But the removal of pseudophedrine from OTC to behinid the counter is only
for certain forms of the drug. Liquid forms will be exampted, because that
is not easy to make into meth.

Jeff

Okay, it's been a long time since I did any synthetic organic
chemistry, but here's some handwaving for what it's worth.

Ideally, you would get one molecule of methamphetamine from one
molecule of pseudephedrine, but of course you don't in practice.  You
lose some in extracting the pseudephedrine from OTC stuff.  You lose
some at every step of the synthesis.  I would be really surprised if
you could get a 10% overall yield.

I have no idea what street prices for meth are, but I strongly suspect
that running a meth lab based on getting your starting materials by
buying little OTC packages of Sudafed from stores all over town would
result in an income well under minimum wage, not to mention the expenses
of setting up and running the lab -- hardly worth the risk!

Anyone who wants to make money from this is going to have to get their
pseudephedrine wholesale, probably from the same places the legitimate
commercial drug packagers get it.  Even getting it wholesale already
formulated and packaged for OTC is economically dubious.  Are these
companies and their customers being carefully audited?

Again, I don't have any recent experience with the economics of the
underground economy, but putting the decongestants behind the counter
seems to me a pretty ineffective way to reduce meth production.