The war on opiates and constipation

Every time a war against anything starts in the US, the warriors are very annoyingly efficient. Last year I just wanted a little plastic bag for my purchases in a pharmacy in Harvard Square. I asked the cashier for a plastic bag, and he looked at me with huge round eyes and open mouth, as if I had asked him for newborn baby brains sprinkled with cocaine. Then he looked around, as if trying to make sure that nobody heard us, and whispered: "Don't you know? Plastic bags are forbidden!" I told him that I live in Helsinki, Finland, and the news of the city of Cambridge forbidding the plastic bags hadn't quite made the front page there. This seemed to surprise him.

But yes, they are forbidden now. Mind you, not taxed, or sold for money (unless you want to buy a pack of 100 or so; unless they already got to those as well), or something like that. Forbidden. The paper bag was utterly unusable for my purposes so I made do sticking the stuff in various pockets of my jeans and purse, and buggered off, wondering what they are gonna ban next.

I guess we found it now: Loperamide, aka Imodium. As a part of general struggle against the opiate addiction. Because some people apparently use it as a drug, in the amounts of 100 times the recommended dose. (As an aside: I have taken the drug in question once in my life, half a pill, and didn't shit for a week after that. Do the people who take 100 pills at a time shit at all, ever again?)

Anyway, now the FDA is asking the manufacturers to discontinue selling the big packages, and the people with chronic diarrhea are screwed. Paska juttu.