Limits are Sought For Selling Over-The-Counter Medicines Containing a Key Ingredient
By Alfred Lubrano, Philadelphia Inquirer
You can’t buy cold medicine in Oregon without showing a picture I.D.
If you try to buy four boxes of cold pills at a Wal-Mart anywhere in the country, you will be told to put one back.
In some states, pharmacists may soon be treating Sudafed, Contac, and other over-the-counter products like prescription medicines.
Those restrictions are part of the new war on drugs, now raging in a store or pharmacy near you.
At the heart of it all is pseudoephedrine, a decongestant that is a basic ingredient in 80 percent of all cold medicines and in some allergy remedies. Illicit “cooks” extract it from tablets to make methamphetamine, known as the poor man’s cocaine.
While it’s far down the list of Philadelphians’ drugs of choice, meth is prevalent in Western, Midwestern and Southern states. It will become a bigger problem here soon, law enforcement officials predict, citing the police seizure of nearly $1.8 million in methamphetamine in a Northeast Philadelphia home last month.
So Philadelphia narcotics police are gearing up, just now learning to brief local store owners about the need to manage the sale of products containing pseudoephedrine. The Philadelphia office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency says it is conducting several investigations into the production and distribution of crystal meth in the area.
“You Northeasterners are the last bastion that hasn’t been hit yet,” said U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency agent David Taylor of the joint Drug Enforcement Administration/FBI drug-fighting group known as the El Paso Intelligence Center. “But I hate to tell you: It’s coming.”
More addictive than crack and scarily efficient at eating away the human brain, methamphetamine is a stimulant that lights up the central nervous system. Also called speed, crank, crystal or ice, the drug can be smoked, injected, swallowed or snorted.
Originally made from the ephedra plant and used in the late 1800s as a decongestant, methamphetamine became a significant problem in the 1950s, when truckers abused it to stay awake. People began injecting it in the 1960s, and over the last 15 years its use has developed into the most dangerous drug epidemic ever seen in America, according to the DEA.
Admissions for treatment of meth addiction in the United States jumped 420 percent between 1992 and 2002, from 10 per 100,000 among the population aged 12 and over, to 52 per 100,000, federal health figures show.
These days, meth is becoming popular with women looking to lose weight and gain energy; with white, suburban youths who attend raves; and with gay men who use the drug to enhance sex.
Addicts cynically describe methamphetamine as “the only cure” for crack cocaine: Once they do meth, they abandon the crack pipe and never go back, according to Glen Hanson, a senior adviser to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the director of the Utah Addiction Center. Methamphetamine offers a longer high than crack: six to 12 hours vs. less than one hour, Hanson said.
“The downside is meth is a significant brain toxin,” while cocaine is not, Hanson said. Methamphetamine plays havoc with memory and systems that identify consequences.
People become impulsive and violent.
The drug is also the roughest to kick, Taylor said. “I know people who’ve beaten crack,” he added. “I don’t know anyone who’s beaten meth.”
Throughout the early 1990s, Mexican drug cartels flooded the West Coast with methamphetamine, diverting pseudoephedrine from manufacturers abroad, mostly in India and Southeast Asia, said Rob Bovett, legal counsel for the Oregon Narcotics Enforcement Association. Oregon is one of the states hardest hit by methamphetamine.
Today, about 80 percent of all methamphetamine in the United States is supplied by so-called super laboratories in Mexico and parts of the West Coast, Bovett said.
Because 20 percent of American methamphetamine is homemade by so-called mom-and-pop cooks who get pseudoephedrine from cold medicine, then make the drug by following recipes posted on the Internet, state officials believe they can control at least part of the drug trade.
The mom-and-pops usually aren’t big-time distributors, generally making enough only for themselves and their friends, officials say.
These days, a gram of meth sells for $70 to $100, compared with $100 a gram for crack and powder cocaine, according to the Philadelphia police.
So caustic is the witch’s brew used to create methamphetamine, entire houses have exploded during drug preparation. Site cleanups can take up to 16 hours and cost $100,000, said Inspector Joe Sullivan, commanding officer of the Philadelphia Police Department’s Narcotics Division.
While methamphetamine has been a problem for years, police have only recently begun to battle the scourge by limiting access to its main ingredient.
In October, the Oregon Board of Pharmacy ruled that all products containing pseudoephedrine must be sold in limited quantities only in licensed pharmacies or drug outlets; that they must be stored behind the counter, like prescription drugs; and that they cannot be sold to anybody without photo identification.
A similar law took effect last month in Illinois. Oklahoma enforces identical measures, with the added stipulation that anyone who buys products containing pseudoephedrine must sign a log kept in the pharmacy.
And in Oklahoma, you need a doctor’s prescription to buy regular over-the-counter cold medicine if you don’t have a picture identification.
There has been a federal law on the books since 2003 limiting the sale of products containing pseudoephedrine. But the law has been mostly ignored, and state laws are far stricter, said Blake Rice, president of the pharmacy board in Oregon.
In all, 27 states are considering legislation similar to Oklahoma’s to regulate cold-medicine purchases. Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware are not among them.
Taylor said he has seen evidence that methamphetamine labs are closing up in Oklahoma. Some people are skeptical, however.
“I don’t know how limiting the sale of cold medicine in one pharmacy stops you from buying it from the pharmacy next door,” said Cindy Fitzpatrick, spokeswoman for the Food and Drug Administration, which is not involved in limiting the sale of over-the-counter drugs.
While Mary Ann Wagner, vice president of pharmacy regulatory affairs for the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, supports limiting medicine sales, she does see another problem.
“Consumers won’t have the luxury of choosing from a wide variety of products if the medicines are kept behind the pharmacist,” she said. “There’s just not room behind the counters.”
Costco, Rite-Aid and Walgreens, along with Wal-Mart, have agreed to limit cold-medicine sales throughout the nation.
Not many people in the Philadelphia area are aware of pseudoephedrine limitations and the problems that methamphetamine spawns, because the drug isn’t big here.
Just 0.6 percent of men arrested in Philadelphia in 2003 tested positive for methamphetamine use, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Meanwhile, 45.8 percent of the arrested men tested positive for marijuana use, and 30.3 percent tested positive for cocaine. In comparison, 28.7 percent of men arrested in Los Angeles tested positive for methamphetamine in 2003.
During the late 1970s, Philadelphia was a major center of a less pure type of methamphetamine known as P2P, Sullivan said. Government crackdown on P2P ingredients helped curtail its spread.
But there are indications that the newer, purer meth may be moving east.
The El Paso center tracks three areas of methamphetamine activity: the number of meth labs discovered, the number of dump sites of meth by-products found, and the number of seizures of meth-making equipment. These are called methamphetamine incidents.
In 2002, Pennsylvania had 29 incidents. A year later, there were 62. And last year, there were 96 incidents, including 55 labs discovered. Most of those were in rural areas.
While the numbers don’t approach the 2,285 incidents in Missouri last year, they reflect a growing threat, Taylor said.
To compare, there were two labs found in New Jersey last year, and three in Delaware.
The big meth seizure in Northeast Philadelphia “vindicates what I’ve been predicting,” Sullivan said.
He added, however, that “the majority of methamphetamine now in Philadelphia is shipped from Phoenix and Southern California by Federal Express.”
To avoid problems before they start, Sullivan will soon be talking to owners of small, local convenience stores and markets who may be ignorant of the medicine-meth connection.
“The little stores is where the challenge will be in Philadelphia,” Sullivan said. “But we’re preparing an outreach program to educate them.
“I firmly believe more labs are coming. It’s only a matter of time.”