I despise the late Paul Holmes with a passion. And no, it’s not because he shamelessly ripped off Aussie’s Derryn Hinch. To explain why, I need to go back to around 2009.
In 2009 Paul’s daughter (you know the one) was a full-on meth addict. Together with the government’s science advisor, Sir Peter Gluckman, Paul pushed for pseudoephedrine, a precursor chemical used in the making of methamphetamine, to be banned. As a result, all products containing pseudoephedrine were removed from our shelves.
I suffer from a chronic cough caused by fluid going down from my nose to my throat. The only drug I know of that works as an effective decongestant is pseudoephedrine. Its replacement, phenylephrine certainly doesn’t. I’ve even been prescribed codeine which did absolutely nothing.
You may be saying, “Methamphetamine is the scourge of our society!” Well if you just listened to the MSM, I can’t blame you for thinking that. In waste water analysis methamphetamine comes out on top as I’m sure it would have done back in ’09. However waste water analysis may tell us roughly how much methamphetamine users are using, it doesn’t tell us how many users there are.
Participants in the Global Drug Survey constantly rate methamphetamine near the bottom of the list, way below the most popular drugs such as alcohol (number one by a country mile), cannabis and MDMA (Ecstasy). Hence there are many fewer meth addicts than the media will have you believe. They just happen to use a lot. “They” of course meaning meth addicts, not the media, although I’ve been told the media has more than its fair share of meth-heads.
Don’t get me wrong. Methamphetamine is a terrible drug. It’s dopaminergic, meaning it’s highly addictive (it basically rewards your brain just for taking it). The high may be great but the comedown is horrific: paranoia, extreme anxiety, flight or fight responses; the works. In fact, meth addicts are at their most dangerous when they are coming down.
Some will “top up” with more meth while others will use anti-psychotic medicines etc so they don’t have to deal with the comedown. The problem is that apart from the cost of the drug they’re not actually paying for the high. Or to put it more philosophically, they’re obtaining happiness without actually doing anything to earn it.
Alcohol acts as a social lubricant. Cannabis lets people chill. MDMA is proving to be a very effective drug when used as part of therapy for the treatment of PTSD and as a treatment for extreme social anxiety in autistic adults. I can’t think of one redeeming quality that methamphetamine has.
But getting back to pseudoephedrine. As I’ve said above, as a result of Paul Holmes pushing for pseudoephedrine to be banned as an over-the-shelf medicine, manufacturers pulled their products from the shelves and replaced them with products containing phenylephrine. The problem is that phenylephrine has been shown to be no more effective than a placebo. In comparison, pseudoephedrine has been proven to be one of the most effective decongestants around, probably the most effective known.
But, you say, getting meth out of our communities is worth the sacrifice. Yeah, about that. Banning pseudoephedrine may have put some of the amateur cooks out of business but it has done nothing to reduce the prevalence of methamphetamine. The thing is there’s more than one way to cook methamphetamine and it hasn’t stopped dealers and gangs from importing methamphetamine and precursors, including pseudoephedrine.
Have a look at these graphs:
But you know what really gets me angry? Back in 2009, Paul Holmes was told that that contribution of over-the-counter sales of drugs containing pseudoephedrine to the so-called methamphetamine epidemic was miniscule but he still went ahead and pushed for pseudoephedrine to banned anyway.
So Paul, thanks for nothing.
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