A ban on cold pills would deliver a lot of inconvenience for only a little meth-fighting result.

Restrict sales, yes. Put the pills in locked cabinets, yes. Keep logs of customers’ purchases, yes.

But demand that all buyers get a prescription for cold pills they now can buy over the counter?

No. That’s going too far. The Minnesota House of Representatives overreacted by forbidding all over-the-counter sales of pseudoephedrine-containing pills. True, &uot;you can’t fight a beast with a peashooter,&uot; as Gov. Tim Pawlenty said in support of the measure. But you don’t need a nuclear warhead to do it, either, especially when such weapons create collateral damage.

To understand why the House’s proposal goes too far, recall the economists’ &uot;law of diminishing returns&uot;: As you keep working harder to reach a goal, your efforts become less effective after a certain point. It’s just a fancy rewrite of the old saw about low-hanging fruit.

Well, the North Dakota Legislature and the Minnesota Senate both picked that fruit and left the bottom part of the tree pretty bare. Both bodies took action to restrict easy access to the chemical ingredients of meth. In North Dakota, the new law helps farmers buy locks for their anhydrous ammonia tanks; in Minnesota, the Senate action would put pseudoephedrine-containing pills behind pharmacy counters and make pharmacists log customers’ purchases.

Both of these actions throw barriers across meth makers’ once-easy access to ingredients. In the cold tablets’ case, the Senate proposal also recognizes that a meth addiction is hard to hide. Addicts need many pills to make a little meth. That, coupled with the havoc the drug wreaks on addicts’ looks and behavior, turns the pharmacists’ scrutiny and logs into powerful deterrents and law-enforcement tools.

Add all this to the fact that about 80 percent of the meth in Minnesota comes from major labs outside the state, and you’ve got a law that would terribly inconvenience hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans to stop the illegal actions of a relative few.

Legislatures, like people, should be reasonable. The Minnesota House became unreasonable in its zeal to combat meth. The House should recognize its error and adopt the Senate’s bill, which is neither a nuke nor a peashooter but an appropriately sized elephant gun.

&045; Grand Forks Herald