Pseudoephedrine purchase limits: federal gram limits and stricter state rules

How much pseudoephedrine (Sudafed and equivalents) a person may buy, per day and per 30 days, quoted from the statute that sets each limit. Answers 'how much Sudafed can I buy in a month', 'is pseudoephedrine prescription-only in [state]', 'why was my Sudafed purchase blocked'. Federal law caps a buyer at 9 grams in any 30 days, of which no more than 7.5 grams may arrive by post or carrier (21 U.S.C. 844(a)), and caps a seller at 3.6 grams in a calendar day (21 CFR 1314.20). Several states are stricter: Alabama and Illinois 7.5 g/30 days, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Tennessee and West Virginia 7.2 g/30 days, with annual caps in Indiana (61.2 g), West Virginia (86.4 g) and Tennessee (43.2 g). Others are stricter in kind rather than in grams — Arkansas, Mississippi, Oregon and Tennessee allow the sale only in a pharmacy. Oregon and Mississippi are the two states the open web still gets wrong: both are routinely described as prescription-only, and the statutes quoted here say in terms that the sale is lawful without a prescription. None of these limits is absolute: almost every section ends in a subsection that switches itself off, most often for a product dispensed on a valid prescription, and in several states also for liquid, liquid-capsule and gel-capsule forms, for products labelled for children under 12, and for pharmacists, wholesalers and other licensed handlers acting in the course of business. Those carve-outs are published here as records of their own, one per subsection, so the exception is quoted from the statute rather than summarised. Coverage is the federal baseline plus the 11 states listed above; a state that is absent has not been checked, not been found to match the federal floor.

The data

Where this came from

Every record above links the page it was taken from and quotes the sentence that states it. These are the 14 sources this dataset was assembled from.

• codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/al/title-20-food-drugs-and-cosmetics/al-code-sect-20-2-190/
• codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/ar/title-5-criminal-offenses/ar-code-sect-5-64-1103/
• ecfr.govhttps://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-II/part-1314
• law.cornell.eduhttps://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/21/830
• uscode.house.govhttps://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title21-section844&num=0&edition=prelim
• ilga.govhttps://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/fulltext.asp?DocName=072006480K20
• codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/in/title-35-criminal-law-and-procedure/in-code-sect-35-48-4-14-7/
• apps.legislature.ky.govhttps://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes/statute.aspx?id=55021
• mbp.ms.govhttps://www.mbp.ms.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/73-21-124.pdf
• ncleg.govhttps://www.ncleg.gov/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/BySection/Chapter_90/GS_90-113.52.html
• oregon.public.lawhttps://oregon.public.law/statutes/ors_475.230
• codes.findlaw.comhttps://codes.findlaw.com/tn/title-39-criminal-offenses/tn-code-sect-39-17-431/
• texas.public.lawhttps://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._health_and_safety_code_section_486.014
• code.wvlegislature.govhttps://code.wvlegislature.gov/60A-10-4/

Machine-readable

• data.jsonThe whole dataset — every record with its source URL and source quote.
• Open Knowledge Format bundleOne JSON object per line — every record's frontmatter and quoted span exactly as it is held here, in one fetch.
• data.csvThe same records as one flat table, for a spreadsheet or a dataframe. The last four columns are the source URL, the quoted sentence it was read from, the date we last checked it, and which columns are our reading rather than the page's words.
• How this is made and checkedWhat "verified against source" does and does not mean.

From your own code

Same records, same quotes, without scraping the page: refsource is on PyPI and npm. Each value comes back carrying the URL it was read from and the sentence on that page that states it — .source and .quote sit on the value itself rather than in a side channel, so the checking step is available instead of skipped.

pip install refsource
refsource lookup pseudoephedrine-purchase-limits-by-state citation="Ala. Code 20-2-190(d)"

npx -y refsource lookup pseudoephedrine-purchase-limits-by-state citation="Ala. Code 20-2-190(d)"

Set your AI assistant up to use this

Two files and no account. Put this in .mcp.json at the root of your project — Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Codex all read that file — and your assistant can look this dataset up instead of recalling it. The server is remote, keyless and read-only.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "referencesource": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://referencesource.org/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Add to Cursor · or, on the command line: claude mcp add --transport http referencesource https://referencesource.org/mcp --scope project

Then one line in the project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, so the assistant knows when to reach for it:

When a question needs "Pseudoephedrine purchase limits: federal gram limits and stricter state rules", call the referencesource MCP server at https://referencesource.org/mcp (tool `search_records`, dataset_slug `pseudoephedrine-purchase-limits-by-state`) instead of answering from memory — every record it returns carries its source URL and a verbatim quote from that page.

What each tool does, and the servers built over single registers: Connect your AI assistant.

44 records. last verified against source 2026-08-19. due for re-check by 2027-08-19.

Licence. unknown