You can buy Sudafed over the counter in UK pharmacies. Meth hasn’t really been a big issue here yet.
You can buy it over the counter in the U.S., too, in the sense that you don’t need a doctor’s prescription. However, for the last three or four years, it’s no longer kept on the shelves with the bandages and aspirin and antacids. Rather, it’s kept behind the counter, and you have to sign a log book kept by the pharmacists (chemists) before they’ll sell it to you. Are there no such restrictions in the UK?
One of the things that annoys me the most about the restrictions (at least as they’re interpreted and enforced by the pharmacies around here – not sure if this is actually the rule) is that they limit you to one box, regardless of how many pills are in it. For example, if a store carries the generic in 10 count boxes and the brand name in 20 count boxes, the only way to get 20 pills is to buy the brand name package. You can’t buy two boxes of the generic, even though the combination contains exactly the same number of pills and the same amount of pseudoephedrine as the single box of brand name that you are allowed to buy. Or, if the store normally carries both 10 count and 20 count boxes, but is out of the 20, you can’t buy two of the 10s. It doesn’t make any sense at all.
sharding, Here in Georgia, the rule is 3600mg Psuedoephredrine, and a max of 3 packages per a day. (9000mg per 30 days). I’m pretty sure the milligram limit is national, but I have no idea if the package limit is state or federal.
Of course, the laws in your state could be different, and stricter.
Ah right, I see what you mean. You don’t have to provide identification, or sign anything. There is a limit of 720mg active ingredient per pack, with one pack per purchase, and the recommendation is that the sale is supervised by the actual onsite pharmacist. The products are not on open shelves.
The 720mg limit was introduced in 2007, up to that point there had been one incident of criminal misuse. In July 2009, the recommendation was that no additional restrictions were required after a year without further incident.
I got this from
http://www.pseudoephedrine.co.uk/background.php
and
www.pagb.co.uk/pressarea/releases/Pseudoephedrine29.07.09.pdf
So I guess the light restriction regime seems to be working in terms of preventing homemade meth production. The PDF states that the measures only reduced sales of pseudoephedrine based medicines by 25% (that might well be the reduction in pack size!), so I wonder if the UK market is maybe still unrestricted enough to use as a basis for comparison.
My sister ran into a major hassle with a law like this, in Maryland. Don’t know what the “dosage” limit was, but here’s what happened: my sister and her partner both have bad allergies; my sister was in Wal Mart. There was a sale on NyQuil: they were ‘bargain’ packaged together, two bottles to a package. Then, they were also on sale, buy one, get one free. So she tried to buy two 2-bottle packages, and was told at the checkout that there was a limit of three bottles of NyQuil per purchase. :smack:
Nevermind… I didn’t read the most recent replies