OKLAHOMA LAW REDUCES METH MISERY

Makeshift Meth Labs Are Much More Scarce Since Lawmakers Limited Access To
Pseudoephedrine, Law Enforcement Officials Say

Oklahoma City, Okla. - Inside the congested Wal-Mart store near one of
Oklahoma City's busiest malls, customers became agitated last spring when
they suddenly could not find some cold and allergy medicines.

"About half of them complained," pharmacist Martin Pham recalled. "A lot of
them didn't know about our new law or why we would do that."

Pham, too, was a little frustrated when Oklahoma lawmakers took a bold step
to try to rid that state of the thousands of small, make-it-yourself
methamphetamine laboratories that had spawned public health and safety
problems.

In April, lawmakers required pharmacies to take over the sale of dozens of
medicines that previously were available over-the-counter in supermarkets,
convenience stores and discount stores. The lawmakers acted because those
products were being used to make illicit, highly addictive meth. The new
law designated pills and tablets made with pseudoephedrine a controlled
narcotic, meaning only licensed pharmacists could sell them. The law also
required buyers to show photo identification and sign a log before they
could purchase the products - an added nuisance to both consumers and
pharmacists.

At the time, Pham and other pharmacists said, most residents of Oklahoma
did not understand why dozens of cold and allergy medicines such as Actifed
and Claritin-D were moved behind pharmacy counters.

But Oklahomans were well-versed on the misery caused by meth manufacturing.
There had been house explosions and law officers killed, dead babies and
burned children. Millions of dollars had been spent cleaning up toxic dump
sites and poisoned homes where meth was found, and the state's courts,
jails and prisons were clogged with the makers and users of meth.

Once pharmacists, grocers and others explained the connection between the
problems and the new law, the grumbling died down.

"I think there's no question that this law's been a good deal," Pham said
recently. "Meth has cost us all so much more than this little inconvenience."

More than two dozen states have shown interest in following Oklahoma's
lead. While some retail and drug organizations have urged less-restrictive
action, supporters argue that meth-makers need to be cut off from easy
access to pseudoephedrine, meth's main ingredient.

In Iowa, one of the states hit hardest by the meth epidemic, Gov. Tom
Vilsack has said making pseudoephedrine a controlled substance is his top
public safety priority for 2005.

"The governor's priority in Iowa remains children," said Matt Paul,
Vilsack's spokesman. "The production and sale of this drug has put children
at risk. It is time for a new approach, and the time to act is now."

Just months after moving to restrict pseudoephedrine sales to legitimate
buyers, many people in Oklahoma are ready to declare meth manufacturing a
fading problem in their state. Local, state and federal law enforcement
officials say volatile, makeshift labs that wreaked havoc for years still
exist, but they are much more scarce.

Zoom

In November 2004, law officers in Oklahoma found 19 meth labs, one-fifth
the number they discovered before the law was changed.

For the first time, agents who once only had time for the most pressing or
"sure-bet" reports of meth-lab activity now have time to investigate other
drug-related crimes. Some members of the state's 27 drug task forces are
being reassigned to other drug problems that had been neglected, such as
cocaine and ecstasy trafficking, and marijuana growing.

"At this point, I think we've got it under control," said Lonnie Wright,
head of Oklahoma's Bureau of Narcotics.

As promising as Oklahoma's success appears to have been, however, efforts
in other states to control medicines with pseudoephedrine - the only
ingredient that cannot be substituted in meth-making - have not been easy.
In recent years, retail and pharmaceutical groups have successfully fought
off the most restrictive measures aimed at controlling sales of products
containing pseudoephedrine.

Critics of tougher laws have contended that moving and tracking sales of
hundreds of medications would cost retailers more. Other critics have said
such laws unduly burden pharmacies, invade the privacy of consumers and
make people's favorite medicines more difficult to get.

In Oklahoma there has been little backlash to the new law, drug enforcers,
pharmacists and state officials say.

Easy Meth Recipe Spreads Like Plague

Nik Green, an off-duty highway patrolman, was summoned before dawn the day
after Christmas in 2003.

A woman delivering newspapers told the 35-year-old father of three from
Devol, Okla., that there was a man slumped over in his vehicle not far
away. The man's trunk and car doors were open, she said.

Green found the car near a wheat field on a country road about a mile from
his home. Inside was Ricky Ray Malone, who had been released from jail on
drug and weapons charges four days earlier. Officials later said Malone was
cooking a batch of meth in his car when Green approached.

A video camera mounted on Green's patrol car recorded what happened next.

A fight broke out, and seconds later Malone shot Green with the officer's
own gun, authorities said.

Days later, a bill that would become known as the Trooper Green Act began
to advance through the Oklahoma Legislature. The bill limited sales of all
pseudoephedrine pills or tablets to 9 grams, or about 10 boxes, and
required buyers to make the purchase only from licensed pharmacists. A full
range of liquid pseudoephedrine products - including gel capsules and
pediatric medicines - would remain widely available at most retail outlets.
Though liquid and gel products can be converted to meth, few of those
products had been used in labs, authorities said.

The bill was studied by the Oklahoma narcotics bureau, an agency that had
showed success in fighting methamphetamine before. The bureau was
instrumental in outlawing - first in Oklahoma, then the nation - the
commercial sale of phenyl acidic acid, which at one time was the key
chemical used to make another form of methamphetamine in the 1970s and '80s.

By the time the narcotics bureau approached the Oklahoma Legislature in
2004, however, law enforcement officials had been inundated with an
entirely different type of meth lab. The new recipe for meth could be made
inexpensively in a few hours with just a few household products and
hundreds of pseudoephedrine pills or tablets.

Cheaper and longer lasting than meth imported from Mexico, the
make-it-yourself recipe spread across Oklahoma like a plague. From 2000 to
2004, the number of labs discovered in that state mushroomed from 399 to
894, according to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration figures.

During the same time, authorities learned of "rogue" convenience stores
that were making huge profits by selling large quantities of products
containing pseudoephedrine to meth-makers. During a seven-month period in
2002, seven stores in the Oklahoma City area sold $35,000 to $70,000 worth
of pseudoephedrine products each. The total far exceeded the amount of
Coca-Cola products the stores sold, according to the narcotics bureau.

Green became the third Oklahoma trooper to be killed by someone addicted to
meth. But there were scores of other casualties.

In 2003, an 8-month-old toddler in a walker "roasted to death" while stuck
over a furnace grate while his parents, both addicted to meth, slept off a
drug binge, authorities said.

By 2004, the prison system in Oklahoma was spending a record $700 million
annually. Most new inmates had committed meth-related crimes. Mental health
and substance-abuse treatment systems, also dominated by meth, cost another
$234 million. Growing domestic violence and child-welfare costs tallied
$123 million.

Before the Oklahoma Legislature considered the bill making pseudoephedrine
a controlled substance, the narcotics bureau summoned trade groups,
business people and civic leaders to talk about the state's methamphetamine
problem. Agents underscored how just one oxygen molecule - burned off
during the cooking process - separated pseudoephedrine from the form of
methamphetamine that had swept the state.

"We felt that when rational people weighed this versus the cost and the
carnage of meth in our state, it was a very simple solution," said Wright,
the head of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

The legislation, the leaders were told, still allowed virtually any grocery
or convenience store to sell liquid pseudoephedrine products. "Just about
every major brand makes a liquid form of their product," Wright said. "For
all practical purposes, they do the same thing."

Vance McSpadden, executive director of Oklahoma Petroleum Marketers
Association, a trade group representing convenience stores, said few people
wound up opposing the proposed law. "I think we all realized that this was
a chance for us to do what we knew was the right thing," he said.

Phil Woodward, executive director of the Oklahoma Pharmacy Association,
said most pharmacists were willing to take on added inconveniences, given
the state's growing addiction problems and the widespread theft of cold
products from stores.

"It was sort of a mother-and-apple-pie thing," he said. "Who would be
against it?"

Ron Edgmon, president of the Oklahoma Grocers Association, was one of many
lobbyists who supported the measure.

"We just have such a problem here," he said. "It had become obvious that
something had to be done."

Narcotics officials said they never promised a decline in drug use. Whether
meth usage waned or not, meth labs were costing the state too much not to
do anything. And when the pseudoephedrine bill finally reached the Oklahoma
Senate, the bill passed unanimously.

'Smurfers' Remain A Problem

From April to November 2004, 111 meth labs were discovered near Oklahoma
City and Tulsa. During the same months in 2003, 232 labs had been discovered .

That number in the state's two most populated areas suggests to narcotics
agents that they still have a problem with "smurfers," or people who go
from pharmacy to pharmacy buying products containing pseudoephedrine until
they have enough to cook into meth.

Sheila Bhakta, a pharmacist for the CVS drugstore chain in Oklahoma City,
said people who are gaunt and look strung out still come in trying to buy
several packages of pseudoephedrine pills at one time. "We just tell them
they can only buy two packages and make them sign a log," she said.

Wright said narcotics officials have begun to try to determine which
pharmacies are selling more to buyers than the state's limit. The state is
also using grant money this year to create a statewide database that will
more easily show when people are buying more products than they could
safely use.

Meth-related tragedies continue. In September Oklahoma prosecutors for the
first time brought first-degree murder charges against an addict whose baby
boy was stillborn. Early last month, narcotics officials say, two young
children died in a mobile home explosion triggered by an alleged meth lab.
Pseudoephedrine packages found on the scene were purchased over the state
border, according to the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

Nationally, trade organizations continue to fight national and regional
efforts to adopt the Oklahoma legislation.

Linda Suydam, president of the Consumer Healthcare Product Association,
said she is not convinced that tighter restrictions on certain
non-prescription, over-the-counter medicines are the answer. She has
suggested that Oklahoma's decline in meth labs could be attributed to less
money available to law enforcement teams or to other law changes -
assertions that Oklahoma officials deny.

"We just believe Oklahoma has gone too far with their approach," Suydam
said. "It doesn't allow the legitimate consumer access to a product in a
reasonable way."

However, representatives from several trade organizations in the state said
they have heard no major concerns expressed about Oklahoma's law since it
was enacted last year.

Said McSpadden, the petroleum marketers association official: "I don't know
that stores have lost many sales. We just haven't had a backlash."

Critics of the Oklahoma law have said meth addicts there can still purchase
meth imported from Mexico and southern California. Wright, the narcotics
bureau director, said that before the law was passed, few drug agents had
time to investigate cases of large meth traffickers because agents were so
busy with the meth-making labs located throughout the state.

Before the law was changed, narcotics officials said, Wal-Mart stores were
unintentionally the largest supplier of pseudoephedrine products used to
make meth in Oklahoma, either through inadvertent sales or through shoplifting.

"Early on, it was kind of a headache," said Pham, the Wal-Mart pharmacist.
"But it's working."