Hoosier grandma arrested for buying two boxes of antihistamines

From Jacob Sullum in Reason...

Early on the morning of July 30, Sally Harpold and her husband were awakened by police banging on the door of their home in Parke County, Indiana. The officers hauled Harpold away in handcuffs, charging the grandmother with a Class C misdemeanor. Her mug shot appeared on the front page of the local paper, under the headline “17 Arrested in Drug Sweep.” Her crime: buying a box of Zyrtec-D allergy medicine for her husband, then buying a box of Mucinex-D decongestant for her daughter at another pharmacy less than a week later.

That second transaction put Harpold six-tenths of a gram over Indiana’s three-gram-per-week limit for purchases of pseudoephedrine, a decongestant that happens to be a methamphetamine precursor....

There is little evidence that the pseudoephedrine crackdown has reduced meth use...Pseudoephedrine limits have helped shift meth production from local mom-and-pop labs to the large-scale Mexican traffickers...and they have driven explosive innovation in manufacturing techniques....