[dan_quixote]

For the last 20+ years, I've lived in states where you had to show ID at the pharmacy counter to get your hands on the real thing. So I made it my (probably annoying) mission to ask every pharmacist if phenylephrine was effective for anyone. I don't recall a single time I got a "yes".

[whatshisface]

It shows you something about the priorities of the system that the company got a similarly-named substitute to sell (that's what they need out of medicine), but we didn't get a substitute for what we needed out of the medicine.