I may have already mentioned the crazies that shuffle round SF screaming their murderous plans or generally being a bit weird. I am reliably informed that there is a significant meth problem in the city - a combination of the existing weed culture, the warm climate and the empathetic local hippies apparently attracts them.
Well, it turns out that these fuckers aren't just creeping me out at the bus stop*, they are also the reason I have to sell my soul for some Beechams.
So, I troll over to the pharmacy to pickup some hardcore cold medicine, and it turns out that I have to actually ask for it at the pharmacy counter. Fair enough. There's certain questions that need to be asked - do you have asthma? Are you on any other medication? And, apparently, can I have your driver's license? Yep, if you want to buy certain cough and cold medications that contain pseudo ephedrine then you'll need to provide ID to the California equivalent of a Boots saturday girl who will record it on some central database. Pseudo ephedrine is apparently a key ingredient in the production of meth, so if one tries to buy it in significant quantities, by visiting numerous pharmacies, a little red flag appears and your purchases are limited. There are two reasons why I am irritated by this. The first is that when everyone is telling me to protect my identity, forcing me to hand over all my pertinents to all in sundry when all I want is something to unclog my schnoz feels a bit wrong. The second is that the US is incapable of streamlining most of its core systems to make my life easier (tax/car insurance/sending a cheque) and yet this little database that is targeting the minority seems to be working swimmingly.
Oh, and if you want to get a bit of soluble aspirin to gargle with for your sore throat, good luck. Having sifted through all the utter tripe about it on the internet forums it turns out its not as readily available as it is in the UK, but you can still find it by looking for "buffered" aspirin. What? Know, right. Make it more complicated than it needs to be. Buffering is some sort of chemical process that means that it dissolves sooner, rather than coating which means it dissolves later (in your stomach). Why the manufacturers think I give a shit about the chemical process before I buy it, rather than what happens after I buy it and shove it in my cake hole, who knows.
* SO, the first evening we ever spent in SF we accidentally walked through a less savory part of Downtown, and there was a crazy lady screaming at the bus stop that she was going to kill everyone. Welcome to California, boys and girls...
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