Regulating Cold Medicine May Be Prescription for Meth Labs

May 21--Making methamphetamine is as easy as shopping at a store where the highly addictive drug's ingredients -- from cold medicine to batteries and soda bottles to "cook" the drug in -- are available.

"If you can follow a Toll House chocolate chip recipe, you can make meth," Marshall Fisher, director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, said at a round-table discussion in Columbia earlier this month.

Simplified cooking methods and easy access to ingredients, including a cold medicine that is key to making meth, have led to a spike in S.C. meth lab incidents, which increased more than 300 percent from 2010 to 2012, S.C. law enforcement leaders say. Efforts to curb the rising number of toxic meth labs are not working, they add.

The answer to the problem, they say, may lie in Oregon and Mississippi, states that say they have reduced the number of meth labs by enacting laws making cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, the decongestant used to make meth, available by prescription only.

A bill sponsored by state Sen. Mike Fair, R-Greenville, would do the same in South Carolina.

By making pseudoephedrine products available by prescription only, Fair hopes to stifle the growing "cottage industry" of meth cooks who employ straw buyers -- "smurfers" -- to skirt state law that now limits the amount of pseudoephedrine products any one person now can buy over the counter.

But critics say Fair's bill would come at a cost to responsible consumers, requiring them to get prescriptions for the cold medicine they need.

"Why punish everyone for this problem?" said state Sen. Kevin Bryant, R-Anderson, a pharmacist who said he takes "a Sudafed every morning" for his allergies.

"Cold and allergy sufferers, we're going to put them through this, and I just can't support that," he said.

'Deader than a doornail'

Despite purchasing limits and the state's adoption of a database to track cold medicine purchases, the number of meth labs discovered in South Carolina has been climbing -- to about 45 a month in 2012 from 26 in 2007.

Meth lab incidents include active and non-active labs, dump sites and seizures of the chemicals used to cook meth. Meth lab discoveries this year, through April, are on course to surpass last year's total, with 185 incidents or 46 a month.

The rising number of meth labs is alarming to law enforcement because of the safety and health risks that the labs pose to neighbors and children, including explosions and fires, and the cost of cleaning them up.

Law enforcement officers have found 165 children at meth labs discovered in South Carolina since mid-2011, according to the state Law Enforcement Division. During that same period, the state has spent more than $1.8 million to clean up meth sites.

Making pseudoephedrine prescription-only nationwide would make the meth lab problem disappear practically "overnight," said Rob Bovett, a Lincoln County, Ore., district attorney who helped craft his state's restrictions on the cold medicine. Pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in about 15 cold medicines, is the most accessible drug available that can be used to cook meth, Bovett said.

Other drugs can be used to make meth, but they are difficult for someone living in the United States to obtain and require more advanced knowledge of chemistry, far beyond the limited skill required by the "shake-and-bake" method of cooking meth, he said.

Fair said he will push for a subcommittee hearing on his bill after lawmakers return in January for the second year of their current two-year session.

But opposition to similar bills in other states has been fierce. Bills to make pseudoephedrine prescription only have failed in 22 other states, Oregon's Bovett said.

Bryant says Fair's bill will face a similar fate in South Carolina.

"It won't happen," he said. "With parliamentary procedures, we can keep this bill deader than a doornail, which we've pledged to do."

Incidents on the rise

The cold medicines used to make meth were prescription-only until 1976, when the Food and Drug Administration declared them safe for over-the-counter sale.

Meth production grew increasingly until the middle of the last decade, when states and the federal government took steps to limit access to meth's ingredients.

In 2004, the number of meth labs that federal money was used to clean up peaked at 24,155, according to a January U.S. Government Accountability Office report. However, in 2006, Congress passed a law limiting how much cold medicine with pseudoephedrine consumers could buy, moving the drugs behind the counter and requiring states to track their sales.

Meth lab incidents nationwide plummeted to 6,951 in 2007, according to the federal report, but have been climbing since, reaching 15,314 in 2010.

Many states, including South Carolina, also have adopted a national database -- paid for by the drug companies that make cold medicines -- that tracks purchases.

But meth lab discoveries are on the rise in South Carolina, said Lt. Max Dorsey, clandestine laboratory coordinator for the state Law Enforcement Division. Dorsey said only about 10 percent of meth labs are found because of data pulled from the tracking database.

SLED's Dorsey would like South Carolina -- like Oregon and Mississippi -- or the federal government to make pseudoephedrine prescription only. But efforts to get Congress to act have been unsuccessful, leaving states to look for their own solutions.

"Soon (states) realize, 'Oh my, this is not stopping anything,'" Oregon's Bovett said of the tracking system. "We just have too many people to arrest, too many people to investigate, too many people to lock up."

Oregon's meth-lab incidents dropped to seven in 2012 from 448 in 2004, results Bovett ties to the state making meth-related cold medicines prescription-only in 2006.

But a study paid for by manufacturers of over-the-counter medicines challenged Oregon's claims that the number of labs fell after pseudoephedrine was made prescription-only. That study argued the number of meth labs already was dropping as a result of a previously passed laws that moved the medicines behind the counter and limited purchases.

But Oregon prosecutor Bovett says that meth cooks found ways around those laws, employing "smurfers" to buy the medicines for them. The prescription-only rule has eliminated smurfing in Oregon and kept the numbers of meth lab incidents consistently low, he said.

Borders an issue

Mississippi was considering joining the national database to track drug purchases, when officials heard about Oregon's experiment and decided instead to push for a prescription-only law, said Fisher, that state's narcotics director.

Since the Mississippi law took effect in mid-2010, meth labs incidents have dropped dramatically, he said. In 2012, the state had 253 incidents, down from 692 incidents in 2009. So far this year, Mississippi has had 59 incidents.

Those numbers would be lower if neighboring states passed their own prescription-only laws, Fisher said, citing evidence of Mississippi residents going to neighboring states to buy meth-related medicines.

Tennessee, for instance, has seen a major influx of Mississippi drivers' licenses being used to buy cold medicines used in meth, said Tommy Farmer, director of Tennessee's meth task force.

Tennessee has been tracking pseudoephedrine purchases for years, Farmer said. But "sales have increased, despite restrictions, despite controls, despite everything we've done," Farmer said. "Smurfing became more organized overnight. While tracking is a tool, it does nothing to stop meth labs."

State Law Enforcement Chief Mark Keel also agrees tracking purchases is not working.

Having met recently with leaders of other states' investigative agencies, Keel says the solution for the meth- lab problem that stood out was making cold medicines with pseudoephedrine prescription-only. Questions about whether such a change would cost consumers or inconvenience them are "legitimate concerns" that need to be evaluated, he added.

SLED's Dorsey said law enforcement's time would be better spent stopping major drug traffickers, not tracking meth cooks and spending money to clean up the labs they leave behind.

"I'd rather stop it on the front end," he said. "Whenever we've found a lab, that means we've lost."

Survey: