The idea of toughening the fight against methamphetamine in Indiana by making pseudoephedrine available only by prescription is in mortal danger in the General Assembly.
The prescription issue — about which we wrote two weeks ago in an opinion page series called The Rx Factor — appears to be blocked in both houses of the Legislature.
A bill introduced by state Sen. Brent Steele, R-Bedford, that would require you to have a prescription to buy pseudoephedrine (PSE) apparently will not be heard in the Senate Corrections and Criminal Law Committee. That committee’s chairman, Sen. Michael Young, R-Indianapolis, can pick and choose which bills get a reading before the committee, and as he told us in a statement two weeks ago, he opposes Steele’s bill. Instead, according to the committee’s schedule on the Legislature’s website, Young’s own meth bill (Senate Bill 536) is scheduled to be heard at a committee meeting today. Young’s bill would prohibit meth convicts from buying PSE without a prescription.
Steele plans to introduce his bill (Senate Bill 445) as an amendment to Young’s. It’s probably overly optimistic to believe Steele’s amendment will prevail before Young’s committee, even though Steele has a vote there.
Such are the political ways of making sausage — creating legislation — at the Statehouse.
A bill in the House of Representatives that would lower the quantity of PSE a consumer could obtain without a prescription also appears blocked in committee — Public Health, chaired by Rep. Ed Clere, R-Georgetown — and unlikely to surface as anything but an amendment. That probably has about as much chance of succeeding as does Steele’s bill/amendment in the Senate. (Statehouse columnist Brian Howey wrote about the House bill on the cover of today’s Perspectives section.)
Many will see stopping the Rx-only PSE movement as good for consumers, doctors, retailers and pharmaceutical companies. We continue to take another view: That the individual, familial and societal costs of meth call for a more radical approach than the current electronic tracking of PSE sales. PSE by prescription only would make it harder to get an essential ingredient for those who would make, use and distribute meth. So awful are the effects of meth on today’s children that police, prosecutors and courts need another weapon in their arsenal to fight meth and better protect our next generations. The overall costs of meth on our state, your county, your town or city are so great that the inconvenience of getting a script is a small price to pay.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen what fresh data on Indiana’s 2014 meth lab busts and arrests mean.
According to new numbers from the Indiana State Police Meth Suppression Section, meth lab seizures were down in 2014 by 320, or 17.7 percent, from 1,808 to 1,488. Meth arrests were down from 1,551 in 2013 to 1,1316 in 2014, 15 percent. Vigo County’s meth lab busts fell in 2014 from 40 to 37, but, because of the state’s overall decline in lab busts, Vigo rose back into the state’s top 10 counties. For other counties in our area: Clay rose from 9 to 10 in meth lab busts; Greene fell from 19 to 12; Owen rose from 3 to 9; Parke rose from 5 to 7; Putnam fell from 5 to 0; Sullivan fell from 17 to 2; and Vermillion fell from 15 to 4.
Statewide, Delaware County, home of Muncie and Ball State University, led the state in 2014 meth lab busts, rising from 109 in 2013 to 148 in 2014. A look at a state map shows that seven of the counties with the most meth labs are north of midstate and are near the U.S. 31 and Interstate 69 corridor northward. For several years in the early 2000s, the U.S. 41 corridor between Terre Haute and Evansville saw the highest number of meth lab busts.
Vigo County, as you will recall, led the state in meth lab busts for a few years — until a county ordinance clamped down on over-the-counter PSE sales.
While the numbers of meth lab busts and arrests were down in 2014, that does not mean meth is being defeated by the electronic tracking system that records PSE purchases in the 35-state National Precursor Log Exchange and that limits PSE purchases by amount and frequency. More likely, it reflects that 90 percent of the meth in the United States comes across the border from Mexico, where industrial-sized labs produce nearly pure meth, in large quantities, for about a third of the previous price.
But that hardly means that fewer meth lab busts in Indiana — and seizures, by some informed estimates, account for about one-fifth of actual labs — that the damage from meth is less. In fact, the percentage of one-pot lab meth — mixed dangerously in a two-liter plastic bottle in a woods, car, motel room or home — rose in 2014 from 87 percent to 91 percent. Of these one-pot labs, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency wrote in its 2012 annual report: “Although these laboratories produce very small amounts of methamphetamine, they produce large amounts of toxic waste. DEA ... estimates that one pound of methamphetamine produced by a [one-pot lab] can produce five to six pounds of toxic waste.” That toxic waste ends up in side ditches, woods, fields, motel rooms and probably even neighborhood parks.
Rx-only pseudoephedrine may well not survive this session of the legislature, where many good ideas go to die, but it remains the best next step as a way to fight meth.
We still hope it prevails — another year if not this.