Math Cooking

Here's a cute little word game where you start with a word and change one letter at a time to come up with different words. It has whiled away some hours spent on planes or during road trips.

It goes without saying that there is but one step to go from the good word "math" to get to the evil word "meth." Regarding meth, the steps that the federal government has taken to control methanphetamine production is pissing me off for numerous reasons beginning with "limiting my ability to obtain pseudoephedrine."

I'll be showing you some math in a bit.

First, let me point out that I am not a meth cook nor do I play one on the Web. I am, however, a person who suffers from constant, relatively low-grade allergies. If untreated, as the day progresses the sinuses in my head swell to the point where I suffer from a headache that makes a migraine feel like tickling. One 12-hour Sudafed© taken in the morning keeps me from suffering. It's relatively cheap, does not require me (or my insurance provider) to pay through the nose for prescription drugs or doctor visits, and it's very, very effective. Pseudoephedrine works. For me, at least, phenylephrine, the "decongestant" agent used in Sudafed PE©, does not do a damned thing. It may not be only me, in fact.

Phenylephrine has recently been marketed as a substitute for pseudoephedrine, (e.g. Pfizer's Sudafed (Original Formulation)) but there are recent claims that oral phenylephrine may be no more effective as a decongestant than placebo.

On a regular basis, then, I get to stand in pharmacy lines, hand over my driver's license, get entered into tracking logs, and get my dole of this brain-saving medicine. I am not going to go into the usual rant-like issues with the laws requiring control of products containing pseudoephedrine -- including the contra-American presumption that I am a drug dealer. Those topics have been blogged and articled to death.

Instead, I'd like to explore the actual limits they've imposed on the quantities of this product -- because at one store, one day, I was prevented from getting some after I'd run out, simply because I had already picked up more than my permitted quantity after I had done favor for a family member.

Let's start with the limitation part of the law:

• Daily sales of regulated products not to exceed 3.6 grams without regard to the number of transactions


• 30 day (not monthly) sales limit not to exceed 7.5 grams if sold by mail-order or "mobile retail vendor"


• 30 day PURCHASE limit not to exceed 9 grams of pseudoephedrine base in regulated products (misdemeanor possession offense under 21 USC 844a for the individual who buys it)

'k, now let's do the math: How much Sudafed© does it take to make meth?

The pills usually found at meth lab sites are the 60 mg or 30 mg dosages. It takes 472 pills containing 60 mg of pseudoephedrine to make one ounce of methamphetamine. The typical lab discovered by law enforcement in Arizona produces less than one ounce. Meth is typically sold in ¼ gram increments (for anywhere from 15 to 20 dollars per ¼ gram). There would be a little more than 28 grams in one ounce produced by a meth lab. If sold in ¼ gram increments that would yield $2,240.

My beloved 12HR Sudafed© contains120mg of pseudoephedrine. Thus, to make a typical production run in a hypothetical lab, I would need 214 of the white tablets to make the seven packets I would then presumably sell.

By law, I am permitted to buy one 20-count package of the 12HR formulation per day, up to three per 30-day period.

One package contains roughly 8% of the amount I'd need to make a single supply of meth. The 30-day limit gives me 60 tabs, which, at 2 per day for a month, is twice what I as an individual use. Those 60 tabs are about a quarter of what a meth cook would need for his two thousand dollar income.

I am not, however, merely an individual. I am a member -- the shopping member -- of a family. The family has allergy issues. We also get colds. It'd be easy to blow through those three packages -- the purchase of each of which requires three separate trips on three separate days -- well within the month and be left needing.

Doing the math, then, in order to both stay legal and supply the family's needs I and another legal adult member of my family need to shop on three different days within a month to get a family's month's supply of a medicine we rely on to prevent the killing rampages we might otherwise go on.

Meth cooks, meanwhile, just smurf around from store to store with their fake IDs and gobble up whatever they need. The number of US meth labs has reportedly dropped since Bush signed the law, but meth use is increasing, and production in Mexico has surged. The really fun part is that apparently the Mexican meth cooks are getting most of their pseudoephedrine supplies by smurfing in the US!

I have seen no data that this drastic limit in the amount a person may legally purchase is significant in the reduction of US meth drug lab seizures. Eight and twenty-five percent. The law could be rewritten to double those limits, which would alleviate my potential suffering and probably not harm the efforts at reducing meth trafficking. For that matter, so long as there is demand, and so long as the price is affordable, there will always be a supply.

Gotta love it when the law does so much to cause law-abiding folks pain and so very little to, well, actually provide law and order.

My head really hurts now.