Editorial: Stay strong on meth bill

Friday, Dec. 30, 2005 | 6:57 a.m.

We supported Senate Democrats in their successful efforts to postpone renewal of the USA Patriot Act so that its wording could be more carefully understood. But there was a casualty. Attached to the bill was a bipartisan measure to strictly regulate sales of cold medicine.

The postponement of the Patriot Act has bought time for the drug industry and its allies in the Bush administration to water down the cold-medicine bill or perhaps kill it outright. Fearing loss of sales, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have been successful for years in stifling similar legislation.

Why regulate cold medicine? Because most brands contain pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in methamphetamine. This is a highly addictive drug whose growing use around the country is alarming.

Addicted meth users acquire severe health problems, which are often treated at great expense in taxpayer-funded clinics and hospitals. The drug is also at the root of much crime committed by people desperate for money to feed their addictions. The users and makers are known to become violent, imperiling responding police officers.

The labs where meth is made endanger neighborhoods when they explode, as they often do. The quality of the environment is endangered too, as the toxic ingredients, which can include battery acid, drain cleaner, antifreeze and lye, are often poured into sewers, streams or vacant lots.

Earlier this year Oklahoma passed a law upon which Congress' bill is based. It requires stores to safeguard their supplies of cold medicines, to limit the amount sold to individual customers and to require customers to show identification and sign for their purchases. The state quickly experienced an 80 percent reduction in meth labs.

Oregon soon adopted a similar law. And a recent story by The Oregonian newspaper documented that Mexican drug cartels were obtaining tons of pseudoephedrine legally imported by the country's pharmaceutical industry. Congress' bill contains foreign-aid penalties for countries that fail to control the black market in pseudoephedrine, the paper reported.

Congress should stand tall against the pharmaceutical lobbyists and pass its cold-medicine bill as it is now written.