I recently found out that Tyramine is a Schedule I controlled substance in Florida. It is also a significant component of well-aged cheese.
Even though I think of this as a merely theoretical issue, but given a German citizen comes to visit some friends in Florida to gift them a nice block of well-aged German cheese, if said German gets confronted by an evil-meaning police officer, what would happen? Is this drug trafficking?
A good question that arises from stupid lawmaking. As Wikipedia notes:
United States
Tyramine is not scheduled at the federal level in the United States and is therefore legal to buy, sell, or possess.
Status in Florida
Tyramine is a Schedule I controlled substance, categorized as a hallucinogen, making it illegal to buy, sell, or possess in the state of Florida without a license at any purity level or any form whatsoever. The language in the Florida statute says tyramine is illegal in "any material, compound, mixture, or preparation that contains any quantity of [tyramine] or that contains any of [its] salts, isomers, including optical, positional, or geometric isomers, and salts of isomers, if the existence of such salts, isomers, and salts of isomers is possible within the specific chemical designation."
This ban is likely the product of lawmakers overly eager to ban substituted phenethylamines, which tyramine is, in the mistaken belief that ring-substituted phenethylamines are hallucinogenic drugs like the 2C series of psychedelic substituted phenethylamines. The further banning of tyramine's optical isomers, positional isomers, or geometric isomers, and salts of isomers where they exist, means that meta-tyramine and phenylethanolamine, a substance found in every living human body, and other common, non-hallucinogenic substances are also illegal to buy, sell, or possess in Florida. Given that tyramine occurs naturally in many foods and drinks (most commonly as a by-product of bacterial fermentation), e.g. wine, cheese, and chocolate, Florida's total ban on the substance may prove difficult to enforce.
But lawmakers, in principle, are allowed to pass stupid laws, and an evil-meaning police officer confronting a German citizen with a technically correct interpretation of a duly enacted law, even if it makes no sense, is hardly a fanciful scenario.
The mostly likely result would be that a judge would interpret the Controlled Substance designation to apply only to synthetic and meaningfully concentrated version of the chemical in order to avoid absurdity, even if this is not the most plain reading of the statute, in order to reflect legislative intent.
Also, while the statute doesn't have an express de minimis exception, one can look by analogy to the fact that no one is prosecuted because the currency they receive as change from a restaurant has trace amounts of cocaine (which 80% of dollar bills in circulation do).
Another potential challenge under the federal constitution would be based upon the dormant commerce clause (as in impediment to interstate and international commerce in ordinary trade goods), under a "rational basis test" argument under the Equal Protection Clause (to highlight the lack of any positive reason to enact the law read broadly), or under a "void for vagueness" analysis that assuming the law wasn't intended to have absurd consequences it isn't clear how far it was intended to go.
Lack of knowledge that one is in possession of the substance due to lack of advanced chemical knowledge not shared by most members of the legislature would also be a defense in many cases, because many controlled substances offenses require you to have knowledge that you are in possession of a controlled substance.
