Prescription or Tracking PSE

In response to your opinion story “Database will help police fight meth” I wish you would have elaborated more on why this new “Tracking System” will be effective or why it will not. Also, the question needs to be asked, why is the present law not effective?  Why does ISP want this change? Although I am no Sheriff or elected official, I am a subject matter expert on developing models to identify, track and locate criminals and fugitives from justice. I was also the former CEO of P & S Consulting, a Criminology Consulting Firm based out of Terre Haute that tracked Pseudoephedrine purchases. I offer these simple comments to you in hopes that it inspires you and the local community to start asking questions

First, small groups of people buying multiple amounts of PSE from various stores by traveling State to State and County to County within in a short period of time has been a common documented practice in Indiana since 1999. In 2003, Detective Denzil Lewis of the Terre Haute Drug Task Force was reflecting on the strange “non” arrests between 1999-2003[1] Lewis said;

The meth cooks and users have found a way around the law. Meth heads there are banding together in groups of 10 or 12, "like a wacked-out Mafia," he said. The groups delegate roles for buying the legal and easily obtainable household ingredients used to make the drug. One person buys the cold pills and nasal decongestants. Another picks up batteries. Someone else gets ammonia. Still other purchases some paint thinner.

 "So picture our officers pulling over someone with 15 boxes of batteries in their car," Lewis said. "We can seize the batteries, but we can't make an arrest on that alone. We know paint thinner is used in making crank, but we can't bust you for having acetone in your car."

More recently in 2006, the Daviess County Sheriff's Department (KY) busted-up a drug ring of 13 people that bought 1,400 pseudoephedrine pills within a very small amount of time[2]. “The sheriff's office says one man in the drug ring was the meth maker. Everyone else would go from pharmacy to pharmacy buying pseudoephedrine, a primary ingredient in making the drug and deliver the cold medicine to the cooker.” However, smurfing is just not contained to people addicted to meth. Again in 2006, an Indiana trio, 21, and 22-year-old men along with a 17-year-old girl from Evansville were busted for buying more than 100 boxes of cold medicine at stores across Anne Arundel County (MD)[3]. They admitted they were planning to sell it to methamphetamine cookers in the Hoosier state. They planned to return to Indiana and sell the pseudoephedrine for a large profit. "They were doing it to make money for college," said Detective White, explaining that one of the men admitted to spending $6,000 on pseudoephedrine during a previous trip to Maryland and to selling it for $20,000 in Indiana.

The idea of a state tracking system started in Vigo County. On December 22, 2004, Vigo County Commissioners voted 3-0 to adopt a county-wide ordinance that controls the sale of products containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine (PSE) products. The ordinance limited customer purchases to no more than two packages of products containing ephedrine per transaction and no more than two ephedrine products within a 7-day period. Retailers must record the obtained (personal ID) information on a log sheet. Then in 2005, Governor Mitch Daniels signed passage of the Indiana methamphetamine (Meth) precursor law, State Enrolled Act 444, (effective July 1, 2005) However, the law went retroactive to February 1, 2005, wiping out any Indiana county ordinances (except Vigo Counties) which may have been set in place to regulate the sale of PSE products. Then finally in 2005, The Combat Meth Act classifies pseudoephedrine as a schedule V controlled substance and requires that non-prescription medications containing pseudoephedrine be shelved and sold from behind a pharmacy counter. The act also requires the purchaser to show state or federal approved photo identification and the purchaser must sign a purchase log.  The act limits person’s purchases of products containing pseudoephedrine to 9.0 grams per 30-day period or 3.6 g per 7-day period.

So with a County PSE Ordinance, State Law and Federal Law, Vigo County and perhaps the rest of America would see a reduction in “Meth Labs.”  One major problem with the laws – there was no attempt to gather PSE log data in a centralized location for law enforcement to analyze. Until, “Terre Haute based” company, P&S Consulting (Criminal Justice Consulting Service) provided this service in 2005. P&S was on contract by the Vigo County Sheriff’s Department and The Vigo County Prosecutors Office to track the sales of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine (PSE) based products sold in Vigo County (and 22 other Indiana counties). So what were the benefits from tracking? Tracking allowed law enforcement the ability to single-out the number of state and federal law violators produced by identification of electronic and/or signing paper logging form for ephedrine or pseudoephedrine (PSE) sales, which in turn lead to probable cause warrants and arrests issued based on the identification of the PSE log information. Tracking also allowed Sheriffs and Drug Task Force Agencies to cross reference the quantity of monthly precursor store transactions with the number of precursor violators, etc…. Lastly, to some extent, the tracking allowed law enforcement to indentify if precursor law violators were in-county residents or out-of-county residents.

So what was the result of tracking people signing PSE log books in Vigo and surrounding Counties? Law enforcement identified a ton of people that violated the State law and the number of labs decreased. However, amount of PSE product sales increased[4]. Strange you say? Fact, sales of PSE product sky-rocketed. Sadly, people that wanted Meth, fearlessly still signed the pharmacy PSE log books. I guess the reward of getting their next “fix” outweighed the risk of being charged with a misdemeanor or identified as a person with connections to a Meth manufacturer.

A report presented in 2006 at the Midwest Criminal Justice Association, titled: Evaluating Indiana’s precursor law: seizing fewer clandestine meth labs while precursor violators go unfettered” detailed three Indiana counties that utilized PSE tracking for one-year. Davies, Knox and Vigo Counties. Using PSE log data from 1 July 2005 to 30 June 2006. In one year, Daviess County tallied 328 people that could be charged with the state’s meth precursor law. In one year, Knox County found 559 people in violation of the State’s meth precursor law.  The study found that at the start of January, 2005, Vigo County had 74 stores that sold ephedrine products, which dropped to 45 stores by July, 2005 and as of September, 2006, only 27 stores sold PSE products. The report found that many Vigo County stores simply just stopped selling ephedrine products to stop perpetuating the meth problem. Vigo County had 481meth precursor violators from January 2005 to December 2005 (1yr). Beginning December 2005 to May 2006 the number of precursor violators soared to 718, many of them new / first time violators.

To put this in a perspective, only 3 out of 92 Indiana counties were mentioned in the study. If each Indiana County conservatively averaged 125 state precursor law violators a year, Indiana would have had to cite 11,500 people with a C-misdemeanor. Did Indiana have this many people willing to violate a federal or state law just to purchase more than 3 grams of pseudoephedrine per week and more than 9-grams within 30-days? At the time, Indiana did!

Even if law enforcement had the ability to track store purchases of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine products and identify violators, the manpower to enforce the law would leave law enforcement overwhelmed and jails overcrowded. In 2006, Vigo County was the only county that aggressively issued warrants based on the states precursor law and issued citations based on their county-wide precursor ordinance. In one year, Vigo County Drug Task Force issued a combined 100 citations/warrants for precursor violations and was able to conducted 35 arrests (that’s a hell of a lot of hard work!). Even with the dent of 100 violators cited, the list of PSE violators from 2006 still showed over 1,600 people that still need to be caught or cited, and by the time the P&S Company called it quits, the list was still growing.

In a Vigo County news article[5] from April 2008, Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel wanted a county ordinance aimed at ingredients used in over-the-counter allergy to be amended to account for sellers of the product, Sheriff Jon Marvel said “I want to hold sellers responsible for the number of packages sold weekly “There is a loophole in [the ordinance] we found … that makes it difficult to enforce, as [the ordinance] is not specific enough,” Then in a June, 2009[6]  Marvel asked area businesses that sell potential methamphetamine ingredients to meet next week with him to discuss a local electronic tracking system to track sales of pseudoephedrine” As of January 2010, The Vigo County Sheriff now wants to make PSE a prescription only product. So in a mater of one-year, the Vigo County Sheriff went from “no-tracking”, to wanting to prosecute retailers for selling to much PSE, to establishing electronic tracking, to let’s just make this whole PSE thing a prescription.

As for the State of Indiana, ICJI and ISP consistently keep the publics focus on the reduction of meth labs which have nothing to do with the reduction of multiple PSE purchases. The Meth labs are a secondary result of buying PSE products. Therefore, all the charts and graphs that expound on the reduction of seized labs make the public think illegal purchases of PSE are also being reduced.  Shouldn’t the real measurement of a precursor law be the reduction of people violating the precursor law? In July of 2007 the Indiana State Police (ISP) were required to present and deliver an evaluation to the Governor on Indiana ’s meth precursor law (SEA 444) which was passed in July 2005. The SEA 444 law specifies that the evaluation is to measure the number of arrests attributable to the logging or signing of the precursor logs. It never happened. Again, the measurement metric ISP pointed out was the number of meth lab reductions – which is now back on the rise.

Much of the information the public receives on Indiana’s attempt to reduce the spread of Meth comes from one of the Governors offices, the Indiana Criminal Justice Institute (ICJI). ICJI started a media campaign to inform the public in 2006 that the recent (2005) state PSE law was a success, especially the laws effect on reducing meth labs. They reported seized meth labs were dramatically down due to the passing of the law, this was true; however, the part about reducing multiple PSE purchasing was never brought to light. Than at the same time, ICJI and the State of Indiana wanted to have Indiana State Police (ISP) monitor all 92 counties PSE sales logs. The plan was to have a vender build a “real-time” tracking system and have it implemented by July 2007. The State promised this was a done deal, so most Sheriff Departments stopped their own County tracking models. Why pay Deputies – when you can get the State Police to track PSE sales for free. Of course, we now know, this has never happened. In October of 2009, ISP Sgt. Nicki Crawford, (head of the State of Indiana Meth Suppression Unit) stated “we need to make PSE a prescription only product”

Today, Sgt. Nicki Crawford and the Indiana State Police[7] hope to unveil a statewide computer system for tracking methamphetamine-related information by the end of 2010. The Indiana Meth Intelligence System will pull together several sources of meth-related data and be accessible to local police agencies across the state, said Niki Crawford, head of the Indiana State Police's Meth Suppression Section. "The purpose is to make law enforcement more efficient. We don't expect that when this begins it will lead to finding more meth labs," Crawford said. "Although it may go up because more information will be available." 

So here we go again! What happened between October of 2009 and today? And why are Vigo County and the State going in different directions? Have we learned anything since 2005? Clearly, tracking has some benefit but it is not the right choice. How long is it really going to take for all the lessons learned in the past to make the right decision for Indiana’s future?

Can it be that easy to just make PSE a prescription?  It should, but you have to understand that it takes a lot of time and money from those hard working pharmacy and retail lobbyist to keep in connection with Indiana law makers to keep this a non-prescription. Certain drug makers based in the State of Indiana employ many good Hoosiers. In a story posted by Indy.com[8] in March of 2009, Indiana lawmakers proposed bills to make pseudoephedrine and ephedrine available only by prescription. The House version of the bill, authored by Rep. Trent Van Haaften, D-Mount Vernon, had a hearing but died in the Public Health Committee. The Senate version didn’t get a hearing. The Bill was fought by some in the retail and medical industries because of the extra time it would take to obtain and fill a prescription. According to Grant Monahan, president of the Indiana Retail Council “It would be harder for legitimate customers who wanted the medicine to obtain it,”

In closing, a report by the Associated Press, dated July 6th, 2005; Titled: Sheriffs say meth is top drug problem - Sheriff Jon Marvel of western Indiana's Vigo County estimated that 80 percent of the inmates in his county's jail in Terre Haute are held on meth-related charges. He also points to an operating budget that has risen from $800,000 in 1999 to about $3.4 million last year as the best way to illustrate the stranglehold meth has on the county's resources. "I want it stopped, and I want it stopped now - and there is no way that's going to happen," Marvel said. I think he’s right? I can only speak for the things P&S Consulting accomplished with tracking PSE sales. On the day we stopped tracking services with Vigo County there were still large number PSE violators still un-cited (over 1,000). One thing P&S Consulting noticed from tracking, even if law enforcement had the ability to locate every ephedrine and pseudoephedrine purchase violator hooked on Meth, the manpower need to round-up every violator would involve an around the clock effort, 365-days a year. Lastly, there’s not a jail in any Indiana County that can hold that many people.

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[1]Meth sweeps across nation, leaving poisonous trail in wake. by Gerry Weissand Lisa Thompson. April 28. 2003

 http://goerie.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20030428/NEWS02/104280355

[2]Huge meth ring broken by Reporter: Liza Danver http://www.14wfie.com/Global/story.asp?S=6193939&nav=3w6o

[3]Trio from Indiana uses the county as a meth superstore by Scott Daugherty, Staff Writer. Mar 30, 2006

 http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/2006/03_30-50/TOP

[4]Cold, allergy medicine sales rose in April (2006): http://www.tribstar.com/news/local_story_146234359.html?keyword=topstory

Sales of meth precursors still on the rise (July 2006); http://www.tribstar.com/cnhi/tribstar/local/local_story_212000615.html

[5] Tribstar "Vigo’s Ephedrine ordinance could be revamped"  by Howard Greninger

[6] Tribstar; “Efforts under way to combat Valley’s meth problems” by Lisa Trigg

[7] Courier Press online, Police developing new tool to fight meth: http://www.courierpress.com/news/2010/jan/03/police-developing-new-tool-to-fight-meth/

[8] Meth production surges in Indiana: http://www.indy.com/posts/meth-production-surges-in-indiana