Slick Drug Companies? 

I understand the desire to curtail access for this ingredient on the open market.  Currently, those products require registration and are kept behind the pharmacy counter.  Buyers names and information is recorded and made available to law enforcement.  Has this been an effective deterrent in the meth production and proliferation? 

Forcing average citizens to bear the cost of a doctors visit (not to mention the added time) to remedy a stuffy nose hardly seems like an intelligent plan. 

I guess when I have the sniffles, I can always go to the Emergency Room.

There are other medications that will do just as well as Sudafed but cannot be used by the meth cooks.  It is a small price to pay to decrease the number of labs in our state.  Oregon passed such a bill and the number of labs went from several hundred down to ten.

Who makes those products?  Not fast talking slick drug companies, I hope.  That might be nice information to put in a newspaper article.

This bill is ridiculous. 

1) some OTC drugs moved to behind counter and require ID and signature.  That was a great move.  Allows for monitoring.  Why hasn’t this worked?  Figure that out and fix it. 

2) Please don’t say (1) hasn’t worked because folks go into different stores and buy the legal limit and still get away with it.  Like the same thing can’t happen with different people going to different doctors and getting scripts, thereby still getting away with it?  Please.

3) All those people in (2) who make different doctor visits to get different prescriptions---if they are on Medicaid, guess who pays the tab.  But that shouldn’t be a problem cause MS is in great shape financially, right?

4) Lets say you have one of those horrible sinus headaches.  Instead of being able to run by the store and get help, you have to ask if you can take off work because now you have to call the doctor, schedule a visit which you hope won’t be a week/several weeks from that day, if no vacation time from work then you’re just out of luck cause its time off without pay, to go sit in a doctor’s office for an hour, to tell him that you just needed some dang sudafed. 

5) The just-use-something-else answer.  Real easy to say if you CAN use something else that (a) actually works, (b) doesn’t interfere with any other possible medications you are taking.  Come on, if one specific drug worked for every human being, there’d only be one choice out there.

6) So, lets use the best case scenario--taking off work any time you could ever need isn’t a problem for YOU, you don’t even have to wait that week or two to get in to see YOUR doctor, and you even have insurance so you only have to shell out the co-pay.  Congrats.  Now, do you really think if every person who needs a prescription for an OTC drug has to go to the doc to get the scrip and uses insurance--that the cost of insurance isn’t going to increase because the payout increases?  What world do you live in.

Do I think this meth problem is serious --YES!  Its horrible and the affects are devastating.
Do I believe that punishing every single person in the state who has chronic problems and needs the OTC option and hasn’t done anything wrong is the answer- NO
Do I think this hairbrain idea is going to work?  NO, see (2) and quite frankly, everyone thought putting this stuff behind the counter would solve it and the bad guys figured a way around that apparently.  So when this doesn’t work, what’s next?

If we used this approach across the board, then booze should be prescription since, according to MADD, an estimated 11,773 people died in drunk driving crashes in 2008.  That’s a lot of people.  Yet you don’t see ANYONE jumping up and down to put booze on a prescription. And please, don’t try the I-dont-know-how-horrific-this-abuse-is thing.  It is horrific.  But so are many other abuses out there. 

Folks have totally forgotten that the product isn’t the problem.  The problem is the people who have MISUSED the product.  Punish them, not the rest of us.. Or you can just go ahead and ban alcohol, guns, knives, vehicles, and anything else that has ever been MISUSED to harm. 

And the “slick” drug companies---good grief, can anyone smell politicin going on there.  Legislators, dems and repubs, explain to me how this product jumped up on its little two feet and caused harm.  Oh, it didn’t?  You mean if used as directed, it doesn’t just morph into an illegal drug?  Wow.  I guess it goes right back to certain people misusing a product.  Sure seems like punishing those people would be the next step.

Have we forgotten the quadruple scourge of TN, AL, LA and AK?  Why is there no money in this bill to set up checkpoints at the borders? 

And maybe some big guns on the coast; might bring ‘em in from Texas or Florida by water.

We’ll also need guards at all the all post offices, in case any of those meth cooks have Internet connections.  Or friends out of state (except Oregon, apparently).

Of course, this will sop up some of that huge surplus of doctors we have in this state.  They mostly sit around doing nothing all day when they could be writing scripts for cold medicine.  That’s a double benefit, because they can use up more of my tax money for medicare and medicaid runny noises, and run up my own insurance at the same time!

Jeesh.

Or maybe AR.  But you can never be sure.  They’re all to ship us cold medicine.

Elwood, you’re hitting on a good point that I don’t think has really been addressed.  Oregon’s decreased meth statistics don’t consider the same set of factors that MS has to deal with, such as our proximity to the Mexican border and our I-10 and I-20 drug corridors.

I applaud the drastic drop for Oregon, but I think we’re not exactly comparing apples to apples.  I just dont believe that making the cold medicine prescription-only will have the same effect.

Slick Drug Companies? If they were slick they will support the bill, because they’ll see prices shoot up from $3.75 for a pack of sniffle pills to $50 bucks.

Oregon? This was simply a case of our politicians jumping on the bandwagon looking for a quick fix. What they failed to research, or just totally ignored is that Oregon had a multi disciplined approach to the problem.  In addition to the prescription requirement, they went forward with state funding of education programs, rehabilitation efforts, and community and social programs. Washington State accomplished the same results, if not better, but without the prescription requirement.

Each state also went forward with developing a steering commitee of sorts, with reps from stakeholders in the state and stopped throwing grant money at law enforcement, who, to be honest, made no effort at demand reduction and in most cases did not use it to develop solutions, or long term strategies, but defaulted to buying new cars, laptop computers, overtime, training sessions that allowed trips to Disney World, and other toys that really had no effect on the problem.

Also, what they didnt mention about Oregon; it pushed the domestic meth producers underground into the same pill-head prescription system that gives us dirty doctors and a wall of HIPPA regulations and laws that make pharmacuetical diversion cases so difficult to investigate, and have prosecuted, you know the same system that can not prevent pill heads from selling oxycontin on the street for $80 bucks a pill. And, with the reduction of domestic labs, it fostered the Mexican based gangs to gain a strangle-hold in the state, which brought much more meth and violence to their state. 

The police have to be smarter than the meth producers, and begin to use existing technology, or develop more intelligence driven investigations. Currently, they are not using the existing laws that require the reporting of PSE sales, and some of the existing data-bases, such as Meth-Check, that has been up and running in our state for some time now. Ask your local sheriff, or police chief who are backing this bill if his agency is a member of Meth Check (the service is provided free to law enforcement) and use its database to monitor PSE Sales in his jurisdiction. I bet a Who-dat T-Shirt, they dont know what you’re talking about. But these same lacklustre leaders will wring their hands and tell their local elected officials they need more money, they need more laws. Also, these are the same police leaders who look at meth investigations as ‘black-holes’. They get nothing out of them, they dont get to seize cars, property, or other assets, because they’re just not there, or they’re tainted with a haz-mat liabilities. So, there’s nothing in it for them, other than doing the job we expect them to do, and thats not enough sometimes!

I know what I will do, along with thousand of other residents. When I get the sniffles, I am not going to wait two weeks to see my doctor, pay him a $100 bucks, then go pay another $50 for the medicine. I’ll drive over to Mobile, and buy a few packs, but you know what else. While I’m there, I’ll get my groceries for a few weeks, go shopping at those malls too. I’ll be spending money over there with thousands of others from our state.

I’ve been in the trenches, and I’ll tell you that this foolhardy. This effort was based on poor information provided to our state politicians from guys who wear the badge and uniform like a party costume.

Just Me spoke for me.

At every turn we continue to limit liberty of everyone, make changes that affect everyone to correct the few, etc etc.

IMO, it doesn’t matter whether it stops or slows meth production.  When you seek the answer to correct an issue in restrictions on the entire population, you are no longer trying to combat the problem, you are simply giving up and removing a liberty for all for the sake of convenience or expediency.

For instance, we make more and more things illegal in order to supposedly make it harder on those already committing the crimes, but generate criminals out of normally law-abiding persons in the process.

HB 512 passed by house and senate.  Thanks so much to all the legislators and the Governor for making ALL of us pay for a doctor visit to get Sudafed.  Bless your hearts. 

This won’t have any affect on drug people---they are already breaking the law, why do you think they will all of a sudden obey the law now?

Instead, this will be used
1) in the upcoming elections (oh, I voted to get rid of that evil sudafed),

2) in lawsuits (the doctor prescribed Sudafed to a patient but the patient is a bad guy and used it illegally--so sue the doctor for giving the patient the ingredient),

And the people of this state will pay the price for this (Lord knows its always fun to get a fast doctor’s apt now because they just aren’t busy at all...and the cost, its such a small amount. 

And never mind Medicaid, that service has tons of available cash so good job, Gov Barbour, in finding a new way to screw Medicaid up even worse than it is now.  If Barbour signs this into law WITHOUT actually thinking about the effect it will have on Medicaid and the State, then he deserves to be credited with the fall of Medicaid.

Guv twitter “Plan to sign HB 512. I thank the Legislature for swift action on a law that will improve public safety and combat meth labs in the state.”

Wonder if promised $ to campaigns or PACs or organizations got so many politicians on the same page AND totally against the public.  And why the big rush on this bill.

This is going backward at warp speed.  I for one do not agree with this attempt to increase $$$$$ for doctors by making this a required prescription drug.  This is like trying to stop forest fires by banning matches.  Stop Meth with beefed-up law enforcement. Period.

Some are abusing yet another over the counter med and instead of slapping the abusers, we may all end up paying for it-again.  Dextromethorphan is in products such as Robitussin, NyQuil, Dimetapp, Vicks, Coricidin, etc. 

“Later this month the FDA will ask a panel of outside experts whether dextromethorphan should be available only as a prescription.” FDA Looks To Curb Abuse of Cough Medicine, Associated Press

For those who didn’t care about the tobacco tax hike.....for those who didn’t have a problem when regular over the counter meds were pulled and now only available by a scrip/doc visit/higher cost, well, what ya think about the next round of “screw the people”?