WE DON'T NEED A FIX HERE

Colorado's attorney general, John Suthers, has said he wants to hear
from the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession before he
talks to our General Assembly about making pseudoephedrine available
only by prescription.

He hasn't asked for input from the general public whom he is supposed
to serve, but I'll provide some anyway: Don't.

Pseudoephedrine is the active ingredient in Sudafed. It's also a prime
ingredient for cooking up illegal meth.

My acquaintance with Sudafed began about 35 years ago when I woke up
one morning with my head congested and a feeling that it would explode
from the internal pressure. I went to the doctor, who poked under my
eyes and made me flinch.

"You've got sinusitis," he said.

"Thinuthitith?" I asked.

"That's right. If you can pronounce it, you don't have
it."

He went on to explain that in days of yore, one might have needed
surgery to relieve the pressure, but we now had a great medication,
Sudafed. He wrote me a prescription, and soon I was functioning. It is
a decongestant that actually works.

Sometime after that, Sudafed changed from prescription to "over the
counter." More recently, you have to present some identification and
sign for it, on account of its use in meth production.

Maybe meth is as bad as they say it is. It's certainly easy to find
lurid headlines. However, there are always lurid headlines, going back
to "Demon Rum," "Opium Fiends" and "Marihuana, the Devil's Weed with
Roots in Hell."

When I was in high school, there were the college students who'd taken
LSD and stared at the sun and went blind. Then we were supposed to
worry about thousands of returning Vietnam veterans who were hooked on
heroin. And by now, we should have a substantial population of zombies
who were crack babies 25 years ago.

Somehow, the Republic survived all those horrors, and I suspect it
will survive the latest alarms about "bath salts" and "energy drinks."

Sure, Sudafed can be misused. So can gasoline, matches, axes, baseball
bats, computers and myriad other substances and items that Suthers has
not proposed further regulating.

From what I've read, only 20 percent of meth comes from do-it-yourself
cookers. They produce toxic fumes and waste, but those hazards are a
byproduct of our moronic laws. If people could just go to the
drugstore and buy commercial methamphetamine (a drug so dangerous and
toxic that it is used to treat children with attention-deficit
disorder), we wouldn't have nearly as many of these home-cooker problems.

Not for years have I felt so congested as to want Sudafed, but Martha
needs it from time to time. When we're at a Big Box, she sends me to
get it at the pharmacy department, so that I'm not following her
around pestering her with "Aren't we done yet? Can we leave now?"

So I pull out my driver's license and sign the paperwork and joke with
the pharmacist about also wanting iodine, acetone and red phosphorus.

But make Sudafed a prescription drug, and Martha will need a $50
doctor's appointment the next time her allergies act up, which they
will whenever spring arrives. Multiply that by thousands of
Coloradans, and those are some big costs.

Maybe there's a way to phrase the prescription proposal as a tax
increase, since it would be a state law that takes money from our
pockets. And then it would fall under TABOR, requiring a public vote,
and Colorado Republicans would feel duty bound to oppose it. Anyway,
Suthers and our legislature should just leave this one alone.