cold medicine regulations more widespread

Robin's commentary

For my final essay for my writing classes term, I decided to look into the war on meth and was astonished (however not overly surprised) to learn that this is being implemented in at least a dozen other states in the United States.

Oregon is of course trying to make it sound like it is their idea, however the policy on requiring a prescription for cold medicine was originally modeled after Oklahoma law.

Oregon and other states have jumped on the meth bandwagon because it has become the "popular" issue of the times. "It affects the children", a phrase we hear a lot when they want money from us.

Even the federal government is starting to get involved and is considering a bill that would take such medicines such as Sudafed, NyQuil and Tylenol cold and place them behind pharmacy counters and limit how much one person can buy per month.

The proposed amount would be 7.5 g per month or roughly equivalent to 250 30 mg tablets.

Now keep in mind what this really means to the citizenship.

Now that most cold and flu medications are being considered a prescription drug, it is a FEDERAL offense to share these drugs with anyone including your family. of course, federal violations no longer have any teeth citing the example of the illegal immigrants

Example: your child has the flu. Normally you would go to the medicine cabinet, grab the old standby box of flu medication and give it to your child and send the child back to bed.

Under the new law, you cannot do that anymore unless that particular box was prescribed for that particular child. E.g. three kids, three prescriptions.


Another Prohibition?

Prohibition was a time when the government tried to limit a substance from the general public. This substance was alcohol. All that it managed to do and the reason why prohibition failed, is a created a black market for alcohol.

I foresee that by limiting normally over-the-counter cold and flu medications is going to do the same.

People may not tie illegal immigration and meth labs together, however less than one third of the ingredients for meth labs comes from cold and flu medications while the rest comes from over the border.

I will say it again, what is next? Cough syrup? Aspirin?
Pause for a minute and look at your medicine cabinet and look at the medications that we take for granted and then step back and think about how life would be if EACH one of those required a prescription and went for prescription prices.