I am very annoyed and very sick. I am a responsible person being punished. I am happy to give id and others measures but this is crazy.

Pissed off , Tim

As for alcohol, clamping down on it will only drive people to make their own. Sometimes people have to sort themselves out rather than have heavy handed laws.

It’s not the booze, it’s the drinkers!

I might add that alcohol can have medicinal effects as well.

The most common street term for P is crack, which confuses a lot of youth to smoke/snort/take meth without even knowing, as in America crack is speed, cocaine or crystal cocaine.

Most of the similar looking powder form drugs are meth nowadays.
The War On P movement should be ‘cracking’ (he he) down on keeping the ingredients unavailable to those who manufacture meth as it has now contaminated drugs with less stigma and less media attention such as pills which usually contain MDMA, and kids are much more likely to try these in their school years unaware of the P content.

Slightly off topic but still on the subject, that whole ‘laced’ marijuana rumor is a load of shit as well, crystal meth can be sprayed, sprinkled, whatever, onto marijuana but they second the little stoners light their doobie the meth is burned directly, evaporated and would be near impossible to inhale, it would just exit with the smoke out the end like a cigarette and all residue flushed away to the ash tray.
Anyway, P users don’t waste their time trying to hook dope heads, math is much more expensive then the price of marijuana! P users wouldn’t hesitate to fish through their carpet picking up what they think are p crystals and smoking them let alone sprinkling them on a tinny to sell to some kid.

Cut off the ingredients, cut off the problem.
Go buy some other cough medicine
HARDEN Warning obscene. Holiday next time Trevor UP.
Pseudo ephedrine is playing a role in keeping P on the streets, so get rid of it.

I don’t believe removing the sale of pseudoephedrine from the market will have any real effect at all on the sale and distribution of P and I, as a person who finds the alternatives to pseudoephedrine far less effective, am quite angry at this proposed ban.

Back in the early 90’s, you could get a decent kick off a line or two of speed up the nostrils. Throughout the decade, it was increasingly cut with glucose powder and what not. Quality control pretty much went out the window.

In order to circumvent this little rort, a new more powerful standard was introduced; methamphetamine. Harder to cut and pass off. We swapped quality control for upping the dosage and it’s all gone wrong since then.

Their are very legitimate uses for Speed. Cramming for medical exams, relieving sinus congestion, performing double shifts in the factories, partaking in electoral campaigns, truck driving, and of course for the fun of it.

And look at the cost structure of “P”. Codral, for example, costs three quarters of bugger to make at the pharm level. It retails for about $12 at the chemists. Pharm shoppers are a rarity now as so much pours in from China (where we don’t have extradition treaties in place so that’ll never end). But what used to happen is that pack of Codral would be bought for $100 for the cook, who would make about one gram, which sold for $100 a point.

If you can’t think up a regulatory framework that can make a dollar off legalisation, or at least pay for the alleged harms, you need a new abacus.

The point I always reach when thinking about this issue is that, in many cases, USE of drugs and substances should be upto the individual and generally can be safe for themselves and others. Generally most trouble and harm is caused by the ABUSE of drugs and substances (especially true for alcohol).

As you say, I don’t think a knee jerk ban does much help without a wider discussion and consistent strategy. A strategy needs several other aspects such as education, as well as control of drugs where risk of abuse is too high.

Not what I’m saying. My point is that we need a coherent strategy for dealing with drug (including alcohol) issues and that what Key has said so far is far from it.

I’m also saying that the political response is skewed towards tackling a substance that, destructive as it is, causes a relatively small proportion of the overall damage caused by substance abuse.

I do want intelligent debate around this issue, which has been missing in the media hype which Key is feeding off and it is important to point that out.