New rule limits sale of meth ingredient

Thursday, Oct. 18, 2001 | 9:53 a.m.

A new regulation passed by the state Board of Pharmacy is designed to make it tougher for people to produce methamphetamine in a home lab.

Pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in the popular Sudafed cold and allergy pills, is a key ingredient in the illegal production of methamphetamine, also known as crank. Some forms of methamphetamine are legal when prescribed by a doctor and can be used to treat attention deficit disorders or obesity.

The illegal form of the stimulant results in a physical and emotional high that lasts longer than cocaine, according to medical experts. Prolonged use can result in organ damage, depression and even death.

Large-dose bottles of pseudoephedrine, containing up to 120 pills, are sold over the counter at truck stops, convenience stores and even at shops purporting to sell cellular phones, Metro Police Detective Chris Bunn said.

The drug dealers will buy dozens of phones from a discount warehouse and set up a display, Bunn said. The phones in the window are usually the shop's only inventory, Bunn said.

There's also an active black market for 1,000-pill bottles of pseudoephedrine, which are illegal in the United States but available for sale in Canada, Bunn said. During a raid in Las Vegas earlier this year, investigators seized 197 cases of pseudoephedrine; there were 144 bottles in each case, he said.

The new regulation, approved Wednesday by the pharmacy board, will make it illegal to sell pseudoephedrine over the counter unless the pills are in blister packs. The large-dose bottles will now be considered Schedule III narcotics, requiring a doctor's prescription.

The new regulation will not affect customers who buy boxes of Sudafed or other pseudoephedrine products in the usual packages of 12, 24 or even 96 pills.

The blister packs were designed as a safety mechanism to prevent tampering. The packs are also favored by many manufacturers because the flat packaging takes up less space than the traditional bottles, said one pharmaceutical distributor.

The blister packs would make it much more difficult to gather the pills needed for production of the illegal drug, said Louis Ling, attorney for the pharmacy board. Instead of dumping out a bottle of loose pills, each individual tablet would have to be punched out from the plastic card's aluminum safety seal.

About 17,000 tablets are needed to cook a batch of methamphetamine, which takes anywhere from four to eight hours to produce, Bunn told the board. The tablets are ground up and boiled with various chemicals and solvents, including alcohol and even insecticides. This makes for a highly flammable combination.

The people doing the cooking follow the "recipe" and often have little idea of the physical dangers involved in the process, he said.

"We're not talking about rocket scientists here," Bunn said during the hearing. "These people have no clue, no clue how it actually works. That's why we have so many fires and explosions." Most batches yield about 454 grams of the drug with a street value of more than $45,000, Bunn said.

In 1996 Metro uncovered 86 methamphetamine labs in the Las Vegas area. By last year, that number had increased to 282. By eliminating easy access to a key ingredient, many of the smaller drug operations will simply disappear, Bunn said.

At one shop, Christmas decorations lining the walls were supposedly the only inventory. The store took in $120 a month selling ornaments and $50,000 a month on pseudoephedrine, Bunn said.

Most pharmacies already have limits on how many packages of Pseudoephedrine a person may buy at any one time, board member Keith McDonald said. If the new regulation results in more shoplifting of the drug, pharmacies will likely solve the problem by taking the boxes off the shelves and putting them behind the counter, McDonald said.