WHY LIMIT SALES OF COLD MEDICINE?

Shoppers Find Restrictions On Drugs Containing Pseudoephedrine

The Issue

Got a household filled with cold-ridden family members? You might need to
make several trips to the store to get medicine.

A Wal-Mart shopper in Charlotte this week tried buying six individual doses
of a Tylenol cold remedy -- enough for two days. (The store was out of the
bigger bottles.)

But when the fourth package passed over the check-out scanner, a message
came out of the register. Federal and state law and store policy limit the
sales of products containing pseudoephedrine, the printed message read. The
cashier explained that it had to with illegal drugs.

When another shopper offered to buy the other bottles, the cashier said
that's not allowed and the shopper would have to come back the next day.
The shopper just went to another register to buy the remaining cold medicine.

We Investigate

The chemical that helps ease cold suffering, pseudoephedrine, is used to
make the illegal drug methamphetamine.

But unlike the Wal-Mart receipt suggests, no federal or state law limits
the number of medicine packages consumers can buy.

Federal law does limit the amount of pseudoephedrine that can be purchased
at one time, but the Wal-Mart limit is generally more strict.

Wal-Mart along with several other chains -- including Target and Walgreens
- -- have voluntarily set limits on the number of packages shoppers can buy.

"It's a shame," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Jacquie Young said. "We're in a
Catch-22 because we want to provide the products to people who legitimately
need them, but we want to be responsible, too."

Wal-Mart's limit is three packages -- no matter the size. (Target's and
Walgreens' limits are two.)

The current federal standard allows consumers to buy medicines with 9 grams
of pseudoephedrine at one time. Under those rules, shoppers could buy 30
boxes of 10 liquid capsules of Sudafed Cold & Cough or 25 6-ounce bottles
of NyQuil -- or 150 bottles of the Tylenol single-dose boxes that the
Wal-Mart shopper tried buying this week.

The state has no law, though a bill introduced this year would move
medicines containing pseudoephedrine behind counters where sales could be
monitored and would limit shoppers from buying more than three packages at
a time.