INDIANAPOLIS – Cold medicine sales were on the rise in the small town of Rochester a year ago. So were discoveries of illicit meth labs.
Now, pharmacists are asking more nosy questions of sniffling customers who come looking for products that contain pseudoephedrine – the essential ingredient in homemade methamphetamine.
“The people who wanted it for meth would just walk away when we’d start questioning them,” said pharmacist Harry Webb. “They knew we were on to them.”
Webb, owner of two independent pharmacies in Rochester, hopes to convince lawmakers to give pharmacists throughout the state enough legal cover to refuse people whom they suspect of wanting pseudoephedrine for the wrong reasons.
He and other community leaders are working with Sen. Randy Head, R-Logansport, who as chairman of the Substance Abuse and Child Safety Task Force has held hearings on the issue.
“They’ve been looking to us for relief from the misery caused by these meth labs,” said Head. “And when they didn’t get it, they took action themselves.”
In Rochester, the push to squeeze supplies of pseudoephedrine came as local leaders realized that lawmakers weren’t ready to take a tougher, more controversial step of requiring prescriptions for cold remedies. Only two states - Oregon and Mississippi - have done that.
Facing tough opposition from drug lobbyists, prescription proposals have failed at the Statehouse every year for at least the past five years. Legislative leaders predict a similar stalemate for the new session that begins in January.
Even short of that, Rochester's approach goes significantly beyond a law now in place that requires pharmacies to track pseudoephedrine sales and cut off customers once they've hit a state-set limit.
Those rules aim to identify “smurfers” – straw buyers paid by meth-makers hoping to cloak their purchases.
Webb said the strategy doesn’t work. Indiana still looks to rank in the top five states for meth lab seizures, according to state police, despite an overall drop from almost 1,800 in 2013 to 1,400 in 2014.
Leading the effort in Rochester, a town of 6,100 people, was 90-year-old Val Pemberton. He’s a retired manufacturing manager and former president of the Chamber of Commerce.
Pemberton said he was alarmed by stories in the local newspaper about meth lab seizures – 27 last year – and the fallout from homemade meth-making practices discovered by police.
More than 80 properties, damaged by exploding labs or contaminated with toxic residue, are now off the property tax rolls, he said. They’re uninhabitable and too expensive for the town or county to clean up.
Worse, said Pemberton, are stories about children taken from meth-making parents and placed in foster care.
“I just got tired of reading about it and wondered why somebody didn’t do something about it,” he said.
In putting their foot down in Rochester, Pemberton and Webb were inspired by an Arkansas law that pharmacists helped craft. The 2011 law allows pharmacists to question customers about their medical histories and encourages them to offer other cold remedies.
It doesn’t explicitly forbid pharmacists from selling pseudoephedrine to people without a legitimate need. But it does set up a process for the state pharmacy board to review pharmacists' decisions. And it gives Arkansas' pharmacists legal immunity from customers turned away or from being fired for refusing a sale.
“It gives pharmacists the cover they need,” Webb said.
The results are promising. According the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Arkansas saw a nearly 50 percent drop in meth lab seizures after the law passed, from 95 labs in 2010 to 43 in 2014.
Scott Pace, who heads the Arkansas Pharmacists Association, said the measure was a compromise that came after a proposal for cold medicine by prescription ran into the kind of steep opposition now seen in Indiana.
It’s not a cure-all, he said, but it’s made a dent.
“Methamphetamine addiction still exists here,” Pace said. “But what doesn’t exist at the same level are the meth labs that were blowing up homes and leaching toxic chemicals.”
Pemberton and Webb, who worked with community leaders to recruit the area's chain drug stores to their cause, are hoping for the same kind of results from restrictions they put in place in August.
Monthly sales of pseudoephedrine in their community have dropped by 50 percent.
But they’re worried that they may have just shifted a problem, with meth-makers traveling to neighboring communities to buy their cold medicines.
That’s why they’re now asking pharmacists in adjoining counties to adopt more restrictive practices, too.
And it's why, with Head’s help, they're asking lawmakers to adopt the restrictions statewide.
“We’re just one county,” Pemberton said. “But we’ve got a bloody mess on our hands that affects the whole state.”