Published Feb 1, 2011

Thank you for removing pseudoephedrine from our cold medicines. It’s true that compound had kept me up at night one too many times — clear sinuses or not — and perhaps left me dried out on occasion as well, a particularly tough state in a cold winter, and one I won’t miss. The replacement phenelephryne neither wakes me up nor causes enough change in my sinus congestion to make me uncomfortably dry.I’d also like to thank you for increasing the security of our nation’s cold medicine pharmacy shelves, what with the bell that sounds when you open the new plastic doors over said shelves to get your decongestant product of choice. It had long been my feeling that the floor staff at Rite Aid did nothing at all; giving them a security task to monitor certainly makes them earn their paychecks.Still, I might have appreciated it more if your preference for buying large quantities of pseudoephedrine hadn’t resulted in them changing the active ingredient of our cold medicine to something that, well, doesn’t work much at all.You see, for the past few weeks, my lovely wife and I have had a remarkably tenacious cold.; our house has become a little wooden box filled with the dulcet tones of coughs and sniffs. As a consequence, of course, we have been required to consume rather substantial quantities of cold medicine. I offer, for clarification, this photo-graph of our lavatory on a typical day of late:
Cold season
While it’s true that nothing is more adorable than my lovely wife with a case of the sniffles, and that her hacking cough is like music from some Christmastime-ready children’s choir to me, I must still protest that, you see, we’re getting less than full value for the substantial sums of money we’ve given to the Robitussin, Halls, and NyQuil folks. Due to that, you know, lack of an effective active ingredient.I would very much like it if our pharmacies could stock pseudoepehdrine-containing cold medicine on their shelves — and, more, our nation’s famed and clearly socially-responsible pharmaceuticals companies could return to including that scientifically-proven ingredient to our cold medicine. Because I’m getting tired of my cough, you see.In conclusion, while I understand how much you like picking at your face and starting new projects, I must strongly request that you develop a method to synthesize ephedrine yourselves, rather than removing it from our nation’s cold medicine supplies using a highly-explosive combination of solvents.Thank you for your attention to this matter,Wade