Prohibition is the Mother of Invention

I learn something new about the drug war every day:

“The Mexicans have moved to an old recipe that existed in the ’70s and ’80s that is called P2P,” said Jane C. Maxwell, a senior research scientist at the Addiction Research Institute at the Center for Social Work Research at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It uses precursors that have been banned in the U.S. since the 1980s, but the Mexicans have taken up making it,” Maxwell said of ingredients — including a substance called propanone — used to make the drug. “They are making it in mass quantities, and they are damn good chemists.”

The old recipe became popular again after Mexico banned the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, the common ingredients that had been used to make the narcotic. But Mexicans have become increasingly adept at using the old recipe for the drug, which Maxwell likened to a weed in a garden that won’t go away.  (emphasis mine)

So Mexico adopted an even more draconian tactic than the U. S. government, by taking common cold and allergy medications completely off the market and inconveniencing Mexican consumers who simply want to clear up a stuffy nose, and it has not done a damn thing to stop the flow of meth.  Making customers provide identification and sign a registry hasn’t worked so well in the U. S., either, which is why some states are now requiring prescriptions for what used to be OTC medications.

The bitter irony here is that drug warriors will point to cases like this as proof that the government must never lessen its vigilance in combating illicit drugs.  But it is precisely this high adaptability of black markets to prohibition that makes it a futile exercise.  Meanwhile, cold and allergy sufferers are being treated like criminals, and declining domestic meth production is taking a more dangerous turn.