THREE CHEERS FOR THE TWEEKERS!!!!!

(The photo is one I took of our local paper back in Dec 2005...looks like a slow news week in Yavapai County!!!) :(

Yes I mean the title of my entry for today in a VERY sarcastic way >:-S.

As I posted yesterday, Bayleigh is sick. She’s stuffy, has a serious cough and doesn’t feel like doing much of anything. We ran out of cold remedies this morning and I put “kid’s cold medicine” on my shopping list for today.

Can you believe that I had to go to THREE different stores before I could find a pharmacy that had what I wanted!? And all because NOW anything with pseudoephedrine in it is kept behind the pharmacy counter! I feel like a common CRIMINAL because I want to relieve my children’s cold symptoms! I am also treated like one: I had to fill out a form (that they 3-hold punched and placed in a 3-ring binder) with my name, address, phone number, DOB, DL# and signature on it! I mean COME ON!?!?! >:-/

No Sudafed, no Dimetapp, no Triaminic – it’s all “controlled” now. You can buy one product per day at one store. DEA has agents who are checking these “books” that the pharmacies keep now looking for fraudulent entries, multiple entries, etc.. And if you need some AFTER pharmacy hours – oh, forget about it; NO STORE will sell you any. You MUST purchase it while there is a licensed pharmacist on duty between the hours of 8a and 8p (the hours of my local pharmacy). But most pharmacies carry limited quantities of this stuff nowadays because people are buying the stuff that doesn’t work as well that’s still out on the shelf.

I can recall in the last 2 years seeing the LARGER boxes of product behind the counter. That makes sense. It takes a LOT of pseudoephedrine to make a batch of meth. So keeping the 48+ count boxes out of reach of the neighborhood crack-head made sense. I guess I just never realized how much the change back on Jan. 1st was going to affect me. All 4 of us have seasonal allergies and 2 of us have BAD congestion with those allergies.

But this is a 4 oz bottle of cough & cold medicine I am talking about today. It’s not even WORTH THE EFFORT to even TRY to extract the pseuodephedrine out of it! Give me a break! A child’s dose is half of an adult’s dose anyhow….not a very cost effective way to go about making your crank. (If I seem to know a lot about this, it’s because my father is a retired undercover narcotics officer.)

It just pisses me off that a few IDIOTS who thrive on this poison have ruined a perfectly good thing for millions of HONEST non-drug addicted Americans. But for every thing they try to do to keep the ingredients out of the hands of “cookers”, the crooks will build a better mousetrap to get what they need. It’s just ludicrous. It really dampens my spirits to know that our world is truly going to Hell in a hand basket and that there’s little to nothing I can do about it….except raise my own children to be decent human beings.

Maybe things will change in their lifetime? I doubt it, but I never lose hope.