A Stitch in Haste

To review: In one of the more egregious examples of the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling, the federal government now requires law-abiding people to show ID when they buy even modest amounts of decongestants containing pseudoephedrine, and to have those purchases logged. The goal is to curb the manufacture of illegal methamphetamine. The pesky facts that:

• vast quantities of decongestant — more than can be casually purchased at a pharmacy — are needed to manufacture meth


• alternative methods of manufacturing meth are now available that do not require pseudoephedrine at all


• almost all meth production occurs outside the United States


• many people will simply forego the hassle and suffer needlessly

are all conveniently blanked out. You don't want the drug dealers to win, do you?

And what's a mere entry in a notebook behind the pharmacist's counter, right?

Wrong:

Detective Brian Lewis returns to his desk after lunch, scanning e-mails he missed.

One catches his eye: It says a suspected member of a methamphetamine ring bought a box of Sudafed at 1:34 p.m. at a CVS pharmacy.

Minutes later, Lewis is in his truck, circling the parking lot, searching for the woman.

So decongestant purchases are in fact often not "merely" being recorded on paper for future reference, but actively monitored electronically and automatically transmitted to law enforcement. Despite the fact that no illegal activity has occurred.

A perfectly legal transaction that, without more, could not possibly be connected to a crime, is now actively transmitted to law enforcement.

Not only that, but that same perfectly legal, objectively innocuous purchase is now, apparently*, probable cause to pursue and detain (not to mention access DMV records — the detective was looking for the "suspect's" license plate in the pharmacy parking lot).

You can craft your own slippery slope scenario extrapolating from this fact pattern. Rent the movie "Airport" from Netflix? Have the TSA instantly notified. Want to see "Naked Boys Singing" but left off the last word from your Google search? The child pornography unit at the FBI will now have their eye on you. And so on. (Don't forget Googling "using Sudafed to manufacture meth" to research a libertarian-minded blogpost — uh oh!)

The notion that legal activities should be casually monitored, curbed or banned in the name of crime prevention, public safety or national security, with little or no consideration of the costs in terms of lost civil liberties (and to dismiss dissenters as "whiners"), is the siren song of those who would myopically destroy the American way of life in order to save it.

Via FourthAmendment.com.

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*It's possible that in this instance the "suspect" was on probation or parole with specific instructions never to buy pseudoephedrine products. That would be a slightly different fact pattern, but not very.