You already know you can stop meth without burdensome legislation. But what could the crazy meth bill cost the Commonwealth of Kentucky?

Let’s do some fancy maths and such. Warm yer countin fangers up, kids. Ready?

In 2010 some 498,000 Kentuckians purchased pseudophedrine over the counter about 1.3 million times. That’s about 12% of our population. Something like 2.6 purchases per person. There are currently about 400,000 people covered by state health plans. Let’s assume about 48,000 (or roughly 12%) of those state workers make those purchases. Let’s also assume the average office visit to see a physician for a state worker with Humana is $55, patient pays $20, insurance pays the remaining $35 of the contracted rate.

If those 48,000 people have to see a doctor to get a prescription, that turns into 124,900 office visits that would cost the patients $2,496,000. The portion the insurance plan would have to pick up would be $4,368,000. That’s a total of $6,864,000 for office visits in a single year JUST for cold medicine.

No one expects the cost of medications to increase if prescriptions are required, so there are no real worries on that front. The real fear? Loss of sales tax.

Try this on for size: when you purchase over the counter medication in Kentucky, you pay sales tax. That amounted to more than $700,000 in 2010. When you purchase medication covered by prescription, you pay no sales tax. So guess what that loss amounts to for an already struggling state? Yup. $700,000 by conservative estimates.

And all that’s on top of increased law enforcement costs to try to track the meth heads.

Sound like a bad deal to you? Click here to send a letter to your legislators telling them what an absurd idea this is.