How Government Makes Things Worse: OTC Decongestants

 As John Sexton notes in an article at Hot Air, there was a time, not so long ago, when if you had a runny nose you could buy an effective over-the-counter (OTC) medicine called pseudoephedrine to treat it. But it turned out that pseudoephedrine could be processed and used to make methamphetamine ("meth") in small, homegrown labs. So, in their infinite stupidity and usual disregard for the law abiding public (the "f--- the people" attitude so common among the elites and their minions), Congress passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 (part of the misnamed Patriot Act, of course), which meant that medicines with pseudoephedrine had to be locked up behind a pharmacist counter, with limits on how much you could buy, and requiring you to show identification to purchase it (so "Big Brother" could see who was buying it). And if you needed it at 9 pm after the pharmacy had closed or didn't have time to wait in a long line behind a bunch of people trying to fill their prescriptions, well screw you!

    Of course, the restrictions on selling pseudoephedrine (and a bunch of other stuff like the red phosphorus needed to make decent matches) didn't work. Production just shifted to Mexico where the cartels could make it in an industrial scale using precursor chemicals imported from China. But once passed, laws almost never get revoked, and so we are still stuck with restrictions on buying pseudoephedrine (and with crappy matches).

    Because of the restrictions on pseudoephedrine, the drug manufacturers starting substituting a drug called phenylephrine into many of their OTC cold medicines. But now an FDA advisory panel has told us that phenylephrine doesn't actually work (at least when consumed orally). All that money you have probably spent on cold remedies incorporating phenylephrine have probably been wasted. As Sexton puts it:

So it has been pretty clear for 15 or more years that this ingredient does not work but they just keep selling it to us. If you’ve ever gotten a bad cold that made it hard to breath through your nose and your OTC medicine didn’t seem to help, now you know why. Despite this, the Consumer Healthcare Products Association which represents the drug makers has argued that removing this ineffective ingredient would somehow place a burden on consumers and the health care system.

That burden would, I suppose, be consumers keeping more of their own money instead of buying the drug companies' useless product.