Columnist Susan Snyder: Condition too strong for Sudafed

Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2003 | 9:53 a.m.

At 6:15 a.m. one recent Saturday, I stood inside a local grocery store seeking salvation in a blister pack.

The Other was at home praying death would come quickly and quietly. Head colds bite.

I scanned the shelves for Sudafed or a similar remedy, trying to figure out which configuration of symptoms we needed to suppress.

Fever and aches? Sneezing and watery eyes, or simply a clogged-up head?

Sheesh, we even make colds complicated.

We have so many choices in this country that a simple task such as picking up something from the store is not even close to simple. The average supermarket carries something like 10 varieties of boxed macaroni and cheese.

And where was the Sudafed? There were labels on the shelves, but no drugs. Signs said it was at the pharmacy counter, available by request.

We now squirrel away a $5 box of cold medicine like it's as valuable as the expensive brandy or a camcorder.

It's actually more valuable if you're making methamphetamine. Pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in cold and allergy medicines, is the basis for meth. And Nevada pharmacies can't keep the medicines out of shoplifters' paws, said Jack Paige, an investigator with the Nevada Board of Pharmacy.

"You put them out there, and they're gone the next day. Totally wiped out," Paige said.

In 2001 the state pharmacy board made it tougher to purchase large quantities of pseudoephedrine. Bottles that contained more pills than the usual 24-pill blister packs could be sold only from behind the pharmacy counter.

Then whole shipments of the boxed varieties started disappearing from stores' shelves, Paige said.

"I remember I would go into a pharmacy to do an inspection, and they'd show me a section three feet long of empty pegs," he said.

For those who aren't up on the latest in-home brewed narcotics, methamphetamine is generally a white, odorless, bitter-tasting substance. It can be snorted, smoked or dissolved in water and injected. It makes people lunatics.

There are dozens of recipes for using household products -- fingernail polish remover, liquid drain cleaner, iodine -- to convert pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine. The list of recipes and substances that can be used in the process is long, Paige said.

"You can go online and pull up 15 or 20 recipes for it," he said.

One website says a manufacturer would need 29 of the 24-pill blister packs to make an ounce of meth. So depending on how many pills or what else people want to buy, a pharmacist can turn them away when they ask for the cold medicine.

"Most pharmacists, if you try to buy a certain set of products, they're going to say, 'Nope. Get out of here,' " Paige said. "People go crazy on that stuff."

Crazy enough to stab a 3-year-old girl to death and paralyze her 10-year-old sister, judging by recent events in Mesquite. The teens charged in the attack reportedly were angry because a man who lived with the girls sold them salt instead of meth.

Who would have thought we could make the common cold so complicated?