The Nevada legislature just gave the finger to every law enforcement officer who daily puts his or her life on the line in the fight against illegal drugs. Officers like the Carson City deputies who discovered a boy being held in a makeshift home prison by his meth-addicted parents.

The same day that story broke, State Senator Sheila Leslie had to pull a bill that is designed to seriously interrupt the availability of essential ingredients for methamphetamine production, because it didn’t have the support it needs to pass the Senate.

It’s hardly a surprise.

For generations the pharma industry has spent fortunes on advertisements that conditioned us to believe that for any problem, real or imagined, there is a drug that makes it go away. In addition, they also spend money on ads for the meek at imagination, to help them suffer from something they never imagined they could suffer from, something that needs a chemical cure.

This advertising also benefits the illegal drug trade. After all, if legal drugs have magic powers, shouldn’t illegal drugs be at least as good, if not even better?

Advertisers like to get returns on their investments. But how do you do that when you’re publicly traded and the market is illegal?

Simple. Supply the market indirectly by adding essential ingredients for an illegal drug to something as harmless as cold medicine. Make it difficult, but not impossible, to extract those ingredients from the medicine. That helps to shift responsibility for the evil part of the procedure to those who extract, and away from those who supply. It also opens a channel for revenues that put a smile on the faces of shareholders.

Of course, a successful business model like this needs to be protected against legislature that might bring it down. Therefore a small portion of the proceeds needs to be reinvested to hire lobbyist who will put our legislators straight. I got an excellent demonstration how well that works less than a week ago during a brief conversation with our representative in the Assembly, Pete Livermore.

Mr. Livermore was very concerned about the consumers and determined to protect them from expenses that a doctor visit to obtain a prescription would incur. That is nice and very commendable. Particularly since he appeared to be completely unaware that cold medicine with alternative ingredients that are equally effective, but unusable for methamphetamine production, is available from the same manufacturer in states that require prescriptions for the version containing meth supplies.

The lobbyist must have omitted that detail. Too much is at stake for the pharma industry to include it. As the last state in the West that still allows ephedrine, pseudo-ephedrine and phenylpropanolamine to be bought over the counter without effective controls, Nevada is too valuable to be lost to reason and decency.

Making the existing controls ineffective is taken care of by the retailers, particularly the pharmacy chains. They are well aware that meth labs send out buyers who obtain the legal maximum of these ingredients in one pharmacy and then repeat the purchase in others under presumed names, a practice known as “smurfing”.

A common database that allows pharmacies to check on all purchases that are affected by the limited quantity regulation, made by the same person, would prevent smurfing. However, pharmacies argue that they cannot share this kind of proprietary information with competitors. So far, legislators favored respecting a pharmacy’s proprietary information regarding cold medicine sales over protecting constituents and their children from the effects of methamphetamine.

There is a good chance that Nevada’s pharmacies will soon attract more smurfs from adjacent states than our casinos will attract gamblers from the same. Cell phones confiscated during drug raids in Southern California have more contact numbers with 702 and 775 area codes than any other.

Nevada has a tradition of legalizing things that are prohibited in other states. So far we have limited ourself to ruining people only financially. Are we going to expand that to include physical and mental decay?