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I find it ridiculous that you cannot buy pseudoephedrine without the pharmacy checking whether you've purchased any quantity of the OTC medicine in any other st

by 12xo 6y ago

I find it ridiculous that you cannot buy pseudoephedrine without the pharmacy checking whether you've purchased any quantity of the OTC medicine in any other state via a inter-agency, multi-state networked solution... And yet this kind of stuff still exists. There is more than enough way to solve these problems, but for some f'n reason there is no will...

buildbot 6y ago
Probably not not helpful, but meanwhile just a little bit north in Canada they sell excellent otc allergy medicine with pseudofed. Just wild what we choose to prohibit.
- microcolonel 6y ago
  Meanwhile banning coffee roasts and pieces of outerwear because they sound vaguely like the name of scary-looking guns. I feel like there's just so much in the state now, we need mandatory sunset on anything like this. Review of legislation and rules/regulation should be routine, rather than boutique, and each time we should be called upon to make a positive case for each rule.
  - lisper 6y ago
    > banning coffee roasts and pieces of outerwear because they sound vaguely like the name of scary-looking guns. Huh??? Reference?
    - afturner 6y ago
      Looks like it was a mistake: https://nationalpost.com/news/trudeaus-gun-ban-appeared-to-ban-some-coffee-a-website-and-a-toy-heres-why https://nationalpost.com/news/trudeaus-gun-ban-appeared-to-b...
    - microcolonel 6y ago
      Okay okay, technically it didn't apply since there was no authority, though it shows the haste involved in producing the list. It also appeared to include a plastic toy-grade BB gun, because a PMC once imprinted a similar name on a private batch of firearms that were never sold or imported into Canada. Furthermore, apparently the firearm used in the shooting that prompted this sweeping ban was never sold on the Canadian market. It was illegally purchased, illegally smuggled into Canada, and you know, illegally discharged to kill people. There is no connection between the Canadian domestic market for semi-automatic rifles and the shooting, and yet the resultant rules target only the Canadian domestic market for semi-automatic rifles. https://nationalpost.com/news/trudeaus-gun-ban-appeared-to-ban-some-coffee-a-website-and-a-toy-heres-why https://nationalpost.com/news/trudeaus-gun-ban-appeared-to-b...
      - pnw_hazor 6y ago
        Not sure why you are being downvoted. I thought down voting because of viewpoint disagreement was discouraged on HN. The recent CA gun rules are a knee jerk reaction that will not make anyone safer. It will however further Trudeau's goal of disarming law abiding citizens.
      - dghughes 6y ago
        Legal or not there is no need in Canada for a person to own a semi-automatic rifle. Even with the guns there is no need for supersonic bullets and large grain/large mass bullets. If anything would help it would be heavily restricting access to ammo. I don't understand how people with illegal handguns can even find the ammo for them.
        microcolonel 6y ago
        > Even with the guns there is no need for supersonic bullets and large grain/large mass bullets. Even assuming you could make it such that criminals only get ahold of small subsonic ammunition, that would not have a marked effect on the lethality of criminal acts committed with firearms, and likely would have no impact on the rate of wrongful homicide. > I don't understand how people with illegal handguns can even find the ammo for them. Manufacturing and/or smuggling ammunition is easy, and most criminals do not go through a lot of ammunition. In places where smuggling is restricted successfully, criminals find other ways to kill and intimidate people, including manufacturing firearms and explosives; which, it may surprise you, is pretty easy, and pretty easy to do without getting caught. If you want to commit the resources to monitor every machine shop in the Americas and build a trillion dollar system of fences and surveillance outposts between jurisdictions, be my guest though. > Legal or not there is no need in Canada for a person to own a semi-automatic rifle Why do you think you know that? In a free society, the law should not be concerned with defining what is permitted, but with determining what is impermissible. To determine what the law should prohibit, it is not sufficient to ask yourself whether the law would inconvenience you. When you make laws, you have to be ready to put people in prison for disobeying them, you have to be ready to look their families in the eye and say “I think your father/son/mother/daughter should not be free for the next ten to fifteen years because he possessed the wrong shaped metal object”. There are many, many people in Canada who are guilty of no malum in se conduct, yet illegally possess firearms simply because they would rather risk the legal ramifications of keeping them than destroy them simply to satisfy the law. You're going to have to tell me that every time the law sends such a peaceful person to prison and destroys their property, it is worth it. It is no more just to imprison people who possess firearms for their own lawful purposes than it is to imprison people who possess drugs for the same.
- blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
  Pseudoephedrine in Canada has to be mixed with acetaminophen, which is difficult to separate back out for meth cooking.
  - casefields 6y ago
    That's what they said about acetaminophen and opioids, even though cold water extraction is easy peasy. As for separating pseudo and acetaminophen? Right here: https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/thecure.html https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/thecure.htm... Legit large scale meth labs have actual chemists on their payroll. It's not some junkies with a couple high school chem classes under their belt.
alistairSH 6y ago
There's no upside to fixing it for the political class.
- lisper 6y ago
  To the contrary, this sort of thing is beneficial to the political class because each side can point to it and blame the other side. In fact, the worst case scenario for the political class is a well-functioning society with no urgent-seeming problems to be solved because in a situation like that people will start to wonder why we need the political class at all.
  - alistairSH 6y ago
    Isn’t that what I just said? There’s no upside. The political class would rather have fraud (real or imagined, as is the case with election fraud) to use as a hammer with which to bludgeon the other side.
    - lisper 6y ago
      "There is no upside [to fixing it]" is not quite the same as it being actively beneficial to those tasked with fixing problems to have the problem remain unfixed.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> for some f'n reason there is no will Short of overhauling personal identification in the U.S., I don’t see a simple solution. Making unemployment benefits more tedious to claim is politically risky.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  And we can't overhaul personal identification in the US, because there's a non-trivial quantity of the voting population that literally believes giving people unique identifiers is a step towards the apocalypse as described in the Christian Book of Revelation. It's maddening dealing with Americans sometimes.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    While at the same time, often the same people support he patriot act a 100%.
    - LyndsySimon 6y ago
      I know of literally no one who supports the PATRIOT Act “100%”. I know of very few who defend it at all, actually.
  - genericone 6y ago
    On the same coin, there are those saying that requiring id to vote is racist because of an extremely low bar of expectations that they have set for that demographic. No one wins. Everyone loses in this argument.
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      Nobody argues that requiring IDs to vote is “racist,” but that the availability of such IDs is implemented in a patchwork, uneven fashion, with the result being the disenfranchisement of many eligible voters, were new, stricter laws put in place. Were identification to be provided universally and freely, with corresponding automatic voter registration, none of this debate would exist. Strangely enough, those who like to go on and on about voter IDs tend to oppose such universal access to them.
karatestomp 6y ago
Lots of the solutions involve something like a national citizen ID program (for an efficient implementation). Done right it fixes tons and tons of problems that cost normal people piles of time and money every year, plus whatever the costs are to businesses and government. But a few political factions—mostly on the right, if you go looking for them, like religious folks who see such IDs as end-times related (yes, seriously), some stripes of libertarian, and the very much real group of people who don't want government to work well—are very against solutions of that sort.
- briandear 6y ago
  Mostly on the right? Just the simple act of requiring someone to show an ID to vote causes apoplectic fits from the left.
  - madhadron 6y ago
    If you paired it with "everyone gets an ID, no fee, no patchwork" I think you would find that goes away.
  - karatestomp 6y ago
    Usually not if coupled with a mandate that the government provide everyone such an ID at no cost (yes, yes, "nothing's free", but everyone knows what that means). The breakdown is that one side wants to require ID to vote, and the other side is OK with that if there's a program such that every citizen is issued ID for basically no effort, cost, or hassle, and is registered for voting and residency with similar ease (so there must not be renewal crap, problems sorting out issues at the polling place if there's a discrepency, that kind of thing—cannot make voting harder, and if done right should make it easier)—but that's a non-starter because of the things already mentioned (plus some others reasons, but stating the public and explicit, not inferred, positions of certain political factions in my first post apparently rubbed some people the wrong way, so I'll refrain from mentioning those). If 100% of citizens for-sure had an ID there wouldn't be disagreement on the issue. Using such an ID and whatever residency registration program was associated with it would save money and hassle over maintaining voting rolls, overzealous purging of which is another thing the left doesn't like, would allow automatic voter registration, and so on. This would broaden franchise, in practice.
scarface74 6y ago
Because the “War On Drugs” is moralistic signaling...
verst 6y ago
EDIT: The following may be specific to the U.S. state. Also ridiculous but only tangentially related: Psychiatrists (or similar functions) cannot send prescriptions for ADHD drugs (Adderall / Amphetamines etc) to pharmacies (by any method) [EDIT: at least in Washington State as of March 2020]. You need to pick up the physical prescription from the health care provider, then take it to any pharmacy. The pharmacy may not even have the medication, and certainly will need some time to fill it on the spot. Of course this is a controlled substance. Somehow this process is imposed by the DEA perhaps together with the FDA (unsure). I know it's a running joke to throw out the term Blockchain, but this really is where Blockchain might be a good solution. Regardless I don't see how a physical piece of paper changes the potential for abuse or any tracking of the patient. The pharmacy doesn't exactly make me verify my identity any differently from normal prescriptions to be picked up. Also, the prescription is generally only issued for a month. You may get a few prescriptions with different start dates into the future. So every month you will make your pharmacy scramble (and waste your own time) because they could not prepare for your prescription to be filled. All of this is even more annoying in the time of COVID-19. I need to unnecessarily have in person interactions for things that can happen remotely or virtually.
- jetti 6y ago
  This is not true anymore, Adderall can be sent electronically to the pharmacy. It makes things so much easier since I don’t have to find time to get into the office to pick up the paper prescription.
  - verst 6y ago
    Since when? In Washington state it was still true 2 months ago.
    - ohyeshedid 6y ago
      It definitely depends on the state. Something to possibly check into, if you have a primary care doctor you can ask them to conference with your psychiatrist so your primary can prescribe it through normal means. I don't know Washington regulations for that, so it might not help.
pwg 6y ago
> I find it ridiculous that you cannot buy pseudoephedrine without the pharmacy checking whether you've purchased any quantity of the OTC medicine in any other state via a inter-agency, multi-state networked solution Not defending the practice, but the supposed reason for this is because pseudoephedrine can be used in cooking methamphetamine [1], and supposedly the 'cooks' had mules going around buying up stock everywhere to use in their labs. The 'check' was supposedly to catch the mules buying large quantities across plural pharmacies/states to use in the cook's labs. Sadly the unintended consequence is every time one has a head cold and buys original formula Sudafed, some government tracking database somewhere knows one bought that product. [1] https://www.chpa.org/Meth.aspx https://www.chpa.org/Meth.aspx
- briffle 6y ago
  In the state of Oregon, you can't get the 'real' stuff without a prescription. So you get to pay for a Dr visit, to get decent cough medicine. Or you stock up when you are near Washington. :-)
  - Reelin 6y ago
    Or you could purchase meth (easy to come by, as with the majority of illegal substances) and do the reverse synthesis in your kitchen? /s https://web.archive.org/web/20120301155008/https://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120301155008/https://heterodox...
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  In the UK they seemingly just removed all the active ingredient. I couldn't understand how it wasn't working for me, Sudafed had been an almost miraculous way to clear a head cold (mucus blocked sinuses); then it just didn't work anymore. Of course they put caffeine in to try and make it feel like it was working ... Recently, after careful analysis I found they do still make it (or they make it again), but it was a definite bait-and-switch.
  - pnw_hazor 6y ago
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
>There is more than enough way to solve these problems, but for some f'n reason there is no will... Because the point of the unemployment bureaucracy is to prevent the utilization of unemployment insurance. The easiest and cheapest way to do that is to just make the whole thing suck, which also, as a side-effect, makes it vulnerable to malicious actors.
newacct583 6y ago
> for some f'n reason there is no will... That is a euphemism. In face this is a partisan issue. Mismanaged and embarassed social services programs are seen as a feature by one party, because they allow for arguing against them on principle.
- 12xo 6y ago
  That doesnt explain the IRS lapses.
api 6y ago
White collar crime is treated very differently from street crime or other kinds of lower class crime. I'd almost say it's not prosecuted at all. You have to be pretty flagrant or step on the wrong "third rail" to go to jail. Make a few grams of meth? Go to jail. Launder billions in drug money at a major financial institution? Get a small fine and probably keep your job. The current president of the United States is a borderline white collar criminal, though most of his past scams are of the "greasy" sort that are just barely on the right side of the law. It's basically all about the social class of the criminal. The word "villain" comes from the same root as "villager" and means a person of lower social class. https://www.etymonline.com/word/villain https://www.etymonline.com/word/villain A while back I found a fascinating crime map of white collar crime. It showed the inverse of what you see for street crime, with huge white collar crime hotspots in richer more upscale neighborhoods. In Compton (Los Angeles area) you are more likely to have your wallet stolen. It's safer to walk around in Santa Monica or Newport Beach, but the person you pass on the street is more likely to be stealing your pension.
gfxgirl 6y ago
You want a reason, watch this https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/ I have no idea whether or not to trust frontline because they've seemed on the wrong side of things for certain topics I know more about but, at least that made it clear to me why that stuff might be a controlled substance
nilram 6y ago
There is no will to improve those systems because people on unemployment aren’t typically a group that can donate funds to politicians.
0x8BADF00D 6y ago
If it’s trivial to do this type of fraud, imagine how easy it is to falsify voting records. Especially in states that don’t have strict voter ID laws.
- secabeen 6y ago
  It may be easy to engage in Tax and UEI fraud, and they get away with it because the money has already left the country, but they do get detected, regularly. To follow your metaphor out, if this were happening with voting records, we'd have lots of people reporting that they went to vote and their vote was already cast. That is not the case.
  - pnw_hazor 6y ago
    The way to commit voter fraud is to determine non-voting registered voters in a given jurisdiction and submit ballots on their behalf. In some jurisdictions there may be 1000s of non-voting registered voters who have moved away, died, or never voted at all (automatically registered voters, etc.)
    - tomjakubowski 6y ago
      Pulling that off for thousands of non-voting registered voters would require hundreds of conspirators, assuming generously that one conspirator could physically vote in ten voting locations in a day, and if you have any errors which cause double voting you're very likely to be busted.
      - pnw_hazor 6y ago
        Nevertheless, voter fraud happens. While I agree it doesn't effect the outcome of that many elections, I think the loose handling of voter rolls and voter identification, contribute to a distrust in the integrity of US elections. Interestingly, vote by mail may be more secure than polling stations, because vote-by-mail often requires signature matching (matching signature on ballot cover with signature on registration). But the ACLU is fighting tooth and nail against signature matching.
tptacek 6y ago
People say this on message boards all the time but I have literally never had a problem buying pseudoephedrine. I just walk up to the counter and ask for it. It's faster than buying a steak at the meat counter. It's not as if any of us are unclear on why sudafed is controlled.
- mrits 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you are trying to argue here. It's not difficult to buy pseudoephedrine but it is tracked by the ID you provide. And if you go over the limit you can't purchase it anymore. Is this what you are disputing?
- 12xo 6y ago
  You're missing the point. It's the fact that our government created / mandated this multi-agency, multi-state, multi-private/public process and it was implemented in a matter of months. All to prevent people from buying too many boxes of decongestant at one time... The scale of that particular problem pales in comparison to the 100's of billions being tossed to thieves via flawed IRS and UI claims processes.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    You lost me at "all to prevent people from buying too many boxes of decongestant at one time". Obviously, nobody --- including the government --- cares how much "decongestant" you need. The problem is that pseudoephedrine is extraordinarily close to methamphetamine and the meth synthesis process is trivial. You can't buy sudafed without an ID for the same reason that you can't buy codeine off the shelf.
    - akerl_ 6y ago
      It seems that the two of you are talking past each other. The earlier comment is pointing out that it’s “ridiculous” that the government isn’t able to solve the problem from the article, given that they’ve clearly been able to build a system to track pseudoephedrine sales. They don’t seem to be making any claims about it being ridiculous that they need to talk to a pharmacist to get it, which is what your reply implies they said.
tootie 6y ago
My one and only foolproof strategy to getting a bureaucracy to take security seriously: wait for a giant breach and tell them "I told you so." If you've got a remediation plan on hand and ready to fire, that's your chance to get funding.
Aeolun 6y ago
Not my money syndrome?
djaouen 6y ago
This is because the shadow government is looking to force The Jesus to return. Not kidding here.
wutbrodo 6y ago
> There is more than enough way to solve these problems, but for some f'n reason there is no will... It's pretty straightforward. Most people are simple-minded or dishonest enough that they can't understand or admit that policies they like can be inefficient or flawed. In the case of pseudoephedrine, the public conversation doesn't have too many advocates for meth dealers or trivially inconvenienced shoppers. By contrast, any inkling that a government program could be run more efficiently is immediately met with howls of outrage that reform proposals are just cover for the real goal of forcing poor people to starve. Once you know what to look for, you'll see this for _almost literally every topic_ of this type, from infrastructure to public schools.

by 12xo 6y ago

buildbot 6y ago

Probably not not helpful, but meanwhile just a little bit north in Canada they sell excellent otc allergy medicine with pseudofed. Just wild what we choose to prohibit.

microcolonel 6y ago
Meanwhile banning coffee roasts and pieces of outerwear because they sound vaguely like the name of scary-looking guns. I feel like there's just so much in the state now, we need mandatory sunset on anything like this. Review of legislation and rules/regulation should be routine, rather than boutique, and each time we should be called upon to make a positive case for each rule.
- lisper 6y ago
  > banning coffee roasts and pieces of outerwear because they sound vaguely like the name of scary-looking guns. Huh??? Reference?
  - afturner 6y ago
    Looks like it was a mistake: https://nationalpost.com/news/trudeaus-gun-ban-appeared-to-ban-some-coffee-a-website-and-a-toy-heres-why https://nationalpost.com/news/trudeaus-gun-ban-appeared-to-b...
  - microcolonel 6y ago
    Okay okay, technically it didn't apply since there was no authority, though it shows the haste involved in producing the list. It also appeared to include a plastic toy-grade BB gun, because a PMC once imprinted a similar name on a private batch of firearms that were never sold or imported into Canada. Furthermore, apparently the firearm used in the shooting that prompted this sweeping ban was never sold on the Canadian market. It was illegally purchased, illegally smuggled into Canada, and you know, illegally discharged to kill people. There is no connection between the Canadian domestic market for semi-automatic rifles and the shooting, and yet the resultant rules target only the Canadian domestic market for semi-automatic rifles. https://nationalpost.com/news/trudeaus-gun-ban-appeared-to-ban-some-coffee-a-website-and-a-toy-heres-why https://nationalpost.com/news/trudeaus-gun-ban-appeared-to-b...
    - pnw_hazor 6y ago
      Not sure why you are being downvoted. I thought down voting because of viewpoint disagreement was discouraged on HN. The recent CA gun rules are a knee jerk reaction that will not make anyone safer. It will however further Trudeau's goal of disarming law abiding citizens.
    - dghughes 6y ago
      Legal or not there is no need in Canada for a person to own a semi-automatic rifle. Even with the guns there is no need for supersonic bullets and large grain/large mass bullets. If anything would help it would be heavily restricting access to ammo. I don't understand how people with illegal handguns can even find the ammo for them.
      - microcolonel 6y ago
        > Even with the guns there is no need for supersonic bullets and large grain/large mass bullets. Even assuming you could make it such that criminals only get ahold of small subsonic ammunition, that would not have a marked effect on the lethality of criminal acts committed with firearms, and likely would have no impact on the rate of wrongful homicide. > I don't understand how people with illegal handguns can even find the ammo for them. Manufacturing and/or smuggling ammunition is easy, and most criminals do not go through a lot of ammunition. In places where smuggling is restricted successfully, criminals find other ways to kill and intimidate people, including manufacturing firearms and explosives; which, it may surprise you, is pretty easy, and pretty easy to do without getting caught. If you want to commit the resources to monitor every machine shop in the Americas and build a trillion dollar system of fences and surveillance outposts between jurisdictions, be my guest though. > Legal or not there is no need in Canada for a person to own a semi-automatic rifle Why do you think you know that? In a free society, the law should not be concerned with defining what is permitted, but with determining what is impermissible. To determine what the law should prohibit, it is not sufficient to ask yourself whether the law would inconvenience you. When you make laws, you have to be ready to put people in prison for disobeying them, you have to be ready to look their families in the eye and say “I think your father/son/mother/daughter should not be free for the next ten to fifteen years because he possessed the wrong shaped metal object”. There are many, many people in Canada who are guilty of no malum in se conduct, yet illegally possess firearms simply because they would rather risk the legal ramifications of keeping them than destroy them simply to satisfy the law. You're going to have to tell me that every time the law sends such a peaceful person to prison and destroys their property, it is worth it. It is no more just to imprison people who possess firearms for their own lawful purposes than it is to imprison people who possess drugs for the same.
blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
Pseudoephedrine in Canada has to be mixed with acetaminophen, which is difficult to separate back out for meth cooking.
- casefields 6y ago
  That's what they said about acetaminophen and opioids, even though cold water extraction is easy peasy. As for separating pseudo and acetaminophen? Right here: https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/thecure.html https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/thecure.htm... Legit large scale meth labs have actual chemists on their payroll. It's not some junkies with a couple high school chem classes under their belt.

alistairSH 6y ago

There's no upside to fixing it for the political class.

lisper 6y ago
To the contrary, this sort of thing is beneficial to the political class because each side can point to it and blame the other side. In fact, the worst case scenario for the political class is a well-functioning society with no urgent-seeming problems to be solved because in a situation like that people will start to wonder why we need the political class at all.
- alistairSH 6y ago
  Isn’t that what I just said? There’s no upside. The political class would rather have fraud (real or imagined, as is the case with election fraud) to use as a hammer with which to bludgeon the other side.
  - lisper 6y ago
    "There is no upside [to fixing it]" is not quite the same as it being actively beneficial to those tasked with fixing problems to have the problem remain unfixed.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

> for some f'n reason there is no will Short of overhauling personal identification in the U.S., I don’t see a simple solution. Making unemployment benefits more tedious to claim is politically risky.

shadowgovt 6y ago
And we can't overhaul personal identification in the US, because there's a non-trivial quantity of the voting population that literally believes giving people unique identifiers is a step towards the apocalypse as described in the Christian Book of Revelation. It's maddening dealing with Americans sometimes.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  While at the same time, often the same people support he patriot act a 100%.
  - LyndsySimon 6y ago
    I know of literally no one who supports the PATRIOT Act “100%”. I know of very few who defend it at all, actually.
- genericone 6y ago
  On the same coin, there are those saying that requiring id to vote is racist because of an extremely low bar of expectations that they have set for that demographic. No one wins. Everyone loses in this argument.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    Nobody argues that requiring IDs to vote is “racist,” but that the availability of such IDs is implemented in a patchwork, uneven fashion, with the result being the disenfranchisement of many eligible voters, were new, stricter laws put in place. Were identification to be provided universally and freely, with corresponding automatic voter registration, none of this debate would exist. Strangely enough, those who like to go on and on about voter IDs tend to oppose such universal access to them.

karatestomp 6y ago

Lots of the solutions involve something like a national citizen ID program (for an efficient implementation). Done right it fixes tons and tons of problems that cost normal people piles of time and money every year, plus whatever the costs are to businesses and government. But a few political factions—mostly on the right, if you go looking for them, like religious folks who see such IDs as end-times related (yes, seriously), some stripes of libertarian, and the very much real group of people who don't want government to work well—are very against solutions of that sort.

briandear 6y ago
Mostly on the right? Just the simple act of requiring someone to show an ID to vote causes apoplectic fits from the left.
- madhadron 6y ago
  If you paired it with "everyone gets an ID, no fee, no patchwork" I think you would find that goes away.
- karatestomp 6y ago
  Usually not if coupled with a mandate that the government provide everyone such an ID at no cost (yes, yes, "nothing's free", but everyone knows what that means). The breakdown is that one side wants to require ID to vote, and the other side is OK with that if there's a program such that every citizen is issued ID for basically no effort, cost, or hassle, and is registered for voting and residency with similar ease (so there must not be renewal crap, problems sorting out issues at the polling place if there's a discrepency, that kind of thing—cannot make voting harder, and if done right should make it easier)—but that's a non-starter because of the things already mentioned (plus some others reasons, but stating the public and explicit, not inferred, positions of certain political factions in my first post apparently rubbed some people the wrong way, so I'll refrain from mentioning those). If 100% of citizens for-sure had an ID there wouldn't be disagreement on the issue. Using such an ID and whatever residency registration program was associated with it would save money and hassle over maintaining voting rolls, overzealous purging of which is another thing the left doesn't like, would allow automatic voter registration, and so on. This would broaden franchise, in practice.

scarface74 6y ago

Because the “War On Drugs” is moralistic signaling...

verst 6y ago

EDIT: The following may be specific to the U.S. state. Also ridiculous but only tangentially related: Psychiatrists (or similar functions) cannot send prescriptions for ADHD drugs (Adderall / Amphetamines etc) to pharmacies (by any method) [EDIT: at least in Washington State as of March 2020]. You need to pick up the physical prescription from the health care provider, then take it to any pharmacy. The pharmacy may not even have the medication, and certainly will need some time to fill it on the spot. Of course this is a controlled substance. Somehow this process is imposed by the DEA perhaps together with the FDA (unsure). I know it's a running joke to throw out the term Blockchain, but this really is where Blockchain might be a good solution. Regardless I don't see how a physical piece of paper changes the potential for abuse or any tracking of the patient. The pharmacy doesn't exactly make me verify my identity any differently from normal prescriptions to be picked up. Also, the prescription is generally only issued for a month. You may get a few prescriptions with different start dates into the future. So every month you will make your pharmacy scramble (and waste your own time) because they could not prepare for your prescription to be filled. All of this is even more annoying in the time of COVID-19. I need to unnecessarily have in person interactions for things that can happen remotely or virtually.

jetti 6y ago
This is not true anymore, Adderall can be sent electronically to the pharmacy. It makes things so much easier since I don’t have to find time to get into the office to pick up the paper prescription.
- verst 6y ago
  Since when? In Washington state it was still true 2 months ago.
  - ohyeshedid 6y ago
    It definitely depends on the state. Something to possibly check into, if you have a primary care doctor you can ask them to conference with your psychiatrist so your primary can prescribe it through normal means. I don't know Washington regulations for that, so it might not help.

pwg 6y ago

> I find it ridiculous that you cannot buy pseudoephedrine without the pharmacy checking whether you've purchased any quantity of the OTC medicine in any other state via a inter-agency, multi-state networked solution Not defending the practice, but the supposed reason for this is because pseudoephedrine can be used in cooking methamphetamine [1], and supposedly the 'cooks' had mules going around buying up stock everywhere to use in their labs. The 'check' was supposedly to catch the mules buying large quantities across plural pharmacies/states to use in the cook's labs. Sadly the unintended consequence is every time one has a head cold and buys original formula Sudafed, some government tracking database somewhere knows one bought that product. [1] https://www.chpa.org/Meth.aspx https://www.chpa.org/Meth.aspx

briffle 6y ago
In the state of Oregon, you can't get the 'real' stuff without a prescription. So you get to pay for a Dr visit, to get decent cough medicine. Or you stock up when you are near Washington. :-)
- Reelin 6y ago
  Or you could purchase meth (easy to come by, as with the majority of illegal substances) and do the reverse synthesis in your kitchen? /s https://web.archive.org/web/20120301155008/https://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20120301155008/https://heterodox...
pbhjpbhj 6y ago
In the UK they seemingly just removed all the active ingredient. I couldn't understand how it wasn't working for me, Sudafed had been an almost miraculous way to clear a head cold (mucus blocked sinuses); then it just didn't work anymore. Of course they put caffeine in to try and make it feel like it was working ... Recently, after careful analysis I found they do still make it (or they make it again), but it was a definite bait-and-switch.
- pnw_hazor 6y ago

eli_gottlieb 6y ago

>There is more than enough way to solve these problems, but for some f'n reason there is no will... Because the point of the unemployment bureaucracy is to prevent the utilization of unemployment insurance. The easiest and cheapest way to do that is to just make the whole thing suck, which also, as a side-effect, makes it vulnerable to malicious actors.

newacct583 6y ago

> for some f'n reason there is no will... That is a euphemism. In face this is a partisan issue. Mismanaged and embarassed social services programs are seen as a feature by one party, because they allow for arguing against them on principle.

12xo 6y ago
That doesnt explain the IRS lapses.

api 6y ago

White collar crime is treated very differently from street crime or other kinds of lower class crime. I'd almost say it's not prosecuted at all. You have to be pretty flagrant or step on the wrong "third rail" to go to jail. Make a few grams of meth? Go to jail. Launder billions in drug money at a major financial institution? Get a small fine and probably keep your job. The current president of the United States is a borderline white collar criminal, though most of his past scams are of the "greasy" sort that are just barely on the right side of the law. It's basically all about the social class of the criminal. The word "villain" comes from the same root as "villager" and means a person of lower social class. https://www.etymonline.com/word/villain https://www.etymonline.com/word/villain A while back I found a fascinating crime map of white collar crime. It showed the inverse of what you see for street crime, with huge white collar crime hotspots in richer more upscale neighborhoods. In Compton (Los Angeles area) you are more likely to have your wallet stolen. It's safer to walk around in Santa Monica or Newport Beach, but the person you pass on the street is more likely to be stealing your pension.

gfxgirl 6y ago

You want a reason, watch this https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/ I have no idea whether or not to trust frontline because they've seemed on the wrong side of things for certain topics I know more about but, at least that made it clear to me why that stuff might be a controlled substance

nilram 6y ago

There is no will to improve those systems because people on unemployment aren’t typically a group that can donate funds to politicians.

0x8BADF00D 6y ago

If it’s trivial to do this type of fraud, imagine how easy it is to falsify voting records. Especially in states that don’t have strict voter ID laws.

secabeen 6y ago
It may be easy to engage in Tax and UEI fraud, and they get away with it because the money has already left the country, but they do get detected, regularly. To follow your metaphor out, if this were happening with voting records, we'd have lots of people reporting that they went to vote and their vote was already cast. That is not the case.
- pnw_hazor 6y ago
  The way to commit voter fraud is to determine non-voting registered voters in a given jurisdiction and submit ballots on their behalf. In some jurisdictions there may be 1000s of non-voting registered voters who have moved away, died, or never voted at all (automatically registered voters, etc.)
  - tomjakubowski 6y ago
    Pulling that off for thousands of non-voting registered voters would require hundreds of conspirators, assuming generously that one conspirator could physically vote in ten voting locations in a day, and if you have any errors which cause double voting you're very likely to be busted.
    - pnw_hazor 6y ago
      Nevertheless, voter fraud happens. While I agree it doesn't effect the outcome of that many elections, I think the loose handling of voter rolls and voter identification, contribute to a distrust in the integrity of US elections. Interestingly, vote by mail may be more secure than polling stations, because vote-by-mail often requires signature matching (matching signature on ballot cover with signature on registration). But the ACLU is fighting tooth and nail against signature matching.

tptacek 6y ago

People say this on message boards all the time but I have literally never had a problem buying pseudoephedrine. I just walk up to the counter and ask for it. It's faster than buying a steak at the meat counter. It's not as if any of us are unclear on why sudafed is controlled.

mrits 6y ago
I'm not sure what you are trying to argue here. It's not difficult to buy pseudoephedrine but it is tracked by the ID you provide. And if you go over the limit you can't purchase it anymore. Is this what you are disputing?
12xo 6y ago
You're missing the point. It's the fact that our government created / mandated this multi-agency, multi-state, multi-private/public process and it was implemented in a matter of months. All to prevent people from buying too many boxes of decongestant at one time... The scale of that particular problem pales in comparison to the 100's of billions being tossed to thieves via flawed IRS and UI claims processes.
- tptacek 6y ago
  You lost me at "all to prevent people from buying too many boxes of decongestant at one time". Obviously, nobody --- including the government --- cares how much "decongestant" you need. The problem is that pseudoephedrine is extraordinarily close to methamphetamine and the meth synthesis process is trivial. You can't buy sudafed without an ID for the same reason that you can't buy codeine off the shelf.
  - akerl_ 6y ago
    It seems that the two of you are talking past each other. The earlier comment is pointing out that it’s “ridiculous” that the government isn’t able to solve the problem from the article, given that they’ve clearly been able to build a system to track pseudoephedrine sales. They don’t seem to be making any claims about it being ridiculous that they need to talk to a pharmacist to get it, which is what your reply implies they said.

tootie 6y ago

My one and only foolproof strategy to getting a bureaucracy to take security seriously: wait for a giant breach and tell them "I told you so." If you've got a remediation plan on hand and ready to fire, that's your chance to get funding.

Aeolun 6y ago

Not my money syndrome?

djaouen 6y ago

This is because the shadow government is looking to force The Jesus to return. Not kidding here.

wutbrodo 6y ago

> There is more than enough way to solve these problems, but for some f'n reason there is no will... It's pretty straightforward. Most people are simple-minded or dishonest enough that they can't understand or admit that policies they like can be inefficient or flawed. In the case of pseudoephedrine, the public conversation doesn't have too many advocates for meth dealers or trivially inconvenienced shoppers. By contrast, any inkling that a government program could be run more efficiently is immediately met with howls of outrage that reform proposals are just cover for the real goal of forcing poor people to starve. Once you know what to look for, you'll see this for _almost literally every topic_ of this type, from infrastructure to public schools.