I have a cold, and when I have a cold, there is nothing I like better than to take some pill at night that will knock me out, take away my pain, and unstuff my nose. I had been taking a pill called Walgreens Rest Easy Night Time, which should say it all. It included the cold medicine par excellence (and meth ingredient, I think) pseudoephedrine, and three other ingredients meant to help your night-time woes. It really was the best, sending me off to dreamland happily even when my nose was angry. But I ran out night before last, and asked S to pick up some more at the Walgreens on the way home from work last night. He called me from Walgreens very confused, and said he couldn't find what I wanted. Yes, there was a Rest Easy Night Time pill, but it no longer had pseudoephedrine in it, and was in fact touting a "new formula" on the box. Since that's no different from NyQuil (which is pretty useless, to be honest), which I already had, I told him to look for another medicine with four ingredients, one of which was pseudoephedrine, or ask the pharmacist what the deal was. We had a long discussion about the fact that what I wanted should only be available from behind the pharmacy counter, and then we got off the phone. He called back five minutes later, and said that the pharmacist told him to tell me to take Sudafed (which I had at home) with NyQuil Night (which I had at home). I told S to buy no drugs. We had, apparently, all the drugs I needed.
When he got home, I apologized for sending him on a wild goose chase for pills that apparently don't exist anymore, and expressed my pique. He told me that the pharmacist told him that the reason there are no medicines that include it all anymore is that they don't move. They don't move because they have to be kept behind the counter, and no one wants to deal with it, and have to ransom their first-born to breathe at night. They're kept behind the counter because meth manufacturers were stealing these medicines, or buying large quantites of them to cook up new batches of meth, which they then sold to the fiends all over the country. So drug companies don't want to make pills that won't sell, so they just took the pseudoephedrine out of all the compound medicines, and put them back on the floor. Ergo, I have no magic pill to take to make me feel better.
I thought I was angry before, when I had to give my driver's license number and my name and my age and seriously, the next step was asking for a credit card and then my SS# and doing a credit check, I swear. But this is positively ridiculous. Because some bad people make drugs from cold medicine, I can no longer sleep at night when I have a cold. I know they call it a meth epidemic, and I know it's taxing rural police officers, and small-town hospitals, but at this point, I say let 'em all rot. Let's just round up all the meth people and send them to the tundras of Alaska, or the empty vastness in South Dakota (because even though those people rejected the abortion ban, they still give me the willies), and put a big fence around the lot of them, and then just leave them. I'm sure it would all work out, because then the drug companies can start making effective cold medicines again, and the world will actually be a nicer, sleepier place. Emergency rooms can start stitching up the head wounds of children without having to deal with ten meth addicts as well, and police officers can start arresting child molesters and rapists without having to deal with the hazardous experience of busting a meth lab.
I mean, fuck. I just want to sleep at night without feeling like I'm gasping for air.
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