NEW RULE LIMITS SALE OF METH INGREDIENT

Illegal To Sell Pseudoephedrine In Large Amounts

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.