Pubdate: Wed, 04 May 2005
Source: Monitor, The (McAllen, TX)
Copyright: 2005 The Monitor
Contact:  http://www.themonitor.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1250

PARTIAL SOLUTION - COLD DRUG CRACKDOWN WON'T STOP METH

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a Washington Post article
Saturday that the "fight against methamphetamines received a major
boost recently when four of the United States' largest food and drug
retailers decided to put certain cold medicines behind the pharmacy
counter." She wants federal legislation to accomplish something similar.

Limiting consumer access to cold medicines that contain the ingredient
pseudoephedrine will create inconvenience for consumers and could
create concerns about privacy. But to imagine that it will do much to
limit the availability of methamphetamines is the stuff of fantasy.

To be sure, pseudoephedrine is an ingredient used to make
methamphetamines, which are now illegal -- although they were
available and widely used in diet pills in the 1950s. Some people who
use methamphetamine and a few small-scale outlaw meth labs have bought
large quantities of cold medication to get pseudoephedrine. But it is
perhaps the least efficient -- and least widely used -- way to make
the drug.

As Kerri Houston, vice president of policy for Frontiers of Freedom,
the think tank founded by former Wyoming Republican Sen. Malcolm
Wallop, pointed out, "placing over-the-counter cold remedies behind
the counter is at best a 20 percent solution to an 80 percent
problem." That is, about 80 percent of the methamphetamine in the U.S.
black market is made by "superlabs," mostly in Mexico and a few in
Canada, and imported into this country.

Creating added inconvenience for people with colds, therefore, will
not stop methamphetamine use or do much to limit supply. It is more
likely to solidify the control of large-scale, effective, ruthless
criminal gangs and extend their reach into rural areas.

But, then, most drug-war policies, however well-intended, make the
problems they are supposedly addressing worse. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: SHeath(DPFFLorida)