The War on Terror Drugs

There has been a great deal of discussion on the "Patriot Act" and how rather than fighting terror is really encroaching on our freedom and inconveniencing citizens and not really making Americans safer or fighting terror. Well what about the 30 year old "War on Drugs". What has it accomplished? The war has amounted to a game of whack a mole. You go after one drug and a new one takes it's place. The target now is methamphetamine. One of the ingredients required to manufacture it is pseudoephedrine used in many over the counter cold medicines. In an effort to stop methamphetamine production it is now necessary to show ID to by cold remedies containing pseudoephedrine in Oregon and Oklahoma. Just Some Poor Schmuck, who I agree with on virtually nothing, explains:

First Oklahoma then Oregon sought to fight the manufacture of methamphetamine by making cold medicine, a source of pseudoephedrine used in its manufacture, harder to get. This might have some small affect on the meth trade but is no cure-all. Whether it is effective at all and if so, how effective is up in the air. The proponents point to a decrease in the number of meth lab seized as proof of its efficacy, but have been silent about whether the traditional metric for measuring drug traffic, street price, has shown any change at all.

Then, some hotshot in Salem thought, "if a little is good, a lot is better" and came up with the idea to ban cold medicines all together. This idea had not even had time to be discussed when another one came along.

More details on the Oregon law here. The absurdity of this is almost beyond belief. We are going to ban, or make it incredibly inconvenient, for law abiding citizens to buy legal medication that they depend on for health and comfort. This is right up there with incarcerating people for use, sale or possession of marijuana while releasing high risk repeat sex offenders. It's time to end the war we can't win, the war on drugs. We apparently learned nothing from the failure of alcohol prohibition.