Leann Burke and Sam Stites, Herald
INDIANAPOLIS — Deputy John Anderson, a narcotics officer with the Dubois County Sheriff’s Department, received a text Wednesday morning from someone who’d been asked to buy Sudafed for a methamphetamine lab in Dubois County. A proposed law in the Indiana Legislature would make such a transaction more difficult.
“Everybody knows it’s a problem,” Anderson said. “It’s the one ingredient that you have to have to make meth.”
As of now, law enforcement can track sales of over-the-counter cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine to help locate meth labs. Indiana lawmakers are a looking to increase regulations on the sale such cold medicines across the state by making them available through prescription only. Indiana House Speaker Brian Bosma (R-Indianapolis) and the Association of Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys are among those supporting the GOP-proposed bill that would end over-the-counter sales of medicines containing pseudoephedrine.
The move comes in the wake of a report that Indiana has one of the highest numbers of methamphetamine labs in the country in recent years. Indiana State Police reported 1,488 meth lab incidents in 2014 and said the state was on pace this year for about 1,500 lab discoveries.
Anderson said he used to find meth labs in Dubois County all the time, especially before the rise of Mexican drug cartels he saw around 2010 and ’11. Investigating small meth labs consumes resources law enforcement could use to battle the cartels, which are responsible for crystal meth that finds its way to Dubois County. Anhydrous meth is created in meth labs and is weaker than the crystal meth brought in by the cartels, Anderson said. Indiana State Police Sgt. Mike Toles leads an ISP Meth Suppression Unit that includes 18 full-time investigators. His team spends 95 percent of its time responding to and cleaning up hazardous meth labs and dump sites rather than working to stop organized methamphetamine trafficking from Mexico and elsewhere.
“We want to go after these import cases, we want to go after the big hitters,” Toles said in an article from the Associated Press. “But when we’re spending all our time with these little hitters, that’s very difficult to do.”
Anderson said the number of meth labs has decreased in Dubois County since the rise of the cartels, but it’s still a problem, as his text Wednesday morning proves.
Law enforcement officials in Dubois County are generally in favor of the law change. Huntingburg Police Chief Art Parks said he hasn’t spoken with local lawmakers about the issue, but any extra regulation on the sale of pseudoephederine could help smaller departments like his in the fight to keep methamphetamine out of the community.
“I think it’s a good idea, and it will help slow down the manufacturing of methamphetamine (locally),” Parks said. “Whoever needs it can go get a prescription. It will make it harder to get for those who don’t need it.”
Anderson agreed, although he pointed out that a new law wouldn’t totally solve the problem. In our area, he noted, people could travel to Kentucky or Illinois to purchase medicines containing pseudoephedrine without a prescription.
“They’re still going to be buying it,” he said. “But it’s putting them out, and I’m fine with that.”
Parks said his department hasn’t had a lot of dealings with methamphetamine as of late, but it remains a problem across the area. Parks said rural areas provide cover for methamphetamine labs where the production can’t be seen or smelled, but there’s “no doubt” it’s in town as well.
Opponents maintain that requiring prescriptions would be bothersome for law-abiding people who have allergies and colds and increase health care costs by forcing people to make more doctor visits. However, doctors already write prescriptions that allow allergy and cold sufferers to purchase 30-day supplies that exceed the current pseudoephedrine limit of 9.6 grams in 365 days.
Anderson doesn’t think the opponents have a convincing argument.
“If you want to see if (the law) is rational or not, I would look at the number of meth labs and I would look at the number of people buying (cold medicines with pseudoephedrine) without insurance,” he said. “Then see if it’s really going to put anybody out or is it more important to curb the meth problem? I would go with the meth because it has to be stopped.”
Sgt. Jeremy Lee with the Jasper Police Department supports the idea, but questions if the law will help the drug problem as a whole.
“On it’s face, it looks like it would be something good,” Lee said. “The pseudoephedrine laws are good, but I’m not sure they’ve really had an effect. They might just have made the price of meth go up and made heroine more competitive in the market.”
Lee said there’s been a rise in heroine use recently as well as a rise in the use of cocaine, prescription drugs and bath salts. For him, eradicating the drug problem goes beyond legislatures and law enforcement.
“It’s going to take people not wanting to use drugs,” he said. “If we could suppress that, we could solve the problem, but unfortunately there are people who want to use drugs. They want that feeling, and they want everything that goes with it.”
Only two states require a prescription for cold medicines containing psedoephederine: Oregon, which passed its prescription-only law in 2006, and Mississippi, which passed its law in 2010.
This is not the first law Indiana legislators have discussed in an effort to curb the state’s meth epidemic. In 2013, the Indiana House passed a law that requires auto dealers to disclose if a vehicle has been involved in a meth-related incident within the last two years, and in 2014 the House passed a law that provides information to home buyers on whether a home has been exposed to meth. The 2014 law also requires a person who manufactures methamphetamine on someone else’s property to pay restitution to the owner for damages, including lost rent and decontamination costs.
State Sen. Mark Messmer, the District 63 state representative at the time, supported both laws, as did District 74 State Rep. Lloyd Arnold (R-Elkhart).
“Every time someone cooks meth, there’s a kid that’s suffering,” Anderson said. “Whether it’s the kid of the person making it, or the person who buys the Sudafed or the person buying (the meth).”
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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