Bison, head colds and anti-drug hysteria

Mr. T is leaving tomorrow to go slay some free-range, grass-fed meat for the freezer. Well, actually he's going to watch his Dad slay some free-range, grass-fed meat for our freezer. See, his Dad has long dreamed of a buffalo hunt, so Mr. T started trying to find a hunt they could do together that offered significantly more challenge than a standard Dick-Cheney-shooting-
fish-in-a-barrel-and-then-your-hunting-partner-in-the-face kind of deals. And he found one on 90,000 acres in Nebraska. If my father-in-law gets a buffalo, our half will tally up to about 350 pounds. The deep freeze will be full for awhile. (And lots of friends will be eating bison as well.)

But I'm getting away from my main point, which is -- as always, really -- me.
So Mr. T is leaving tomorrow, which will require me to wrangle The Kid alone till we head up to Montana next week.

Cue head cold.

I was sitting here working this afternoon and I could feel it hitting me. First the stuffy nose, then the burning eyes, then the ache in the throat. And I looked down at the dog and said, "Hey, sport, would you be so kind as to hop into your time machine and fetch me some good cold remedies from 1998?"

Remember when cold meds used to work? I used to be a big fan of DayQuil, and then Tylenol Cold and Flu for nighttime. DayQuil could power me through an entire day at Big Law Firm with even the most wretched virus. Yeah, I'd be seeing vapor trails*, but it gave me blessed, blessed relief. Then one day, they stopped working. I took a DayQuil, and continued to feel like pickled ass. Last year's bout with strep was particularly vexing. I assumed I'd developed some sort of tolerance for it until one day it dawned on me.

Meth. They took the stuff that actually works -- called pseudoephedrine -- out of the meds, because in very large quantities, pseudoephedrine can be used to make meth. Now pharmacists are required to lock up meds that contain it and weary cold sufferers must produce a photo ID and sign the products out to get them. Most cold-med makers, afraid that they would lose bidness if their stuff was locked up behind the counter, caved and stuck some weak-ass substitute in their products to keep them on the shelves.

I'm going to go ahead and call this law and order hysteria. Listen, I'm down with preventing the production of meth. It's an environmental and social menace. But this goes too far. Back in the midwest, they would simply not let you buy more than one box of cold medicine at a time, on the theory that no one has that bad a cold. That was fine. But then the meth people would simply shoplift it, leading the lawmakers to insist that pseudoephedrine must be locked up! Oh Noes!

But you know what? I don't care. If someone is determined to make meth, a signature and photo ID requirement isn't going to stop them. It's not. Because no one has ever made a fake ID! Like so much of our security-obsessed society, this is so much window dressing.

Fortunately, some manufacturers have resisted the blacklisting of pseudoephedrine, and their stuff remains behind the glass. I will be going to the pharmacy tomorrow and getting some.

Perhaps I'll be a little bit more reasonable tomorrow, and will see the sterling wisdom of this law once my sinus passages are no longer the size of bratwursts.

Which will only happen after I get some decent cold medicine.





*not really