OKLAHOMA MERCHANTS OK WITH NEW ANTI-METH LAW; N.C. NOT SO SURE

A growing number of states are passing or considering passing new laws
to restrict access to over the counter medicines that contain the key
ingredient for making illegal meth, and a former head of the Oklahoma
Retail Merchants Association isn't quite sure why retailers are putting
up such a commotion.

North Carolina Retail Merchants Association president Fran Preston
said her members had resigned themselves to the inevitability of the
state's new law. But some pharmacies, she said, are concerned that
hefty fines -- beginning at $500 for a first offense -- would take
away the incentive to stock many cold medicines at all.

Oklahoma handed out its first penalty just last month when Walgreens
agreed to pay a $1.3 million settlement to federal, state and local
law enforcement agencies and invest $1 million in a system to monitor
sales of pseudoephedrine-based drugs in its Oklahoma stores. Officials
had threatened to suspend the chain's license to dispense controlled
dangerous substances when they claimed as many as 50 of Walgreen's 65
Oklahoma locations had violated state laws.

Here in North Carolina, Preston said it would be tough for many
retailers to study the new rules sufficiently themselves, let alone
fully train their workforce in the three months remaining until the law
is enacted.

"There's still something left to be seen on exactly how it will play
out," she said. "Most of the impact will be on the seller. Given the
timeframe -- retailers have a very busy season coming up -- we'll need
to see." The new law allowed for the creation of a commission to
develop details of enforcement, compliance and training, but as of
Wednesday, Preston said she still had heard nothing of any
appointments to fill the commission seats.

The uncertainty, Preston said, had led some retailers to speculate
whether they might have to cease stocking the drugs until they could
be certain no Walgreen-sized penalties would be coming their way. "I
actually have a number of members who are considering pulling these
items from their shelves and just not carrying them at all until they
can get a system in place to assure they're complying with the law,"
Preston said.

The catch, she said, is they would have to do it in the middle of the
cold and flu season. North Carolina's new rules, signed into law last
week by Gov. Mike Easley, would require that after Jan. 15 all tablets
and caplets containing ephedrine or pseudoephedrine -- a decongestant
used in a hundred cold and flu remedies -- be plucked from their
shelves and placed behind the pharmacy counter under much tighter
controls.

Dr. David Work, executive director of the North Carolina Board of
Pharmacy predicted the law would make life harder on customers and
pharmacists without addressing meth use in any significant way. "It's
going to make things more difficult for the pharmacists," he said.
"They put all these legal hoops out there for the pharmacists and
legitimate customers to jump through.

In Oklahoma, though, businessman Scott Mitchell said a few hoops are a
small price to pay for the disruption to local meth production he's
seen. As the former executive director, and a current senior board
member, of Oklahoma's Retail Merchants Association, Mitchell has had a
chance to assess the impact of the added rules, and aside from a few
complaints, most merchants have enthusiastically embraced them, he
said. "We were having so many child injuries and deaths, and social
problems connected with meth," Mitchell said. "=46rom the perspective
of its effect on the social fabric here, (the law) pretty much had
good support."

Mitchell said the chilling murder of Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper
Nik Green helped spur the public to pressure law makers into action.
Green was killed during an attempted meth lab seizure. His murder was
captured on the audio track of his cruiser-mounted video camera. The
recording was widely distributed leading to a groundswell of anti-meth
sentiment. Threats to child safety have added to the public outcry. "We
had a child burned on a radiator here," Mitchell said.

"The parents were asleep for two days coming down off meth and the
child fell on the radiator and burned itself up because no one could
take care of it. At that point, you don't give a damn about profit
margins." Scott Rowland, an attorney with the Oklahoma Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control, said, before passage of the law,
60 percent of the labs busted involved children or contained evidence
that children had been present.

Rowland said the 80 to 90 percent drop in illicit lab discoveries has
exceeded everyone's expectations.

"You're going to think I'm lying," he said. "It's impossible to
overstate how well this law has worked. It's saved children, it's
saved families, it's saved police officers.

"I never thought I would tell you we would have a month without a
single meth lab found in Oklahoma City, but September was that month,"
Rowland said.

Rowland said law enforcement in his state had been consumed for a
decade by the fight against small-time meth producers. Meth was one of
Oklahoma's biggest drug problems, he said, but despite an enormous
drain on law enforcement resources, their investigations were only
netting minor busts.

The people involved were most often poor and cooking almost entirely
for personal use or for distribution among a small group of friends,
family and acquaintances.

For decades, law enforcement agencies have followed the same model of
infiltrating drug networks and following the supply line for a strike
as close to the head as possible.

Rowland said law enforcement agencies were not as adept at attacking
the widely scattered and relatively disconnected collection of mom and
pop meth labs that sprung up over the last 10 years. Driving local
meth cooks out of business, Rowland said, has freed narcotics
officials -- from the federal level down to financially strapped local
agencies -- to turn their attention back to large-scale manufacturers
and traffickers.