NLR to set up test program to track cold-medicine buys
BY JIM BROOKS Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Under a pilot program announced Tuesday by North Little Rock Police Chief Danny Bradley, pharmacies in his city will soon begin feeding electronic information about buyers of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine into a national database.
Pharmacies in Arkansas are required to take the names of purchasers of the drugs, which are commonly used as raw materials for the manufacture of methamphetamine. But, information about those purchases isn't shared among pharmacies.
Under the North Little Rock program, scheduled to begin in July, all information would be fed into a computer database to help police determine whether anyone is buying more cold medicine than can be used personally.
"Meth makers have found they can go from one store to another, buying two or three boxes at a time," Bradley said. "There's no way currently for the pharmacy to know what the pharmacy down the street is doing." The department has turned to a national company that markets a database system to police that tracks items sold at pawn shops to administer the pilot program. The company, Leadsonline, will call the test program Leadsonlabs, Bradley said. "This system is designed to simplify the reporting process for pharmacies, and to notify pharmacies when a prospective customer has reached the legal limit for purchases of these products," Bradley said.
North Little Rock City Attorney Paul Suskie said Arkansas Act 256, which requires pharmacies to gather the information, also allows the information to be gathered electronically. In the proposed North Little Rock program, pharmacies would "swipe" the magnetic strip on the back of a prospective customer's driver's license, gathering the identifying information.
The pharmacy would only gather information on people trying to buy ephedrine, pseudoephedrine and phenylpropanolamine, the three drugs mentioned in the state law. Suskie said a proposed ordinance authorizing the Police Department to set up the program will be submitted at Monday's City Council meeting. "I think that this legislation will close the last loophole in the problem of the purchase of precursor drugs," Suskie said. Bradley said North Little Rock narcotics detective Tim Willis came up with the idea for the program and called Leadsonline to see whether the proposed program was feasible.
"This system will tie local pharmacies' computer systems together, giving them real-time information about a potential customer's prior purchases of ephedrine," Bradley said. Currently, the information is gathered by individual pharmacies, but detectives have to go to the individual store to look at the information, police said.
Bradley and Suskie said information about a patient's prescription drug purchases will not be included in the system. "This just involves information that is already required to be gathered," Bradley said. "The information is not mixed with the pharmacy's other records." The chief said there are no costs to the city for the test period, but if successful, the cost to the department would be in the range of $10,000 to $15,000 per year to subscribe to the service.
"The costs of investigating and cleaning up one lab can be that much," Bradley said. |
