Cutting down on the supply. Not.

XKCD today:

There’s another story today about seizing large quantities of methamphetamine, this time hidden in a coffee table.  The border people also catch at lot of imports of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine. From January 1 to October 31, the authorities seized 293kg of meth and the equivalent of 3 million tablets of pseudoephedrine. And, of course, these are  not available legally in New Zealand. We have phenylephrine instead, which is on the Nice List because it can’t be turned into methamphetamine

Recently, a study in the US compared phenylephrine to placebo for hay fever. That’s not quite the same as looking at effectiveness for colds, but it’s still notable that there was no detectable difference. There were also no detectable side effects, which the researchers attribute to the drug all being zapped by the liver before it gets into general circulation.

At least the ban on pseudoephedrine is making us safe, though? Well, the government is tracking the effectiveness of its strategies. Here’s the summary from the October 2015 report, which is robustly disappointing.

There has been a decrease in use of methamphetamine, but it doesn’t look like the war on cold medicine can explain it.

Update: Before anyone else posts it, the famous joke synthesis

Because the hours of availability of such pharmacies are often limited, it would be of great interest to have a simple synthesis of pseudoephedrine from reagents which can be more readily procured.

A quick search of several neighborhoods of the United States revealed that while pseudoephedrine is difficult to obtain, N-methylamphetamine can be procured at almost any time on short notice and in quantities sufficient for synthesis of useful amounts of the desired material.