"Doug Miller" wrote in message
...


It's not just a convenience issue. OTC, store brand equivalents of Sudafed
are
about five bucks for a box of two dozen doses. Adding a visit to a
physician
to get a prescription raises the cost by a factor of eight.

I assume you see your doctor once a year even if you're in good health, so
it's not like you'd need to make a special trip. And once you have a
prescription a phone call is usually all that is needed to renew it.
Happily my prescriptions are all available as generics now, nice and cheap.
One doctor tried to move me to a new brand-name drug awhile back, several
hundred bucks a month as opposed to a fifteen dollar co-pay: I told him to
try again.

More than that, though, is the utter impossibility of ever stopping the
drug
problem by attacking the supply side.

It worked with Quaaludes, the limited number of mfg. meant it was possible
to choke it off. It hasn't totally disappeared but you rarely even hear of
it these days.

As long as demand exists, someone will
produce a supply to satisfy that demand.

Sure, the profit motive is a powerful force. But in the case of in effect
synthetic drugs which require certain raw ingredients it's possible to
restrict the supply of those ingredients and thus sharply reduce the
quantity and strength of what appears on the street. This has already
happened with meth, the strength of what is sold on the street has gone down
as restrictions of products containing the raw ingredients have taken hold.
I agree we're never going to stamp it out, but judging by what happened with
Quaaludes we can sure knock it down in a way we will never be able to do
with any drug derived from a plant.

The only apparent way to
reduce the demand is by treating it as a public health problem: education
regarding the dangers, and working to reduce the social conditions that
make
drug use seem a desirable way of dealing with life's misfortunes.

Very true, treating drug use as a criminal matter hasn't worked. All we've
accomplished is the enrichment of a huge criminal underworld, and look at
what that's doing to Mexico these days.