Putting the pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters knocked out almost all the little kitchen meth labs. Almost all the meth available on the market today comes from “superlabs” that produce huge batches using pseudoephedrine bought in bulk from illicit sources. Even before the new laws putting pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters the DEA was estimating that only about 15% of the meth available on the market was coming from little tiny tweaker labs. The little labs were causing us a lot of problems though, but putting the pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters made it such that if some holdouts are still cooking dope, they aren’t cooking anything but tiny batches and they aren’t able to keep cooking off batch after batch like they used to be able to do.
This new law is unnecessary. They’ve hit the point of diminishing returns already. The new law will only cost money and end up causing more problems than it solves. If they want to really do something, they need to start figuring out ways to control the flow of pseudoephedrine from the nine or ten factories around the world that produce all of it. Track shipments from these factories and try to keep organized crime from getting their hands on tons of pseudoephedrine at a time. That would really hurt the organizations that supply almost all the meth in this country and around the world.
This whole thing with elected officials passing "gesture laws" reminds me of a line from the Mel Brooks classic,
Blazing Saddles, when the idiot governor (played by Brooks) says:
"We have to protect our phoney-baloney jobs! Harrumph! Harrumph!"