Lawmakers offer alternative to cold medicine sales crackdown
http://wlfi.com/2015/12/14/lawmakers-offer-alternative-to-cold-medicine-sales-crackdown/
ANOTHER UNFUNDED MANDATE … requiring Pharmacist to DIAGNOSE… which they are neither trained nor licensed to do… BUT then .. legislators seldom seem concerned about what is legal or illegal.. they just propose bills.. create laws… hoping that no one challenges the law in court as to it constitutionality. BESIDES… they claim that 80% of the Meth in this country is imported from south of the border.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Two Indiana lawmakers unveiled a proposal Monday that they think will curb the use of a common cold medicine in the making of methamphetamine while still allowing sick people to buy the drug without a prescription.
Republican Sens. Randy Head and Jim Merritt said pharmacists should have the authority to approve or disapprove sales for medicines containing pseudoephedrine, which is a decongestant used to treat colds and allergies. A rival measure backed by Indiana prosecutors and GOP House Speaker Brian Bosma would require a prescription for such medicines.
The senators say that could get expensive — and time-consuming — because it would require a visit to the doctor just to treat a cold.
Their bill would instead require pharmacists to “make a professional determination” that there is a “legitimate medical and pharmaceutical need” for the cold medicine before allowing the sale, according to the text of the measure.
A similar law in Arkansas has proven effective, they say.
“We know we have a meth problem in Indiana,” said Merritt, R-Indianapolis. “But that doesn’t mean that we should punish everyone who needs to purchase cold medicine for themselves or their family by requiring a prescription. Parents don’t want to, and often cannot, go to the doctor and get a prescription for something like Sudafed every time their child is sick.”
Indiana restricts how much pseudoephedrine-containing medicine one person can buy and tracks sales through a database. But Head, R-Logansport, says the he state still remains a meth-making juggernaut when compared with other states.
“Meth labs are one area that we don’t want to lead in,” said Head. “Something absolutely has to be done about it.”
One of the problems with the state’s current approach is that meth makers can circumvent quantity restrictions by enlisting friends or by paying people to purchase medicine that contains pseudoephedrine.
Pharmacists are “the natural bottleneck for stopping the sale of pseudoephedrine” to meth cooks, Head said. “We can attack the meth lab problem without making you go to your doctor.”
Those who advocate for requiring a doctor’s prescription to buy pseudoephedrine have raised doubts about the effectiveness of proposals like the one the senators proposed — a concern Head acknowledged.
“I wish we had a perfect solution, but we want to stop Sudafed from getting to … meth cooks while allowing legitimate users to have the most freedom possible, and that’s the balance that were trying to strike here,” he said.
Filed under: General Problems
It never ceases to amaze me the amount of unmitigated “mierda del toro” that comes out of the statehouses. The Beltway Bunch is whole ‘nuther discussion. When I practiced pharmacy in a retail setting, I used to do the quasi-diagnosis drill in deciding to sell insulin syringes as an OTC item. In my state, a diabetic can purchase insulin syringes without benefit of a prescription. I’d ask a standard set of questions to see if the person wishing to purchase the syringes knew anything about insulin dosing. A genuine insulin dependent diabetic would know the answers to the questions as they simply related to me the truth of the portion of their regimen that I was inquiring about. There were a few to whom I sold the syringes to that I’m pretty sure were addicts, but they knew the answers, so I sold them. How hard does one suppose it will be for a meth lab agent to give the “correct” answers to the Indiana pharmacist in order to score some Sudafed for the chemist?
As to requiring a prescription, that’s a huge waste of time, money and finite health care resources. If that “Sudafed-by-Rx-Only” measure does pass, I give it two years before it is repealed and the bill sponsors will be gone by the next election. This failed public policy called the War on Drugs has got to come to a screeching halt. The sheer ignorance and obstinance of the State is harming and killing more people and creating more suffering than if all these “controlled substances” were, at the least, decriminalized at the level of the end user. It’s time for a harm reduction model to replace the prohibition model. As I’ve said numerous times in this space, take a look at Portugal. Their 15 year old policy is a move in the right direction.