Mississippi and Oregon are the two states where pseudoephedrine (most commonly known by the brand name Sudafed) can only be sold with a doctor’s prescription.
Again these laws were passed supposedly to “curb the meth epidemic” because of course our government has this idea that spending all this money on a drug war, which incidentally doesn’t stop people from doing drugs and because of the allure and excitement to it makes kids more likely to use, is somehow going to stop people from using drugs.
I don’t care what drugs people can do. If they can contribute to society, etc etc it’s not my business to regulate what they do in their off the clock time. That’s really not what this country is supposed to be about.
The interesting thing about this is that Oregon has legalized recreational cannabis so Oregon is a state where you don’t need a doctor’s prescription to have marijuana on your person but you do need it to have a package of Sudafed on your person, and of course one of the things that requiring it to be sold by prescription does is increase the price of it making it harder on the poor and elderly on fixed incomes.
But the fact that Oregon voters approved by 12 points a measure to legalize recreational marijuana in 2014, after previous attempts failed (including one in 2012 that failed conversely by roughly the same margin and in a presidential election year) tells me that there is a Colorado effect in the West certainly as it relates to marijuana, if you can get 56% of Oregon voters in a mid-cycle election, where the electorate is usually older, to vote for this then there is no question in any cycle if we put the question “Should it be legal to purchase pseudoephedrine products behind the counter as long as you sign without a doctor’s prescription” that ballot question will be carried by “Yes” by a large margin probably up to 70% or higher no matter the whining from “law enforcement” groups.
But I’m not focusing on Oregon (though yes gladly I will participate in a Sudafed initiative in Oregon if need be) but rather on Mississippi, red red Mississippi but which has a black population now 40% and that proportion is growing, especially in most of the state that isn’t metro New Orleans or metro Memphis.
The reason why I think Mississippi could be fertile territory for an opiate legalization initiative is this large black population because when you redact it down to “cops won’t be able to arrest you for lean” and then tie it into the general issues of police brutality, it’s actually one of the most favorable electorates for such a thing in the country, probably as if not more favorable than California and if felons were re-enfranchised in Mississippi there’s no question yes could carry the day, one of the things that I accept as implicit in re-enfranchising felons is that most of them are going to end up repealing a lot of these “lifestyle crime” laws and will break very heavily for legalization and against drug war continuance policies.
That large black population is why I believe if Mississippi got a cannabis initiative on the ballot it will pass, because well, you are assuming that most blacks under 50 will vote for it, most whites under 35 certainly, and right now I’d say it would have good odds of carrying certainly Harrison County, would run close in Hancock and Harrison and Hancock of course would be a real good barometer for the sentiment in generally white metro New Orleans as a whole.
But back to Sudafed, Mississippi is a state where at least at the beginning of this decade is one of the handful to allow small amounts of codeine and other opiates to be purchased in solution form over the counter, it’s a holdover from when most cough syrups contained codeine.
Younger people were weaned onto the newer syrups containing dextromethorphan (which is Example A of the idiocy of the drug war and drug prohibition as it technically is an opiate as it has activity at opiate receptors, was designed to be a cough suppressant that wouldn’t make people high and yet as it turns out is a hallucinogen at high levels) but older people kept their preferences and Mississippi’s law (like most of the states with similar laws) is a holdover from that period.
Now, when you consider this, that Mississippi is a state where you can buy small amounts of codeine OTC but you cannot purchase Sudafed…..well, there’s a huge disconnect and I think that disconnect has to do with the popular will.
The truth is if anyone had bothered to fight it out 40 years ago when they started phasing out opiate based cough syrups from mainstream use and had put it to the voters in most states voters would have preserved the OTC nature of these substances, but back then no one thought in such a way and such initiatives were not attempted and we could have put the breaks on what the drug war became right then and there.
But we are here today and in two states we have these anti-Sudafed laws on the books, presumably to stop meth but of course by making what was OTC a prescription only drug by default you make it cost more meaning more money for pharmaceuticals for what used to be something where you could buy a hundred or more doses for under $10 and I think that’s the real rationale here, by making it available only by prescription knowing everyone is used to it they increase the prices as well as increase the number of doctor visits from people like me who usually take Vitamin C and a cocktail of OTC remedies to knock out the sniffles.
But here’s the thing, there is no question that in either Mississippi or Oregon without question you can get the signatures necessary to get the descheduling of Sudafed on the ballot, I mean it’s really basic.
Now you aren’t going to see either the Mississippi Legislature or the Oregon Legislature undo what they have already done by legislative act.
But in both states you can get enough petitions signed to get it on the ballot, and as I look through Mississippi initiatives such as the life begins at conception initiative, the eminent domain initiative (which makes illegal the kind of eminent domain landgrabs the Hubbard Legislature legalized in Alabama), the hunting and fishing initiative, I don’t think there’s any question that if we get an initiative basically to deschedule Sudafed and get it to where it is in Alabama and Louisiana, especially when it remains OTC in all states surrounding Mississippi and when the population distribution of Mississippi is such that a majority of the population lives in areas near state lines where they can go across state lines to buy these products over the counter the way that Alabamians buy lottery tickets, there is no question this initiative will pass, it’s going to pass in either the 60s or 70s, and it’s going to be an embarrassment for everyone who worked to get the law passed and also for the whole gung ho drug war crowd especially as it comes out of a state like Mississippi because understand this what I am about to say.
A majority of black Mississippians will vote to put Sudafed on non-prescription OTC or behind the counter status
A majority of white Mississippians will do so as well.
The state legislature won’t dare reconsider it but put it to a vote of the citizens and an overwhelming majority are going to vote to deschedule it and by a landslide and it will be egg on the faces of those who passed it in the first place.
That’s the power of initiative & referendum.
Initiative & referendum is the best weapon we have against the drug war.
Notice it’s not state legislatures going out and legalizing marijuana.
They simply react and regulate once the citizens have gone and done it themselves.
Without initiative & referendum pot would still be illegal in all 50 states so you can thank the populist movement out in the Western states between really 1880-1925 for the fact that pot is legal in Colorado and Oregon now as it is mainly western states that have direct citizen referendum and that’s because it was one of the chief goals of the populist movement.
In our case, yes, because this is such an easy gimme and because it fits into our overall strategy of running candidates and campaigns to attack the drug war whenever we can, I mean this is such a gimme and the PR value of this is so obvious, yes, we at Warpath Strategies will be sponsoring a petition drive in Mississippi to get on the ballot for either 2016, 2017, or 2018 a referendum on whether or not to move pseudoephedrine back to the legal status it had in Mississippi before the state legislature in an act of pure idiocy went and made it prescription medication.
I realize there will be times when we have to work with candidates that support the drug war, especially older ones, but ultimately Warpath Strategies is a purpose driven company and while we will work with candidates of either party one of our chief purposes ideologically as a company is ending the drug war and that’s because of the belief of the founder that any other government program that had cost as much taxpayer money as the drug war and drug prohibition has without achieving it’s stated aim (to stop drug use) would have been repealed a long time ago, just as alcohol prohibition was and the founder of this company believes the money wasted on drug prohibition and the enforcement thereof would be better spent on education, economic development, health care, basically building up people rather than calling them “criminals” because they decide to use a substance and throwing them into jail and so forth.
And an important, and easy for us to win, step in pursuit of our goal will be an initiative to move Sudafed off of Schedule III, prescription only status as it currently has in Mississippi and back to being something that anyone can purchase without having to see a doctor first as I believe the overwhelmingly majority of Mississippi residents prefer.
What we are doing now with Sudafed is what people should have done when they moved against codeine cough syrups in the 1960’s and 70’s.
We won’t make that mistake again and one of the best places to start that push back is with a Sudafed initiative in Mississippi.
And we at Warpath Strategies are ready to lead the way.
Warpath Strategies LLC 