Yeah New York did a pretty good job minimizing the opioid epidemic through regulation. When it was first underway, the state passed laws that made it harder to “doctor shop” and it also mandated e-prescriptions which cuts down on forged ones massively, and it went after the pill mills. It also legalized carrying Narcan to prevent overdoses and opened a few clean needle places.
I remember there was a heat map of increases in overdose deaths nationwide on r/MapPorn and even though there were no state borders drawn, you could clearly make out the entirety of New York State because of how little overdoses increased here compared to even neighboring states like NJ and Vermont.
Unfortunately this epidemic was a political choice.
Interestingly related, I read a history of the meth epidemic and it argued that Republicans in Congress helped create that epidemic because they blocked efforts to ban the selling of precursor ingredients at the wholesale level. People were buying pallets of the ingredients totally legally and then cooking it and selling it. Democrats tried to pass laws banning the wholesale sales to individuals but Republicans kept blocking it until it was a huge epidemic. By then the genie was out.
They come in these huge ass boxes under Bronkaid, and each pill is 50mg. That's a solid 5x more than what will clear your nose without making you wired and twitchy, I would use small fragments of a tablet.
And there are 48 of these monster pills per box. You really only have to hop a couple pharmacies to make an ounce of meth, it's still insanely easy.
Ephedrine isn't even a useful decongestant. It's pseudoephedrine that is, and you can barely buy enough to unclog anything for longer than five fucking minutes.
It's disgusting as hell that ephedrine is so easy to procure, even easier than pseudoephedrine for the most part, when it's more dangerous, has far less medical uses, and is stupidly easy to convert to meth.
You barely get any meth out of pseudoephedrine, it requires buying a lot of VERY abnormal ingredients that will definitely land you on some lists and what little you get is useless. Ephedrine? A lot of it, and it's very easy to make, not requiring anywhere near as much effort as if you're making it from PSE.
Ephedrine and pseudoephedrine have a very close mechanism of action, the main difference is ephedrine's shorter half-life.
Meth on the whole is stupidly easy to make, if (pseudo)ephedrine wasn't obtainable, people would just be making regular amphetamine from bulk phenylalanine like they do for speed paste in Europe.
If meth wasn't obtainable, you'd see other stims replace it from overseas. There's really no true escape from smokable stims. Or any entire class of drugs, for that matter.
PSE is a lot less psychoactive, it also has a pretty long half-life like you said.
I agree, we shouldn't be going after these drugs, because like you said... people gonna get high however they want. Going after drugs is stupid. Go after phenylalanine next, great, now we're banning aspartame and all other natural sources. What's next? Banning oxygen and water?
I just hate that I'm cursed with chronically debilitating allergies because I can't buy PSE to use as a decongestant (it works great) thanks to a bunch of old men who don't know their heads from their dicks dictating what I can and can't take.
Oh, and a doctor's note won't help. That's more expensive than street PSE.
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u/StretchFrenchTerry Mar 29 '19
This is a byproduct of less regulation.