MEDICAL MARIJUANA CREEPING ACROSS STATE LINES

Pot and meth are on the minds of the law enforcement agencies tasked
with fighting illegal drugs.

Chris Endress, director of the Quad Cities Metropolitan Enforcement
Group, returned Friday from a week-long conference in Washington,
D.C., where various agencies discussed drug-related issues facing law
enforcement.

Top on the list was medical marijuana, Mr. Endress said. High-quality
cannabis now legal in some states is making its way into states where
it is illegal, including Illinois.

"We've seized hundreds of pounds of medical marijuana that's coming
from California," Mr. Endress said. In 2009, about half of the
Quad-Cities MEG busts were marijuana, and much of that was high-grade
medicinal cannabis, he said.

It is traveling along Interstate 80, but can also show up via delivery
services and by other methods, Mr. Endress said.

States where the drug is legal are having trouble regulating its
production, so much of what is being grown is finding its way onto the
black market, he said.

In some cases, foreign drug cartels are infiltrating the medical
marijuana field to sell their product, some of which has been found to
contain very high levels of pesticides, some of which are not legal in
the U.S., he said.

Officials at the conference were of the opinion that the best way to
deal with the issue is to find out what part of marijuana is helpful,
separate it and make it into a prescription medicine.

"Extract it, put it into an inhaler, pain patch or pill," he
said.

That way it would have to adhere to Federal Food and Drug
Administration standards, Mr. Endress said.

The conference also discussed various approaches to limiting
pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in methamphetamine, Mr. Endress said.

The two main trends are for states to restrict sales more stringently,
or to use computerized tracking to trace the amounts of
pseudoephedrine sold and where it is going, he said.

Mr. Endress said that the former reduces the number of meth labs
authorities encounter.

The latter helps authorities find meth labs, but also means there
could be more meth labs to find, increasing the dangers police and the
public face as well as the cost of fighting meth production.

Several countries, including Mexico, have banned pseudoephedrine in
the last year, Mr. Endress said. The practice has forced drug cartels
to make a less potent version which is not selling well.

Participants in the conference, which was hosted by the National
Narcotic Officers' Associations' Coalition, also went to Capitol Hill
to discuss issues and funding with legislators.

Mr. Endress said the Obama administration's proposed budget includes a
$30 million cut to one of the avenues through which narcotics
enforcement receives funding.

The QC MEG receives $100,000 of that money and uses it to help pay for
overtime, fuel and drug purchases, Mr. Endress said.

That money also helps agencies across the country work together to tie
their local drug enforcement together into national cases, Mr. Endress
said.

Delegates from the conference also said they were happy to see other
drug-fighting money untouched and hoped they stay that way, Mr.
Endress said. Locally, MEG pays for four agents with that money.

He said conference participants wanted to let legislators know the
federal money was well-spent.

From 2006 to 2009, the 21 Illinois MEG's and Task Forces have made
11,373 drug arrests -- 10,043 of them felonies, Mr. Endress said.
Almost 3,000 firearms and $460 million in illegal narcotics have also
been seized.

Legislators were supportive of continued funding for anti-narcotics
operations, Mr. Endress said. But many knew little of the issues
medical marijuana is creating for law enforcement.