Conspiracy or "Just doing business?"

[elfs]

I am reluctant to post this only because it comes from the Mises, one of those wacky far-right libertarian groups that's trying to figure out how to mutate the human species so that we'll all become Randites, but it's an interesting article and the basic fact is there to read in the documents to which the article links.

Jeffrey Tucker notes that the company that makes phenyephrine, the "PE" is "Sudafed PE," and the substitute for pseudoephedrine, Boehringer-Ingelheim, had an unremarkable history of lobbying in congress, with annual contributions to congressbeasts amounting to little more that $100,000 per year. In 2005 and 2006, the years when congress was mulling the banning of pseudoephedrine, Boehringer's contributions to various congressional races ballooned to an average $1.65 million dollars.

Tucker's a Von Mises contributor, so he sees a conspiracy. I think it's just good business from the point of view of Boehringer; they saw an opportunity to increase their market, and they paid for it. The sheer draconian weight of the law was bought and paid for, and now the shelves are stocked with a drug which probably doesn't even work for most people and which Omaha cannot use ("Patients with a history of epilepsy should not take this substance").

And it hasn't even done anything! The National Drug Threat Assement 2007 Methamphetamine Section shows that even though domestic meth production is now one-quarter what it was before the law went into effect (I won't argue that this isn't a good thing), emergency room visits my methamphetamine users, and overall estimates of the number of users in this country, continue to rise.

Just letting you know. I'm suffering with a stuffy head today, and I'm glad that I can still get some Sudafed somewhere.

Comments

I saw that too

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

But it's really sloppy.

The Boehringer Ingelheim spending figures are for "lobbying" not "contributions."

Lobbying tends to be more effective than contributions.

Tucker's text doesn't agree with the opensecrets.org graph; the numbers are higher than he says.

Plus, I'm pretty sure the 2007 figures aren't for a full year, so it's possibly wrong to say that spending declined this year.

If Tucker had gotten all of this right, it would have strengthened his argument.

But these are still pretty small numbers. Total spending per year on lobbying passed $2 billion a few years ago.

Just out of curiosity, I checked to see how much Pfizer (the maker of Sudafed) spent on lobbying during those years, and it was several times as much:

http://opensecrets.org/lobbyists/clientsum.asp?year=2005&txtname=Pfizer+Inc

So we know he was about five seconds away from data that would have largely invalidated his argument. I wonder if he saw it but chose not to mention it.

All in all, this was a sloppy piece of work. The Mises Institute has been doing a lot of that recently.

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[bellebonnesage.livejournal.com]

I'm still in mourning for PPA, which was outlawed about 7-8 years ago. When I was taking the original Entex, it felt as if I could drive a truck through my sinuses they were so clear and open. I don't really like pseudoephedrine, but if it's outlawed I'll just have to give up breathing, which doesn't seem like such a fun choice, somehow.

[phyxis.livejournal.com]

I miss PPA as well, pseudoephedrine is a depressing fallback... and phenylephrine is a frippin JOKE. :-/ :-/

See the comments on the Mises site

[ideaphile.livejournal.com]

Even more data undermining the article...

http://blog.mises.org/archives/007583.asp

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[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

So does that mean that we're now importing that other 3/4s+ or is that number suspect? I'd suggest that possibly the larger number of users are splitting a smaller amount of meth, but if ER visits are up too then that seems unlikely.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]