Achoo

It saddens me to learn I may soon have to register with a pharmacist if I want to buy Sudafed, my favorite decongestant. I suffer hay fever but have a medical condition that prevents me from taking antihistamine drugs like Drixoral, so I'm a Sudafed guy, in a big way. Well, not a really big way. I buy perhaps two dozen Sudafeds every six months, not quite enough to flag me as a meth cooker.

Sudafed, you see, contains the active ingredient pseudoephedrine, which is used to make methamphetamine. So if you see someone leaving Walgreens with armloads of Sudafed, it's probably not because they have a case of the sniffles.

Meth is a nasty, nasty drug, and I've met many people whose lives it destroyed. I'm a big fan of people not using meth. But I'm not convinced that clamping down on Sudafed is going to make much of a dent, and meanwhile I shudder at the thought of having to give my name and address when I go to buy my little red pills. I generally refuse even to surrender my zip code in retail situations, much less my address.

But if it helps keep even one person off meth, I guess I can live with that.

I can say this: I'm glad meth wasn't big when I was in high school. Could've been ugly.