On another thread, mention was made of one state's attempt to require ID to purchase cough syrup. This type of legislation is increasingly common as legislatures attempt to curb meth production, and hopefully, by extension, its usage.

The title was chosen because the attempt to curb purchases of cough syrup to prevent meth production is as spurious as the attempt to restrict gun purchases to prevent gun crime. The mentality hinges around punishing the INSTRUMENT, rather than the user of the instrument.

Ironically enough, these laws don't recognize the reason that meth came to be in the first place. Quite simply, meth was manufactured because of the "war on drugs".

You see, when we started bombing cocaine fields in Colombia, we began to restrict the supply of a popular drug in the United States pretty much since its inception. Our actions only served to increase the cost of the end product, and pretty soon crack became the popular street drug for the urbanized poor while wealthy drug users still had unlimited access to the product, albeit at an inflated cost. It's the simple law of supply and demand, echoed so often here in the past six months it hardly bears repeating in this article to make my point.

As the war on drugs escalated and we became better at inderdicting drugs as they came across the border, there was a pressing demand to manufacture a street drug to meet the needs of an increasingly addicted populace. Meth was the perfect answer. It could be manufactured quickly, cheaply, and with legal components, and with large rural areas in the United States, abandoned houses available for manufacture that were beyond the reach of law enforcement access within a reasonable response time made its manufacture the perfect solution. And the distribution network was already in place.

Now, I could extend the argument to press for the decriminalization of all hard drugs. But, as Libertarian as I am, I'm not entirely convinced that all drug usage falls into the "consensual crime" category, and I personally think some of our drug laws are not entirely without basis, they're just poorly thought out (punishment not fitting the crime, that sort of thing). But I digress.

If we restrict access to the items that are illicitly used to manufacture drugs, however, we will quickly find ourselves on a rather slippery slope. A surprisingly large number of common household products can be made into intoxicating agents by an enterprising chemist, and outlawing them all would be next to impossible. A more sensible solution lies in education, rather than legislation, and in dealing with the consequences of usage rather than the agents of manufacture.