokal4• 13 years ago

Also, I can't believe this is a thing: "a one-to-five-year sentence for buying pseudoephedrine with intent to make meth".

rob05c5• 13 years ago

Better yet, legalize or prescriptionize less destructive amphetamines, so people have no reason to use meth.

(yes, I just coined a neologism. You can thank me later.)

hollerith• 13 years ago

They are legal. Dextro-amphetamine and mixed amphetamine salts are widely prescribed for ADD.

aheilbut• 13 years ago

Methamphetamine is already an FDA-approved prescription drug, called Desoxyn.

rob05c5• 13 years ago

Holy mother duck! If I were roughly the size of a barge, I still wouldn't take meth to lose weight. I think you'd be trading your mind for your body.

jpatokal4• 13 years ago

True but irrelevant, since it can't be legally prescribed for treatment/maintenance of addiction.

GrinningFool• 13 years ago

On the one hand you deride one solution that's actually been proven effective as magical. On the other hand you propose a solution and then proceed to enumerate its magical effects.

Addicts who start on a street drug aren't typically in the habit of going to the doctor for their fix.

BgSpnnrs• 13 years ago

Not sure that's true if you factor in decent quality. In fact it's demmonstrably untrue if you look at mmj users or the heroin programs in the Netherlands.

jpatokal4• 13 years ago

They would as soon as it was cheaper to go to the doctor instead.

rob05c5• 13 years ago

Pseudoephedrine is the most effective chemical we have to alleviate flu-like symptoms. The alternatives such as phenylephrine simply don't work.

I believe in cognitive liberty, but meth will mess you up. If I believed any drug should be illegal, meth would be at the top of the list. But illegalizing something for which we have no reasonable alternative is absurd.

Of course, making less destructive amphetamines legal so people don't feel the need for meth, that's just crazy talk.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylephrine#Questions_about_e...

ghouse• 13 years ago

I don't think people are proposing making pseudoephedrine illegal. Just slightly more difficult to obtain.

It appears that the data supports that changing the drug's status has a positive impact on meth production. However, there was no data about how people in Oregon or Mississippi deal with their flu-like symptoms.

rob05c5• 13 years ago

Right. But many people have neither the time nor money for prescriptions. Especially when OTC medicines claim to work. Especially in lower income states like Mississippi.

I grew up in rural blue-collar America. My father had health insurance through his work, but we seldom had the money for the co-pay to see a doctor. (anecdotal, I know)

timr2• 13 years ago

One real problem (that this article got factually wrong) is that phenylephrine (the 'PE' in Sudafed PE) doesn't really work. The literature goes back-and-forth on it, but the consensus seems to be that it's only marginally more effective than placebo. Pseudoephedrine is significantly more effective than both (which, of course, is partly due to its close chemical relationship to methamphetamine...funny how that works).

kens• 13 years ago

Agreed. For entertainment, see the satirical article "A Simple and Convenient Synthesis of Pseudoephedrine From N-Methylamphetamine" which notes the difficulty of obtaining psudoephedrine from pharmacies and gives a simple chemical synthesis of it from "readily available" meth.

"We expect that the simultaneous trends of restricting pseudoephedrine sales while N-methylamphetamine becomes less expensive and of higher purity will make the methods presented here increasingly attractive."

http://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf

timr2• 13 years ago

"which notes the difficulty of obtaining psudoephedrine from pharmacies and gives a simple chemical synthesis of it from "readily available" meth"

Ha! It certainly would be a good bit easier to put that hydroxyl group back on than to strip it off in the first place....

whyenot• 13 years ago

If you make psuedoephedrine too difficult to get, meth cooks will start with extracts from Ephedra sinica (containing ephedrine). That may or may not be a good thing.

rob05c5• 13 years ago

There are too many legal plants anyway؟

sxcurry• 13 years ago

Oregonian here. Although the incidence of meth labs here in Southern Oregon has certainly dropped, which is a good thing, I doubt the number of meth users has changed much if at all. The meth is now coming from Mexico, much higher quality, and a straight shot up I5.

Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business

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