COLD PILLS A HOT TOPIC IN METH FIGHT

It's in pills in nearly everyone's medicine cabinet, on chain-store shelves
and in small bottles on convenience-store racks.

It's in well-known products such as Sudafed and Dimetapp and in some
obscure but aptly named brands such as Action and Revive Yourself!

To most people, using pseudoephedrine is an easy way to clear a stuffy nose
or fight the common cold.

To methamphetamine cooks, it's gold.

Pseudoephedrine is the primary ingredient in making the addictive and
highly profitable street drug.

While police have found thousands of empty pseudoephedrine pill bottles
piled in closets or dumped along lonely roads and seized clever home-made
devices designed to pop pills out of blister packs by the hundreds, the war
to keep the over-the-counter pills out of the hands of the homemade-meth
maker has been one with few victories.

"They cook to feed their own habits, pay the bills and gather up the
ingredients for the next cook, because they live from cooking process to
cooking process," says Marlon Hoyle, a drug detective with the King County
Sheriff's Office. "And we haven't had the resources to do anything about it."

Now a new state law, which took effect this summer, aims to crack down on
pseudoephedrine sales and promises the state will better track who's buying
the drug.

Many law-enforcement leaders scoff at the law as a feel-good measure that
will do little more than be a minor inconvenience to meth cooks. Similar
measures in other states have done little to stem the meth epidemic.

Still, plenty of other local police say it's at least a new weapon, this
time aimed not at meth itself, but the key ingredient in the recipe.

"This isn't a war on meth, it's a war on pseudoephedrine," says Tacoma
police Capt. Bill Meeks, whose city has had an anti-pseudoephedrine
ordinance for about a year. The state law is modeled on Tacoma's law.

"Everybody asks us how we're going to win this war. It ain't going to be
from cleaning up labs. And it ain't going to be from removing drug-addicted
children from homes. And it ain't going to be from chasing around street
dealers. The only way to fight this meth problem is to fight
pseudoephedrine. So the gloves are off."

The simple procedure to cook ephedrine drugs into meth is called the "Nazi
method" because the Germans developed it in the losing days of World War
II, to keep their tired, dwindling troops fighting. And police
not-so-jokingly call the methamphetamine cookeries that use the recipe
"Beavis and Butthead labs," after the air-guitar playing, brain-addled
teens depicted in the 1990's animated television show of the same name.

"This process is done regularly by people who have trouble stringing
multisyllable words together," Detective Hoyle says. "They're not exactly
rocket scientists."

Although meth labs range from tiny to large-scale operations, police say
they regard every lab as a big deal.

"A lab is a lab, and if you're producing an ounce or 2 ounces, the danger
is there as much as if it's a pound or 2 pounds," said Debora Podkowa, a
federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent in Portland and a
regional expert on meth labs. "Oftentimes smaller labs have more hazards.
You open the fridge and find the chemicals next to little Johnny's school
lunch."

A case of 144 bottles of pseudoephedrine tablets on the black market costs
about $1,500 these days, up from $400 a few years ago, police say. But they
say even a sloppy cook can turn that case of cold pills into about a pound
of meth. And that sells for $80 to $120 a gram on the street. That's at
least $35,000 in profit per case of pills.

Most pseudoephedrine comes to North America from factories in China and
India, and according to a December 2000 DEA report, imports to the U.S.
nearly tripled in the late 1990s as methamphetamine use took off. The
report cautions, though, that it's impossible to say how much of the
increase can be directly linked to meth.

The DEA tracks pseudoephedrine distribution on the higher levels, but it
loses track when the pills reach small distributors.

Those small distributors often are one-man operations selling
pseudoephedrine products wholesale to convenience stores along with other
items such as snacks, prophylactics, novelty cigarette lighters, key rings
- - and sometimes drug paraphernalia.

These distributors are supposed to report unusually large sales - usually
more than a case - to the state Board of Pharmacy. But if a storekeeper
buys one case from six different distributors, it goes unreported.

"Right now that's the kink in the system," says Grant Chester, operations
director of the Pharmacy Board. "And you've got a few employees who work
for shopkeepers who sell it to the cooks."

=46or police, it has been next to impossible to do anything about it.

"Who's got the resources to watch every 7-Eleven store or follow some guy
around to five 7-Eleven stores?" Detective Hoyle says.

The DEA has been passing out fliers to stores explaining why clerks
shouldn't sell bulk quantities of cold pills and other chemicals used to
cook meth.

Major chain stores voluntarily stopped selling large quantities of
methamphetamine-making products. And the DEA says large pharmaceutical
companies such as Pfizer are trying to develop new pseudoephedrine pills
that can't be cooked into meth.

But fliers and cooperation only do so much, local police say.

That's where the new state law comes in.

Mirroring Tacoma and Pierce County, the state Legislature last session
voted to make selling, at one time, more than three packages of products
containing pseudoephedrine a gross misdemeanor. The limit is one package if
the product contains more than 3 grams of pseudoephedrine.

The law also makes it illegal for a customer to buy more than those amounts
in a single day. Anyone caught with more than 15 grams can be busted.

The law also orders the state Pharmacy Board to develop a system so that
small distributors have to report every sale, even if it's just a case.

"You have to know which mom-and-pop convenience store is buying 60 cases,"
Chester said. "You've got to track those abnormalities. The hope is that by
finding out where the unusual amounts are going, the police can stop it
before it goes to the manufacturers."

And Tacoma police say their year of experience has shown that's what the
law does.

"Stores that before would sell to our undercover officers now won't sell to
undercover officers," said Tacoma police Capt. Meeks. "That tells us the
supply has been diminished."

At first, the Tacoma ordinance was criticized by people who feared police
could use it to hassle innocent cold sufferers who inadvertently stockpiled
too much Dimetapp.

"We've always said that's crazy," Meeks said. "Why would we go after kids
with colds? We're going after store owners who sell massive quantities of
pseudo to meth cooks."

Just like everywhere else, the meth problem in Tacoma is as bad as ever.
But thanks to the ordinance, Meeks said, police now have a way to tap into
underground pseudoephedrine trafficking.

They credit their ordinance with providing the first breaks in what has
become the state's largest bust of pseudoephedrine sales. After a long
investigation with the DEA and raids spreading from Pierce to Lewis
counties, federal prosecutors last month indicted more than a dozen people,
including several convenience-store owners, on federal drug and
racketeering charges.

According to prosecutors, the sophisticated ring was moving huge quantities
of pseudoephedrine from the legal retail system to meth cooks. And some of
the members committed armed robberies and burglaries to get the pills.

"And those guys are nothing; they're just run-of-the-mill," said Meeks, who
said his detectives and the federal agents are working on several
investigations of much larger trafficking rings.

Police in other departments say they have similar hopes now that the state
law is in effect.

"The biggest benefit won't just be that we arrest someone for violating
this law," said Capt. Jim Pryor, who heads the Seattle Police Department's
drug squad. "It'll be that violating that law provides us information to
pursue other leads."

But other police leaders aren't so sure. In Lewis County, which like many
rural areas has a growing methamphetamine problem, Sheriff John McCroskey
calls the state law toothless.

It's almost routine for Lewis County drug officers to recover tens of
thousands of empty pseudoephedrine bottles from rural dump sites and meth
labs. Often the bottles, their bottoms lopped off by a cutting device that
neatly empties a case in an instant, all come from a few identifiable batches.

"Whoever sold the 30,000 containers out the back door knew exactly what
they were doing," said McCroskey, who thinks methamphetamine production
should carry more serious penalties and should count as a strike under the
state's "three-strikes" law.

"Don't B.S. the general public into thinking you're doing something when
you're not," the sheriff says.

His assessment is supported by the experiences of California, which has had
a similar anti-pseudoephedrine law for more than four years.

"It makes it more difficult to buy Sudafed, but they just send out 25 guys
who spend all day going to every 7-Eleven, convenience stores, price clubs,
Rite-Aids, wherever they need to go and clean those places out," said Mike
Van Winkle, spokesman for the California Department of Justice.

"The truth is, in California, even after those laws were passed, we still
saw increases in meth labs each year."

And even the most optimistic officers confess their frustration comes from
something they can't help: Regular, honest people still get colds and hay
fever. And pseudoephedrine is still a useful, popular medicine with few
comparable over-the-counter substitutes.

Police can't ban it, as much as they sometimes think they'd like to.

"We're still the United States, and we have the Constitution, thank
goodness," DEA agent Podkowa says. "It makes it more difficult sometimes to
take care of something so horrible and hideous.

"But there's no easy fix."