Look over there! The media's war on drugs

One day we read about some idiot junkie-slash-'pseudo- runner' being thwarted from buying hayfever tablets at a hundred pharmacies by the fantastic electronic mapping system of 'Project STOP'. Let's be generous and say these are the strongest hayfever tablets available and contain 120mg of pseudoephedrine per tablet. Six tablets per packet (at $12 or so) equals 720mg of pseudoephedrine per packet. Allegedly these packets of hayfever tablets- Clarinase, Telfast decongestant, or whatever, fetch $100 on the black market.

The next day we read about former NSW top cop Mark Standen allegedly conspiring to import 600kg of pseudoephedrine. They never caught the shipment- it didn't show up in the container it was expected to show up in (and we're expected to believe it vanished into thin air, rather than that drug criminals were able to thwart authorities' efforts to prevent its entry into Australia... *cough*).

600kg of pure pseudoephedrine would equate to more than eight hundred and thirty three thousand packets of hayfever tablets.

And yet, every time I visit the chemist I'm treated like I'm the problem.

I get through one packet of hayfever tabs a week, on average. It would take me sixteen thousand years to amass the quantity of pseudoephedrine that Mark Standen is accused of conspiring to import. But I'm the one who gets asked "Do you know you bought a packet of Clarinase only one week ago?" (it's 12 hour Clarinase, six tablets will only last 3 days if my hayfever is bad!).

Are we supposed to believe that Mark Standen is the only man in Australia who has ever tried to import pseudoephedrine? What about all the guys who succeed and don't get busted? And yet the situation is continually painted as if it's sales of pseudoephedrine-containing medications for cold-and-flu and hayfever sufferers that need to be tackled. Not the illegal importation of tonnes of the pure drug every year.

"To date, we've stopped 26,000 packets of pseudoephedrine products leaving the store," said the scheme's co-creator, PGA Queensland manager of Innovation and Development, Shaun Singleton.

Yeah, and 20 000 of them are probably because of people like me who'd rather suffer through a bad episode of hayfever than go to the chemist only five or six days after their last purchase of the damn tablets and suffer the accusatory tone and compulsory cavity search that accompanies any purchase of the only drugs that work to dry up a streaming, runny nose that accompanies the incessant sneezing.

Taxpayers' money, via the Federal government is being poured into Project STOP when the project is essentially just a big fat publicity measure to allow them to pretend that they have scored a success in the 'war on drugs'. What a crock of shit, Shaun Singleton.