PBS Frontline did an excellent piece on the meth problem. You can chart meth-related deaths over time and that chart directly correlates with the chart of meth purity. The more powerful the stuff on the street, the more dead people. Simple as that.

To stop the problem, you need to attack the whole problem: raw ingredients, cookers, distributors, and consumers. The long-term stable answer is to go after the "precursor chemicals" that go into pseudoefedrine. They're made at only a small number of factories around the world. You can control that in the same way that they control opiates. Each country only gets to buy as much as they actually need for their legitimate medicinal needs.

Absent such controls, what we have now is sourced primarily from Mexican pharmacies, which don't have the sorts of controls that are increasingly standard in U.S. pharmacies. You can buy very high volume psudofed in Mexico, cook it there, and ship it into the U.S. using pre-existing gang-related distribution channels.

I certainly sympathize with the "you want my name for what?" argument, but if you're paying with your credit card, those records already exist. The additional privacy hit is relatively minor relative to the public health benefit of controlling the meth industry.