Cold comfort: big Pharma and the drug war.

• Author: Balko, Radley
• Position: Food and Drug Administration on pseudoephedrine drugs - Pfizer Inc. - Brief article

WHEN THE media first seized on the methamphetamine scare, critics lambasted the pharmaceutical industry for its complicity in producing the illegal stimulant. They charged that drug companies, out of greed, were refusing to replace the pseudoephedrine in their cold medicines, a methamphetamine precursor, with the decongestant phenylephrine, which is useless in producing meth.

There's just one problem: Phenylephrine also is useless in cold medicine, as consumers are discovering. Thanks to state and federal laws requiring that pseudoephedrine-based medications be kept behind drugstore counters, millions of Americans have been wasting their money on a cold remedy that's no more effective than a placebo. Nonetheless, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has ruled the medicine safe and effective.

Critics of the industry have seized on this problem too. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has urged the FDA to investigate Pfizer--which was the first company to offer a reformulated alternative to pseudoephedrine, the phenylephrine-based Sudafed PE--for marketing an ineffective medication. Not wanting to...