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What they're going to do with it is prevent me from making a purchase if I've crossed some arbitrary limit as if exceeding that limit automatically makes me a d

What they're going to do with it is prevent me from making a purchase if I've crossed some arbitrary limit as if exceeding that limit automatically makes me a drug trafficker. From there, it's not too far of a stretch to imagine the government assigning someone to review the list and to expend additional investigative resources into merely "suspicious" cases. Plenty of good tragedies start this way. If the government has an interest in preventing drug manufacture then this is the absolute worst way to go about prosecuting that agenda. It harms the wrong people and it offers no impediment to actual producers. The information cannot possibly be useful, it may become a liability, and I didn't ask to be protected from myself.

tptacek 3y ago
They're just going to say "no", right? They're not going to "automatically make you a drug trafficker". They're just trying to enforce a rate limit.
- akira2501 3y ago
  So, if the concern isn't that I'm trafficking, then why am I being told no? Isn't this the logic the government used to assert this right for itself in the first place? Otherwise, what right is it of the government to enact this rate limit? What interest are they protecting? How is the rate limit decided? What can I do if I disagree with the rate limit? Why is a private business being burdened with the governments agenda here? I get where you're coming from, it _is_ a /small/ thing, but the implications immediately become onerous if you think about their meaning inside of a "free" country.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    You're not being told "no". You can just go buy some Sudafed right now if you want to. It's not like there's an application process. There is a rate limit; that's it.
    - akira2501 3y ago
      In order for a rate limit to be effective, at some point it has to apply, and at that point, I'm told "no." More concretely, in order to implement a rate limit, you have to sign an electronic log book, and the government can view that log book whenever it likes, without any sort of review or auditing, of course. This isn't the primary concern anyways, the point was, in order to implement this seemingly simple action, many liberties have to be sacrificed and the boundary between innocent and criminal and government and private business become significantly marred. Perhaps those sacrifices are immaterial to most lives and could be ignored without consequence, but the originalist in me says this is folly, and as I've shown it's easy to think of the dangers that some innocent people might endure as a result. Worse, comparing these dangers to the outcomes of the system itself, the whole endeavor seems to have negative value. Finally, as we've seen in history many times, now that this electronic logbook exists, it's use will naturally continue to expand until the government has secured for itself the right to view nearly every single "questionable" purchase you make at a pharmacy. It's an entirely unaccountable act from the government. I'm not sure why anyone would expend effort minimizing it.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        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.
        AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > 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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- lazide 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Respectfully, I don't believe you. This is another one of those cases where the Bayesian Base Rate Fallacy suggests that the "scary" version of this supposed DEA policy, where they pursue marginal cases of people with extra-stuffy noses, can't possibly work.
    - lazide 3y ago
      https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs36/36407/36407p.pdf https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs36/36407/36407p.pdf Legit extra-stuffy-noses? Sure. But that isn't a Brazil type situation. A Brazil type situation is where you get mistakenly caught in the gears of a no-win bureaucracy just trying to survive. Not a super high risk IMO, but definitely not ZERO risk. The DEA hasn't always been known to give the benefit of the doubt, or ask questions before shooting.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        None of this supports the argument you made? It's just a DOJ report talking about the smurfing-to-lab pipeline, which was obviously very real, until we made it annoying enough to get Sudafed that smurfing became irrelevant and production shifted offshore. No, this is an instance where I won't hedge, because I think my cards in this hand are strong enough: the risk of what you said earlier, of DEA getting bored and looking for marginal cases of Sudafed acquisitions in the logs to trigger enforcement work, is zero. Absent some important other high-signal source to correlate with, that tactic is mathematically guaranteed not to work.
        lazide 3y ago
        Dude, that report was written AFTER the laws which required it to be moved behind the counter, people to take IDs, etc. 2 years after. Smurfing was the response to that. They used those databases to identify it and target folks. That's the whole point.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tptacek 3y ago

They're just going to say "no", right? They're not going to "automatically make you a drug trafficker". They're just trying to enforce a rate limit.

akira2501 3y ago
So, if the concern isn't that I'm trafficking, then why am I being told no? Isn't this the logic the government used to assert this right for itself in the first place? Otherwise, what right is it of the government to enact this rate limit? What interest are they protecting? How is the rate limit decided? What can I do if I disagree with the rate limit? Why is a private business being burdened with the governments agenda here? I get where you're coming from, it _is_ a /small/ thing, but the implications immediately become onerous if you think about their meaning inside of a "free" country.
- tptacek 3y ago
  You're not being told "no". You can just go buy some Sudafed right now if you want to. It's not like there's an application process. There is a rate limit; that's it.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    In order for a rate limit to be effective, at some point it has to apply, and at that point, I'm told "no." More concretely, in order to implement a rate limit, you have to sign an electronic log book, and the government can view that log book whenever it likes, without any sort of review or auditing, of course. This isn't the primary concern anyways, the point was, in order to implement this seemingly simple action, many liberties have to be sacrificed and the boundary between innocent and criminal and government and private business become significantly marred. Perhaps those sacrifices are immaterial to most lives and could be ignored without consequence, but the originalist in me says this is folly, and as I've shown it's easy to think of the dangers that some innocent people might endure as a result. Worse, comparing these dangers to the outcomes of the system itself, the whole endeavor seems to have negative value. Finally, as we've seen in history many times, now that this electronic logbook exists, it's use will naturally continue to expand until the government has secured for itself the right to view nearly every single "questionable" purchase you make at a pharmacy. It's an entirely unaccountable act from the government. I'm not sure why anyone would expend effort minimizing it.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      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.
      - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
        > 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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lazide 3y ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 3y ago
  Respectfully, I don't believe you. This is another one of those cases where the Bayesian Base Rate Fallacy suggests that the "scary" version of this supposed DEA policy, where they pursue marginal cases of people with extra-stuffy noses, can't possibly work.
  - lazide 3y ago
    https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs36/36407/36407p.pdf https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs36/36407/36407p.pdf Legit extra-stuffy-noses? Sure. But that isn't a Brazil type situation. A Brazil type situation is where you get mistakenly caught in the gears of a no-win bureaucracy just trying to survive. Not a super high risk IMO, but definitely not ZERO risk. The DEA hasn't always been known to give the benefit of the doubt, or ask questions before shooting.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      None of this supports the argument you made? It's just a DOJ report talking about the smurfing-to-lab pipeline, which was obviously very real, until we made it annoying enough to get Sudafed that smurfing became irrelevant and production shifted offshore. No, this is an instance where I won't hedge, because I think my cards in this hand are strong enough: the risk of what you said earlier, of DEA getting bored and looking for marginal cases of Sudafed acquisitions in the logs to trigger enforcement work, is zero. Absent some important other high-signal source to correlate with, that tactic is mathematically guaranteed not to work.
      - lazide 3y ago
        Dude, that report was written AFTER the laws which required it to be moved behind the counter, people to take IDs, etc. 2 years after. Smurfing was the response to that. They used those databases to identify it and target folks. That's the whole point.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]