I have walked out of pharmacies without buying Sudafed that I would have wanted because the "ask for a pack of Sudafed" step was too uncomfortable. Buying liquor is easier because I don't have to say words to explain what I want.
Edited to add: I'm not particularly up in arms about needing ID, and I feel like buying Sudafed got easier somehow recently, but this seemed like a place where I could help explain what sorts of things can be uncomfortable/difficult for some people.
What is the concern about there being a record of your nasal congestion? There's a much firmer record of every sensitive prescription you've ever been given.
Probably the most rational, objective concern would be mistakenly exceeding a legal limit and being prosecuted. The limit (9g in a month) is high for an individual, but could be a real risk for someone who does most of the shopping for a large family. This kind of thing is not an imagined risk, as it has happened in reality: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/21/meth-laws-oregons-...
Recent backlash against tech companies tracking users suggests that in general, people do not like being tracked. People may even prefer less effective OTC medications to prescriptions on the basis of anonymity. This may or may not be based on a rational concern about a more concrete negative outcome.
I thought it was interesting that people might have been prosecuted for accidentally exceeding the pseudoephedrine purchase limits, so I tracked down the case that the article mentions and pulled it from PACER, both the complaint and the sentencing memorandum.
This may be an "exception that proves the rule", since William Fousse, the guy who got prosecuted, was addicted to pseudoephedrine and was buying large amounts of it, so large that the investigating officers found it implausible that he'd be personally consuming it (it turns out, he was; he was doing a see-saw thing where he'd get drunk and then use the pseudoephedrine to come up from it to get work done). He was buying from multiple pharmacies, apparently to avoid the limit.
This is not a case that makes me alarmed for my own safety when going to buy a 40-pack of sudafed, though I'm receptive to the argument that prosecution for an actual sudafed addiction was not the intent of the law and should not have been prosecuted in the first place.
I don't think anybody should be prosecuted for any self-administration of any substance provided there was no harm or direct, undue risk of harm to others (e.g. DUI). That's a bit of a tangent though.
Instead, let's take a look at scenarios where you might buy over 9000 mg in a month. The maximum recommended dose is 50mg every 8 hours, so 3 times a day. 9000/50/3 = 60 person-days. If it's allergy season and they're all taking the maximum dose, a family of four could hit the limit in 15 days.
Inefficient distribution (making sure there's always some in both of the cars, each kid's backpack, at each adult's work) makes it even easier to hit the limit. The largest size normally available is 96x25 mg. Four of those is 9600 mg. Just trying to get a box for each family member makes you a criminal.
The point I was making was that in the case you cited, the person charged didn't just blow far past the limit (because, again, they were abusing pseudoephedrine as a stimulant), but also took steps to avoid the limit (for instance, by striping their purchases across multiple pharmacies).
Perhaps the limit should be higher? Certainly, I agree in advance that people not making meth and not reselling shouldn't be getting prosecuted. But the story of William Fousse doesn't really have much to tell me about the public policy value of pseudoephedrine restrictions or about the likelihood that an especially allergic family might get caught up in it.
If you find other cases where something like that happened, I'm happy to dig into the filings as best I can.
Later
There are also a couple surveys of the state laws easily Googleable, and most of them have "knowingly" (for evading the limit) or "intent" (to manufacture meth) standards for the offenses themselves.
Here are a couple more. While both of these do involve state laws, one of which looks to have lower limits than the Federal law, the act itself appears to be purchasing pseudoephedrine for on-label use without knowingly skirting legal limits.
Didn't these both happen in the immediate wake of the pseudoephedrine ban, before the states built their automatic registry systems? Don't you get simply get denied your purchase if you try to buy over the limit now?
That does appear to be the case, however attempt to commit a crime is a crime. If prosecutions under that theory are not happening now, they're one "get tough on drugs" prosecutor away from happening.
The professional information on drugs.com does not suggest such a limitation when used under the supervision of a healthcare provider. It's most likely there because some common causes of congestion that don't clear up in a week can be more medically significant than the common cold. OTC pain relievers say not to use for more than 10 days, also because the underlying cause may require treatment.
Regardless, people often do use OTC drugs in ways that might not be advisable, but definitely aren't recreational (leaving aside the issue of whether criminalizing recreational drug use is a good idea).
Can we all just agree that because the ban on bulk sudafed purchases has nothing to do with drug safety, there's no public policy conclusion we can draw one way or the other from sudafed's counterindications? I can see this thread going back and force on blood pressure and stroke stuff and I think we probably all agree that if this was the only issue, pseudoephedrine would be back on the shelves.
If a family could reasonably anticipate being arrested or searched for consuming sudafed regularly for several weeks (bad allergies, sinus cold, whatever), I stipulate that's significant and problematic. What I'm contending is that in 2019, that's so unlikely to happen as to be implausible.
Yes, it's clearly about meth. I just wanted to make clear that the fact that it says not to take it for more than 7 days doesn't mean people won't, and I don't think it's very controversial that people shouldn't be prosecuted for it.
I don't know how likely prosecution is in 2019. There have been a few under much more restrictive state laws making pseudoephedrine prescription-only and criminalizing traveling out of state to obtain it, but that's not the original issue we were discussing.
It's probably pretty unlikely under Federal law, but it took several posts back and forth on HN along with a PACER lookup for us to reach that conclusion explains fairly well why many people are uncomfortable with having their purchases tracked in this manner.
