TERRE HAUTE — Legislation that many Vigo County leaders and the Indiana State Police believe would have gone a long way toward shutting down the clandestine manufacture of methamphetamine never really got a chance at the Statehouse during the current legislative session.
But even though Senate Bill 103 never got a hearing in committee, where it died, the issue of rescheduling ephedrine and pseudoephedrine as a controlled substance will be revived in future Indiana General Assemblies.
“I’m not gonna stop,” Sen. Tim Skinner (D-Terre Haute) said Tuesday from the Statehouse. “I’ll be back every year on it.”
Information compiled by the Indiana State Police Methamphetamine Suppression Section has shown that making cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine (or PSE) available only through a physician’s prescription is the best way to stop the illegal meth labs that have become a growing problem around the state. PSE is the only constant ingredient in the variety of meth recipes and methods used in the illegal cooking of the powerful drug.
However, Indiana legislators have instead passed legislation supporting electronic tracking of cold medicine sales — an approach favored by retailers and drug companies.
Senate Bill 503, which calls for e-tracking, was on the Senate floor on Monday when Sen. Skinner tried a “strip and insert” amendment that would have substituted prescription-only sales for the e-tracking wording. That amendment effort failed with a 37 to 13 vote against it.
Skinner said he and others favoring prescription-only PSE have done a lot of behind-the-scenes work to educate legislators about the issue. A Terre Haute delegation that included law enforcement and business interests also made visits to the Statehouse in recent weeks to share statistics as well as relate the effects that meth production and use is having in the Wabash Valley.
“I think we were trying to get the information out to these guys,” Skinner said of fellow legislators, “but likewise, the misinformation machine was out there.”
He was referring to a fellow senator’s statements on the Senate floor on Monday where she said that her rural law enforcement people are telling her that meth-makers are now extracting ephedrine from cattle mineral blocks.
“There’s always someone coming up with a new myth,” Skinner said.
Former Vigo County Sheriff Jon Marvel agreed that the cattle salt block myth has been floating around for some time as an urban legend.
“We can’t find anyone, any of the dopers, who use that method,” Marvel told the Tribune-Star on Tuesday.
Sgt. Chris Gallagher of the Terre Haute Police Department, an activist on the prescription-only effort, said the mineral block story is “basically the rural version of an urban legend.”
“Neither I nor anyone else with any lab experience has ever seen any evidence of such a thing actually being done,” Gallagher told the Tribune-Star. “And if it could be done, we’d know about it by now.”
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