THE DRIVE FOR DRUGS

Oklahoma Passed A Law Making It Hard To Buy Products Containing
Pseudoephedrine. So Meth-makers Flooded Stores Just Across The State's
Borders. What Will Happen If Iowa Passes A Similar Law . . . Or If It Doesn't?

ARKANSAS CITY, Kan. -- The Phillips 66 station sits along Interstate
Highway 35, the first pit stop over the Oklahoma border for northbound
travelers headed into the heart of Kansas.

For years, the gas station and convenience store served mostly residents in
the rural area and long-haul motorists. But last year, station employees
began to notice a different clientele.

Gaunt and disheveled, they pulled up in rundown cars, almost always bearing
Oklahoma license plates. They came to Kansas to buy or steal cold and
allergy products made with pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in making
methamphetamine. Then they headed back south.

"Now we only put two packages out at a time, so they're not tempted," said
station clerk Sandra Friery. "That way, we're not contributing to the problem."

Cross-border purchases of pseudoephedrine products have become a greater
concern for Iowa and many other states, as lawmakers across the nation
consider even tighter controls on sales of products containing the popular
decongestant.

In April, Oklahoma became the first state to launch a no-holds-barred
attack on meth-making, designating pill forms of pseudoephedrine a
controlled substance that could be sold only by pharmacies.

For years, pseudoephedrine products have been to meth what flour is to
bread. Oklahoma leaders gambled - with noticeable success so far - that
cutting off easy access to the popular decongestant would begin the decline
of hundreds of small, toxic meth laboratories that have plagued states in
the past decade, cost taxpayers millions of dollars in law enforcement and
cleanup expenses, caused fires and explosions, and killed people, including
children.

Two dozen states, including Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri
and Nebraska, are considering new laws this year patterned after
Oklahoma's. Iowa officials worry, however, that if surrounding states pass
legislation and Iowa does not, the state's meth problems - already among
the worst in the nation - will grow more severe.

"I'm certain that we will become that little island that everyone goes to,"
said Iowa drug policy director Marvin Van Haaften, referring to meth-makers.

Last year, almost 1,400 meth labs and dump sites were discovered in Iowa -
a new state record.

While no comprehensive crime statistics have been collected, Kansas law
enforcement leaders say the second half of 2004 proved that meth cooks are
more than willing to take their business - and related crime - across state
lines.

"Most of our big arrests lately have been people from Oklahoma," said Lt.
Tim Brant, a police officer in Derby, Kan., located an hour's drive north
of the Oklahoma-Kansas border. "That new law is kicking our butts."

Authorities say meth addicts will have access to the drug even with the
tighter controls on pseudoephedrine being considered throughout the Midwest
this year. Although strides have been made in combating meth trafficking
and illegal imports of pseudoephedrine, the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration still estimates that roughly 80 percent of the nation's meth
supply comes from large drug organizations in Mexico and southern California.

The legislative proposals aimed at making pseudoephedrine a controlled
substance target the other source of the nation's meth supply: the
make-it-yourself clandestine labs. These small, toxic labs have
proliferated across the country in the past decade as meth's recipe becomes
better known.

Narcotics agents hope that limiting access to pseudoephedrine on a large
scale will dramatically reduce the country's domestic supply of meth.
Limiting sales of pseudoephedrine medicines on a small scale only pushes
meth-makers to find their pseudoephedrine elsewhere.

In Wichita, located north of Derby, police investigated 94 cases last year
in which officers believe pseudoephedrine was purchased for manufacturing
meth. Thirty-eight involved suspects from Oklahoma, said Lt. Alan Prince,
head of the city's 10-member clandestine lab enforcement team.

Lane Mangels, a meth lab investigator in Salina, Kan., a city closer to
Nebraska than Oklahoma, said his team also has responded to reports of
Oklahomans making pseudoephedrine purchases.

Oklahoma investigators say the meth labs seized in their state since the
pseudoephedrine law was passed suggest that meth-makers are having the most
success finding those products in either Tulsa or Oklahoma City, the
state's two largest cities, or across the border in Arkansas, Kansas and
Texas. Other than Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Bryan County, located near the
Texas border, has led the state in the number of meth labs discovered since
the law passed, with 15 labs found from May to November.

Oklahoma's new law has led out-of-state businesses to act where their state
governments have not.

Around the time Friery and her co-workers at the Phillips 66 station near
Arkansas City limited their stock of pseudoephedrine products last year,
other store clerks in Kansas also began placing limits on sales of
medications containing pseudoephedrine.

Jeneva Smith, a cashier at the Casey's General Store about 15 miles east of
Arkansas City, said employees were told to put the products behind the
store counter not long after the Oklahoma law took effect last spring.
Employees also were instructed to sell just one box of pseudoephedrine
pills at a time.

Yet, she said, meth-makers from Oklahoma still pull up regularly and try to
purchase as much pseudoephedrine as they can.

"You can always tell who they are," Smith said. "They're all ate-up looking."

Problems in Derby arrived in earnest last fall, police said.

Pseudoephedrine thefts grew worse, even after the two Dillons supermarkets
programmed their checkout scanners to sound alarms if customers tried to
buy more than three pseudoephedrine products at a time.

Eventually, the stores put security tabs inside boxes of pseudoephedrine
products so that shoplifters would trigger another alarm as they tried to
walk out with the products. That led to the discovery of empty packages
abandoned in the aisles or on store shelves, the pills having been plucked
out and pocketed.

Kansas, with about 615 known meth labs last year, had its own problems
before the Oklahoma law was passed. However, Brant, the Derby police
lieutenant, said a shift in crimes involving Oklahomans has been noticeable
since spring.

People who drive over the border to buy pseudoephedrine typically leave
trails of crime, he said.

In December, an Oklahoma man who drove away from a gas station without
paying for gas led Brant and other officers on a chase. The man's stolen
GMC pickup truck was outfitted with a power adapter and blender so that
pseudoephedrine pills could be crushed immediately for the mobile
meth-cooking operation the man had onboard.

"Quite frankly, we're tired of it," Brant said. "It's about time Kansas
ponied up. There's a certain quality of life here that people have come to
expect, and these kinds of drug problems aren't a part of it."