Thursday, December 29, 2011

Driver's License for Advil?


My son-in-law purchased Advil Cold and Sinus this week. In order to do this, he had to provide his driver's license to the store clerk. What's up with this? Isn't this just one more example of over-regulation?

So I did a little research on this.  There were a few complaints by individuals that they had to not only provide a Federally recognized form of identification, but that this information was loaded into a database.

The regulation in question is 21 USC Section 830.  I'm cutting to the chase here, but the regulation is very wordy. The following sections are what seems to affect the average American citizens.

1.  "Pub. L. 111-268, Sec. 1, Oct. 12, 2010, 124 Stat. 2847, provided
    that: "This Act [amending sections 830 and 842 of this title and
    enacting provisions set out as notes under section 830 of this
    title] may be cited as the 'Combat Methamphetamine Enhancement Act
    of 2010'."

2.  ...."The seller maintains, in accordance with criteria
          issued by the Attorney General, a written or electronic list
          of such sales that identifies the products by name, the
          quantity sold, the names and addresses of purchasers, and the
          dates and times of the sales (which list is referred to in
          this subsection as the "logbook"), except that such
          requirement does not apply to any purchase by an individual
          of a single sales package if that package contains not more
          than 60 milligrams of pseudoephedrine.

Each Advil Cold and Sinus liquid-filled capsule contains 30mg of pseudoephedrine so it falls under the purview of this regulation.  Ridiculous....

Also, the Energy Independence and Security Act 0f 2007, which apparently was scheduled to go into effect on January 1. 2012, will not be enforced  "until Oct. 1, 2012, according to a rider attached to the $915 billion spending bill signed to avoid a federal government shutdown" as reported by Stacy Jones / The Star-Ledger.

Coupled with attempted regulations of what we can feed our families, I ask the the following question.

Why are we paying the salaries of 535 people who are supposed to be representing us, but instead are, in my opinion, over-regulating us?  Also, why are we paying their staff, approximately 15,000 people as of 2009,  according to the website, "Government Policy", to assist with writing the laws that are too wordy and difficult for the average citizen to read?

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2 comments:

  1. Good research......although I think some of those 535 people that are representing "us" are also representing people who lived next door to a Meth Lab which are indeed a very dangerous thing to have in your neighborhood. A good book to read on this is Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town - buy it on Amazon for $15.82.

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  2. Thanks, for your comments, Chris. I will check the book out. While I can't read the minds of our elected officials in Washington, I suspect that maintaining the privacy and freedoms of the average US citizen was not a priority in this instance. Perhaps this product could be reformulated to remove that one substance. This would, unfortunately, be an expense and inconvenience to the Pharmaceutical company. However, according to Wikipedia, Nyquil did it. This issue is, in my opinion, just another instance of losing our right to privacy. Thanks, again.

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