I FIGURED THIS OUT THE FIRST TIME I TOOK IT: A Decongestant in Cold Medicines Doesn’t Work at All, an F.D.A. Panel Says. When they replaced the pseudoephedrine in cold meds with this (to produce failures like “Sudafed PE”) out of meth hysteria, I could quickly tell that phenylephrine wasn’t nearly as good as pseudoephedrine. And it did such an ineffective job of limiting meth availability that I’m looking for the recipe to turn meth back into sudafed to avoid the third degree I get when I try to buy the real thing at the drug store . . . .

Related: This story about cold medicine is infuriating. “So instead of something that worked, we got sold something that didn’t.”