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Meth cooks finding loopholes Wednesday, Mar 26, 2008 By Sara Spivey Stephens Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - Drug dealers have found a loophole in the law intended to cut off their access to key ingredients used to manufacture methamphetamine, according to law enforcement officials in Arkansas. Some meth makers are requiring customers to supply their own ephedrine or pseudoephedrine in an effort to get around the federal limit on how much can be bought at one time. "The cooks and buyers have figured this out and found a way to work the system," said Chris Harrison, chief illicit laboratory chemist at the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory. The chemicals are common ingredients found in cold tablets like Sudafed and Actifed, kept behind the pharmacy counter but sold without a prescription. National and state laws limit per-person sales to 3.6 grams per day and nine grams per month, about 300 30 mg pills. Harrison said a good "cooker" can produce about 8.5 grams of meth from the monthly pseudoephedrine limit, a "decent amount" for someone with a small meth habit. Some addicts are going one step further than simply supplying their own cold pills, said Sgt. Doug Pope of the Fayetteville-based 4th Judicial District Task Force. They do their own preliminary work of boiling the pills to extract the key ingredients, he said. The remains are then taken to the cooks who complete the manufacturing process. The ingredients are filtered and combined with lithium battery acid, farm fertilizer, brake cleaner, drain cleaner or other toxic chemicals, then cooked and filtered again to achieve the final product. The practice shortens the time that dealers are working in their labs and are vulnerable to detection, Pope said. "Everything is already broken down in the correct form," Pope said. "They spend a couple of hours cooking the meth and then leave." Making addicts the ones to purchase the cold pills shifts some risk away from dealers, said William J. Bryant, assistant special agent in charge of Drug Enforcement Administration operations in Arkansas. "Sometimes the cookers want the buyers to bring in the chemicals, or they'll have a chemical runner to go buy them," Bryant said. "They'll give them dope, or pay them." The practice is happening in mostly rural areas of Arkansas, said Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder. Arkansas law enforcement officials hope a new statewide database of cold medicine purchases may help close the loophole. By May 15, every pharmacy in Arkansas will be hooked in to LeadsOnLabs, an online record of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine purchases. Anyone wanting to purchase cold medicine will be required to swipe his or her driver's license into the LeadsOnLabs system. The database will interact with the pharmacist's point-of-sale system and return a color-coded response, said John O'Brien, communications director of LeadsOnLabs. O'Brien said the response will be green if the purchase is OK, red if the buyer has already reached the limit for the month. Customers can call a toll-free phone number if they believe they should be allowed the purchase, he said. "But I don't expect that phone number to get used very much," O'Brien said. The program is already installed in more than 300 pharmacies in the state, and the company hopes to finish installing them in the more than 700 pharmacies throughout the state by the end of April, he said. Pharmacies in Benton, Mountain Home and North Little Rock have been using the database for more than a year, Harrison said. In addition to stopping illegal sales, the system may lead to more lab busts by making it easier for law enforcement to track suspicious purchases - like someone buying pills from two different pharmacies in less than 24 hours, Harrison said. "Any law enforcement agency that wants to proactively use it will have great success," he said. Statewide meth lab seizures are already up for the year. In January and February, officials seized 79 labs, compared to 58 in the same months of 2007, Harrison said. |
