6 ms·
Merchants of Meth: How Big Pharma Keeps the Cooks in Business
- bediger4000 13y agoMeth 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 13y agoSources? Mother Jones clearly has theirs, otherwise I would have to accuse you of "trying to polarize a situation".
- rurounijones 13y 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 13y 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.
- bediger4000 13y agoSorry, 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 13y agoisn'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-idUSBRE98R02W20130928 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/ 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 13y agoThat 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.
- jpatokal 13y agoThe 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.
- jpatokal 13y agoAlso, I can't believe this is a thing: "a one-to-five-year sentence for buying pseudoephedrine with intent to make meth".
- rob05c 13y agoBetter 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 13y agoThey are legal. Dextro-amphetamine and mixed amphetamine salts are widely prescribed for ADD.
- aheilbut 13y agoMethamphetamine is already an FDA-approved prescription drug, called Desoxyn.
- rob05c 13y agoPseudoephedrine 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_effectiveness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenylephrine#Questions_about_e...
- ghouse 13y agoI 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.
- rob05c 13y agoRight. 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)
- timr 13y agoOne 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).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kens 13y agoAgreed. 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 http://heterodoxy.cc/meowdocs/pseudo/pseudosynth.pdf
- timr 13y 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 13y agoIf 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.
- rob05c 13y agoThere are too many legal plants anyway؟
- sxcurry 13y agoOregonian 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.