Reply #7: It's weird, here in Ohio.

[Philostopher]

We went up to Cleveland over the summer for a weekend, and the drugstores up there only sold Sudafed 24-count boxes, kept them locked up in the pharmacy area after the pharmacy closed (we were in a 24-hour store, maybe a Cub Foods), and there was a sign that said something about restricted sales. Other places, you can still buy the 96-count bottle right off the shelf, and there's no restriction at Walgreen's at all in my neighborhood.

Sudafed is used to make crystal meth, and there are teenagers who abuse dextromethorphan, the most-used cough suppressant -- Robitussin makes one that's all DXM, and most drug store chains make a generic version. Because it's mostly high school kids, and most of them don't have a working knowledge of cold meds, they'll abuse stuff that's not just DXM, but also has other meds in it -- like the active ingredient from Sudafed, which can give you a heart attack if you OD on it. I'm fairly sure that's another thing they restrict in some places.

I'm not sure what it says about us, as a society, that common cold medicines are so abusable. I'm pretty sure Big Pharma didn't know dextromethorphan was a hallucinogen at higher doses. I'd imagine if they really cared about 'us' out here, they'd find another active ingredient or find a way to denature DXM so it didn't produce this effect (anybody remember when they started putting mustard seeds in airplane glue, back in the early '80s, because kids were getting brain dammage from sniffing glue?).

It's easier to put the responsibility on the drug outlets for that stuff, though, and cheaper for Big Pharma, so instead of 'fixing' the problems at the source, which I imagine would be possible (though I am not a chemist, maybe it isn't), instead we end up having to drive all over town to get enough cold medicine for more than two people.