“The leading decongestant used by millions of Americans looking for relief from a stuffy nose is no better than a dummy pill,” the Associated Press reports, citing the unanimous vote of a US Food and Drug Administration advisory panel.

Phenylephrine, the best-selling over the counter “decongestant” in the US, just doesn’t work, at least in orally ingested form and for that purpose (it has other  uses — if you’ve got hemorrhoids or a priapism, you might want to talk to your doctor about it). For nearly two decades, you’ve probably been taking what amounts to a placebo for one of the most common cold and flu symptoms.

Why? Because of the war on drugs.

Pseudoephedrine is a fantastic decongestant. It’s cheap — or at least it WAS cheap — and it clears those clogged sinuses right up. But starting in 2006, it disappeared from OTC cold/flu medications and got moved behind pharmacy counters. You could no longer buy it without showing ID, you could only buy limited amounts, and if you bought “too much” (by visiting different pharmacies) or “too often,” the police might just pay you a visit.

Pseudoephedrine was, at one time, commonly used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. By making it difficult to get pseudoephedrine,  drug warrior logic ran, the difficulty of cooking meth — and the price of the final product — could be driven up and its availability severely curtailed.

That worked exactly as well as one might expect.

Meth cooks just hired people (referred to, at least in the hit television show “Breaking Bad,” as “smurfs”) to drive around to pharmacies buying pseudoephedrine.

One morning on trash day, I walked out of my home in St. Louis and saw little white pseudoephedrine boxes — hundreds or thousands of them — scattered across yards as far as the eye could see. For some reason, instead of just shredding the boxes, the meth makers had decided to fill people’s dumpster carts with them in the windy pre-dawn hours (I get the impression meth makers may not possess fantastic judgment skills).

Suppressing pseudoephedrine did eventually start “working” in the sense that the market cap of Kimberly-Clark (maker of Kleenex brand facial tissues) has more than doubled from then to now.

As for methamphetamine, its use has also more than doubled, as have methamphetamine overdose fatalities, since the pseudoephedrine pseudo-ban. Production largely moved from rural mobile home labs to industrial cartel facilities in Mexico.

Now the drug warriors want to escalate to literal war with the Mexican cartels. What could possibly go wrong?

I’d like to tell you this whole saga is nothing to sneeze at, but it’s had you needlessly sneezing for 17 years now,  just another example of how dumb the war on drugs really is.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Speaker Kevin McCarthy returns to Washington this week,” CNN reports, “confronting a twin set of challenges: avoiding a costly government shutdown and addressing growing calls on the right to impeach President Joe Biden, despite resistance from the party’s moderates.”

Fans of DC theater may get a fall double feature!

“Shutdown” situations have become so popular and perennial that you might think they’ve been on the marquee pretty much continuously since the days of Washington and Jefferson.

In reality, all ten of the US government’s actual “shutdowns” (federal “funding gaps” that resulted in furloughs of government employees) have occurred since 1980. Even the 14 “funding gaps” that HAVEN’T closed the Smithsonian’s gift shops for a few days didn’t start happening until 1976. But the whole thing has certainly become the standard — the last time Congress passed a budget on time was 1996.

Congress got a much earlier start on impeachment theatrics when it attempted to bring down Andrew Johnson in 1868, but they’ve only done it three times since — all three in the last 25 years and two of them in the last four. If those are enough data points from which to discern a trend,  we may see at least one impeachment in every presidential term from here on out. And every one will be about as serious as … well, as the budget process.

When it comes to theater, modern Washington rarely does tragedy (1963 and 2001 are notable exceptions). Our politicians try to stick to comedy, and specialize in farce.

The important thing to remember about political theater is that it’s exactly that: Theater.

With control of government always split between the two “major parties” — arguably just factions of a single state party, in complete agreement on the only things that matter, which are preserving their monopoly and getting their rake-off from your paycheck — real issues of importance are almost never even addressed, let alone resolved by principled debate on cogent arguments.

American government these days is more like professional wrestling, with multiple teams — all beholden to the same league — switching off soap opera style between “face” and “heel” roles, then pretending to put each other into painful holds and through devastating body slams until the countdown to a predetermined (and hopefully surprising) outcome finishes. Which is what makes professional wrestling theater rather than sport.

I, for one, approve of the move toward this double feature paradigm. It’s the least we deserve given the insane ticket price.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Most Americans likely harbor little sympathy for Nathan Hughes.  He was arrested in Arkansas on August 30 on felony and misdemeanor charges relating to the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol.

Whether Hughes is guilty or not I can’t say, but it’s clear that he made a big mistake when it came to securing his firearms. That mistake was trusting the company which built his gun safe — Liberty Safe — to keep his access codes private. Liberty Safe turned over a code allowing law enforcement to unlock the safe and take the weapons.

There’s some disagreement over whether the code was specific to Hughes or whether there’s a “master code” that unlocks all Liberty Safe products. If we’re to believe Liberty Safe, it’s the former, and they’re acting to let customers “expunge” their codes from the company’s servers.

There are also, of course, calls to boycott Liberty Safe for complying with the FBI’s warrant instead of fighting it, but let’s be honest: It’s hard to fight the feds and hard to blame a company for complying rather than going to war.

The solution to this problem isn’t boycotting Liberty Safe specifically. It’s to avoid putting yourself in any situation where someone else has a “back door” into your stuff.

There’s a saying in the cryptocurrency community: “Not your keys, not your crypto.” It refers to the difference between “custodial” wallets run by centralized exchanges and “non-custodial” wallets to which the wallet owner, and ONLY the wallet owner, has the private keys. Cryptocurrency kept in those “custodial” wallets can be seized any time the government goes to the exchange with a court order. But unless the owner gives up his private key, crypto in a “non-custodial” wallet is secure.

With the advent of the “Internet of Things,” there’s a temptation to let second or third parties control access to one’s things. If you forget a password or whatever, they can help you get back in. The problem with that is they can also help someone else get in, unintentionally (a hacker, for example) or intentionally (usually a government).

Governments hate your privacy. They want to be able to know what you’re doing, or take your stuff, at will and without inconvenient safeguards.

That’s why we see so many government efforts to mandate “back doors” in encryption or even outlaw some forms (non-custodial crypto wallets, end-to-end encrypted email and text messaging, etc.) altogether. And don’t even get me started on “Know Your Customer” laws and the requirement that banks report “suspicious” transactions rather than awaiting a demand accompanied by a warrant before they hand over their customers’ data and cash.

It’s not criminal to value one’s privacy and want to keep one’s belongings secure from theft by criminals or governments (but I repeat myself).

Take a look around your house, with special attention to your computer and phone. Is your crypto secure? How about your email? Find ways to stop trusting your money and information to other parties’ honesty, competence, courage, and good will.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY