Pharmacies log cold-pill sales; police say lab seizures on the decline
BY MARK MINTON SUNDAY, JULY 23, 2006
For police out to pick up the trail of methamphetamine cooks at the pharmacy counters where they buy their main ingredient, the clues would seem glaringly obvious: the name and address of each perpetrator, carefully recorded in logbooks.
But, 15 months after the Legislature required everyone buying a pseudoephedrine cold pill to show ID and sign a log, police concede that many methamphetamine cooks are going from store to store, buying a limit of pills at each counter until they have enough pseudoephedrine to fuel their labs.
Under the new law, each pharmacy keeps a log meant to restrict customers to the legal limit of 9 grams a month, an amount that pharmacists say is plenty for the worst allergy attack. But pharmacies do not compare their logs looking for names that match, and police say they don’t always have time to scour hundreds of pages of names gathered from far-flung drugstores.
Police say the 9-gram limit and bookkeeping requirements of Act 256 of 2005 have deterred would-be methamphetamine cooks afraid to record their names in the logs. Spot-checks of the logs have exposed some cooks who are still operating labs — and have solidified cases against cooks identified by the usual tips.
But as they credit the new law for sharply reducing the dangerous methamphetamine labs that were proliferating in Arkansas, police concede there are gaps.
“We made some cases, but it was something that was time consuming and hit-or-miss a lot of times,” said Sgt. Tim Willis of the North Little Rock Police Department.
As many as 80 percent of the people buying excessive quantities of cold pills at North Little Rock pharmacies were driving in from as far away as Bentonville, so the North Little Rock police had no jurisdiction to investigate, Willis said. And although the department checked the logs of the city’s 18 pharmacies daily, officers didn’t have the time to pursue every purchaser buying at multiple stores.
On July 1, North Little Rock became the first city in Arkansas to link the records of its pharmacies through a computer network. The clerk ringing up the sale scans the buyer’s driver’s license along with the package. The computer screen instantly alerts the clerk when a customer is already at the legal limit.
The system, provided by L.e.a.d.s.online, a Dallas company that markets a similar system to flag stolen items at pawnshops, has had an immediate effect that suggests how badly the old logbook system has been exploited by methamphetamine cooks: Cold-pill sales in North Little Rock have crashed.
Willis said officers accustomed to seeing 40 boxes a day logged at a single pharmacy counted a total of four boxes sold citywide one day last week.
Despite logs at each of the state’s more than 800 pharmacies, drug-enforcement officials could not say how many cold pills containing pseudoephedrine — popular brands include Sudafed and Tylenol Cold — are sold throughout Arkansas, or how the numbers may have changed.
But Keith Rutledge, the state drug director, points to another number — the plunge in Arkansas methamphetamine-lab seizures — as clear evidence that Act 256 is working.
According to the state Crime Laboratory, 1,206 labs were seized in Arkansas in 2004. Last year, it was down to 668 — a decline of 45 percent. Through June of this year, 238 labs have been seized, on pace for an annual decline of 29 percent.
Still, that’s 633 methamphetamine-lab seizures since the law restricting pseudoephedrine sales took effect on March 28, 2005. Police blame some of the problem on border states, such as Louisiana, that have more lenient laws.
But police say Christopher Brumley, 24, of Newport, didn’t have to go far to stock the methamphetamine lab they say they found in his bedroom on July 10, along with empty pill boxes. Brumley was being held Friday in the Jackson County jail on charges of manufacturing methamphetamine.
Chief Deputy Charles Vaughn of the Jackson County sheriff’s office said regular checks of the logs at Newport’s five pharmacies alerted police to Brumley, as well as a few other suspects.
“We can pinpoint on those fixing to cook off a batch,” he said.
Paul Suskie, city attorney in North Little Rock, said other Arkansas law-enforcement agencies are exploring tying into the city’s computerized network of pharmacies, which is similar to a system that Oklahoma is trying statewide.
In the meantime, the USAPATRIOT Act renewal that President Bush signed March 9 will soon add pseudoephedrine cold remedies sold in liquid and gel-cap form to those that require a signature. In Arkansas, they are sold off the shelf, with no documentation, because the Legislature determined that methamphetamine cooks could not use them. The federal gelcap provision will take effect in September.
The federal law has also added a 3.6-gram daily limit to the 9-gram monthly limit in Arkansas.
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