In Case YOU Missed It

THE WAR ON DRUGS IN... WALGREEN'S?

In case you missed it, I recently visited the front lines in America's
War on Drugs. Did I stealthily accompany undercover DEA operatives to
Medellin to observe the world's best known cocaine cartel at work? Was
I embedded with a U.S. Army unit in Afghanistan to survey that
government's crackdown on poppy farmers, the force, according to a
U.N. estimate, behind nearly 90 percent of the world's opium trade?

Nope. I went to Walgreen's. One of my twin sons had an ear infection
not long ago and I picked up his prescription. Stacked neatly behind
the druggist's counter was row after row of Sudafed and the house
knockoff, as well as other drugs containing pseudoephedrine or
ephedrine, the key ingredient to making methamphetamine, the outlaw
drug currently touted as the biggest scourge in a nation that loves to
live better through chemistry. The pharmacist had even secured the
Vick's nasal inhalers, which, online sources say, contain
methamphetamine.

This was the first time I had noticed compliance with a state law
passed last year to combat the nefarious meth trade. Just this month,
a similar provision to move cold meds behind the counter took effect
nationally as part of the recently renewed USA Patriot Act.

Now, don't get me wrong. The drug trade in certain quarters is violent
and deadly and has ruined the lives of many of those who couldn't
control their appetite for destruction.

But the government's drug war has always been reminiscent of Samuel
Johnson's characterization of second marriages: the triumph of hope
over experience.

The only effective progress we've made in this long, twilight struggle
has come from the very costly and time-consuming tactic - at least for
police, prosecutors, judges, jailers and the taxpayers who pay them -
of locking up everybody carrying anything more than a joint. Now,
we've had to effectively criminalize the common cold.

Yet a few important facts are worth remembering: meth is illegal; its
use is spreading; and Marion County ranks in the top three counties in
Florida for the number of meth labs found.

All that would be enough cause for concern. But a group here in Ocala,
led by Sheriff Ed Dean and comprised of police, health officials and
child welfare advocates, is zeroing in on a policy to deal with a more
worrisome aspect of the attack on meth: rescuing children found inside
the toxic mills where this crud is cooked.

Among that group is Special Agent Eddie Velez of the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement, a member of a special multi-agency
anti-drug task force operating in Marion, Alachua, Levy and Gilchrist
counties.

To understand the concern, Velez likened making meth to baking a cake:
it's a few key ingredients with a pinch here and a dash there of the
cook's personal favorites tossed in for fun.

Except this cake's recipe calls for, besides cold medicines, anhydrous
ammonia, used to make fertilizer, and muriatic acid, a swimming pool
cleaning agent. Meth cooks also use red phosphorous, sulfuric or
hydrochloric acid, kerosene, drain cleaner, or paint thinner.

As sick as it seems, the knuckleheads who make this junk allow
children in and around their labs.

The Web site for a group called Common Sense Drug Policy highlights a
Dallas Morning News report from September that noted, according to the
Drug Enforcement Administration, 10,000 meth labs had been cleaned up
around the country within the previous year - with more than 3,000
children removed from them.

Drug agents in Marion County will encounter a child in a meth lab
perhaps 15 percent of the time, Velez said. Not that frequent, but
even that's too much.

When a cleanup crew moves in after a bust, they're wearing
decontamination suits because of the chemical overload. Meanwhile,
"these kids are in it and exposed to it," Velez observed, "you can
collect their clothes, but now we have to figure out what to do with
them." Often, they're taken out with open sores on their little bodies
and respiratory ailments.

Dean says he wants child welfare experts on the scene to help treat
these children and place them in appropriate settings.

Velez believes the cold-med lockdown works by forcing meth makers to
work harder for their goods. By this time last year, his troops had
busted half of the 30 or so labs they found in Marion County. So far
this year, they've uncovered six.

The downside, albeit Velez says he hasn't seen it here yet, is that as
the Sudafed market dries up, meth heads turn to more powerful doses
imported from Mexico.

We've locked up plenty in the War on Drugs, including now the Sudafed.
As ridiculous as that seems, though, some things are worse. You could
be a kid trapped in one of these chemical compounds.