You know how I feel about the issue – I favor requiring tablet form of pseudoephedrine being a prescription only drug. Here is a story about the State of Okalahoma.
Oklahoma authorities have been at the forefront of the nation’s battle against methamphetamine, but they will soon have a tough new opponent: a politically connected, well-heeled pharmaceutical industry.
At issue is a proposal to require a prescription for certain cold and allergy tablets containing pseudoephedrine. Police and prosecutors say the measure is essential for curbing an out-of-control meth trade. Drug companies and their lobbyists are eager to keep pills such as Claritin-D and Advil Cold and Sinus on store shelves.
There has been plenty of evidence that Oregon has had great success over the past five years since they have required a doctor’s prescription for pseudoephedrine.
Five years ago, Oregon became the first state to require a prescription for products containing pseudoephedrine — a step that authorities say was effective. Since then, the state has seen a 96 percent reduction in meth-lab incidents, a 32 percent drop in meth arrests and a 35 percent reduction in meth-related emergency room visits and health care costs.
In 2008, two years after the law took effect, the state experienced the nation’s largest crime rate decrease, said Rob Bovett, a district attorney in Lincoln County, Ore.
Mississippi is the only other state to impose a similar restriction, and it also has seen a tremendous drop in the number of meth labs.
“If you see a reduction between 10 and 15 percent, that’s a big deal, and we’re between 60 and 70 percent. And it almost happened overnight,’’ said Marshall Fisher, director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics.
Oklahoma should pass a prescription only law. The inconvenience to a few allergy sufferers is NOTHING compared to the devastation of this drug on the health and welfare of its citizens. Besides the Oklahoma law only applies to the tablet form of pseudoephedrine. Gel caps and liquid would still be available over the counter.
But, the pharmaceutical companies will wage a war against the legislation because it is all about the money and profits.
Oklahoma legislators should weigh the cost/benefits carefully.
Methamorphosis as a result of chronic Methamphetamine abuse
Federal agents have seized a 1 1/2-ton shipment of methamphetamine-making chemicals at Los Angeles International Airport.
Customs and Border Protection spokesman Jaime Ruiz said Thursday that 40 drums of methylamine hydrochloride and two barrels of ethyl phenyl acetate shipped from China were intercepted at the airport on Sept. 29.
The chemicals are used to make methamphetamine and the party drug Ecstasy.
The shipment, described as one of the largest meth precursor seizures at the airport, was destined for a company in Illinois. There are no further details.
Ruiz says special permission is needed to import the controlled substances.
There are no arrests.
On Aug. 12, federal agents at the airport seized a quarter-ton of methylamine hydrochloride in eight drums that was being shipped from China to a company in central Mexico.
Although Meth use has declined recently, there is ongoing pressure to manufacture this highly addictive and very ruinous drug.
Congrats to the DEA for their intelligence and execution of the seizure.
Ten years ago, this newspaper sponsored a community town hall meeting on the use and abuse of methamphetamine in South Sound. The illegal drug was consuming an incredible amount of law enforcement and court time and meth labs posed a significant environmental and public health risk.
The statistics for the highly addictive stimulant were staggering. More meth labs were cleaned up statewide in the first nine months of 2001 than in all of 2000. Thurston County logged 105 meth lab cleanups between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, 2001, while neighboring Pierce County was the state’ s leader with 486 labs. King County busted 200 labs, while Spokane broke up 193 labs.
Nationally, Washington state ranked second behind California in meth raids.
Law enforcement officers and treatment professionals were warning people that they could get hooked on the insidious drug from the very first time they used it. Doctors were seeing more patients move from meth addiction to heroin addiction.
In addition, every time law enforcement officers dismantled a meth lab, they had to safely dispose of hazardous materials. Sometimes it was a mobile meth lab operated out of a van. Other times, it was homes where children were subjected to great health risks every time their parents cooked a new batch of the drug. And just days before the town hall meeting, Lacey police were called to a motel to dispose of toxic chemicals from a meth lab set up in one of the rooms.
But, in the ten years, there has been success in reducing the number of Meth Labs.
Tonight, county officials will meet at the courthouse for another town hall meeting on meth sponsored by the Thurston County Action Team. Speakers will discuss the methamphetamine situation in South Sound 10 years after that first town hall meeting.
They will report on their successes – primarily the decrease in meth labs. Thurston County has gone from a high of 150 meth raids a year to fewer than five in the last couple of years.
Much of the success can be credited to a federal grant that led to the formation of a local enforcement team that made meth its top priority. Laws were changed to take ingredients for meth off the store shelves. Other laws were passed to increase penalties for those caught making and distributing the drug. Parents who brew meth in the presence of their children now face child endangerment charges that carry more jail time than manufacturing charges.
But, there is also work to do.
Sheriff John Snaza says, “ While we may have mostly licked the lab problem, meth is still an epidemic in Thurston County.” Local labs have simply given way to the Mexican drug cartels who import meth to South Sound in large quantities. “ We’ re seeing crazy numbers on that, ” Snaza said.
More young people are using marijuana, Snaza said, and there has been an explosion in prescription drug abuse, mostly opiates like Oxycodone that are as addictive as heroin.
Local young people are attending “ punch bowl parties” where they take their parents’ or grandparents’ prescription drugs, throw then into a bowl and party guests select unknown pills for consumption. “ They don’ t know what they are getting themselves into, ” Snaza said.
The message from tonight’ s town hall meeting must be one of continued vigilance. While the meth lab problem is mostly behind us, other drug problems exist, and, in fact, are growing in severity and impacting the lives of our young people. We, as a community, cannot back away from these challenges.
On the methamphetamine front, the federal government must better secure the border with Mexico and more strictly monitor precursor chemical manufacture offshore. Some states are now adopting an electronic database to monitor and prevent the smurphing of meth precursor chemicals like pseudoephedrine.
Three promising formulations could be used in a vaccine to treat methamphetamine addiction, U.S. researchers say.
Kim Janda of the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif., and colleagues note methamphetamine use and addiction cost the United States more than $23 billion annually due to medical and law enforcement expenses, as well as lost productivity.
The highly addictive crystal meth can cause a variety of problems including cardiovascular damage and death.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, found three of the new formulations that produced a good immune response in mice were particularly promising.
Thai Malay Muslim drug users drink 4×100, the popular cheap narcotic drink on September 1, 2011in Narwathiwat, southern Thailand. Translated as ” sii khun roi,” 4 x 100 is a mix of the illegal kratom leaf, cough syrup and Coca-Cola with added ingredients like tranquilizers and marijuana
“Over the past five years, ATS manufacture has spread to new regions which previously reported little or no manufacture,” the UN Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2011 Global ATS Assessment report said.
“ATS are attractive to millions of drug users in all regions of the world because they are affordable, convenient to the user and often associated with a modern and dynamic lifestyle.”
The UN’s last assessment on the illicit production and trade in ATS, including ecstasy and methamphetamines, was published in 2008.
The illicit manufacture of methamphetamines in South-East Asia has continued apace despite a significant rise in seizures from 32 million pills in 2008 to 133 million last year.
While Myanmar remains the main source of methamphetamine production, new bases have emerged.
Over the past five years, Indonesia has become a major producer of ecstasy, threatening to replace the Netherlands as the main regional supplier of the up-market party drug.
In Europe, there is growing evidence of the spread of methamphetamine production replacing less expensive amphetamines.
Illicit methamphetamine laboratories have been seized for the first time in Austria, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland and Portugal, according to the UN report.
“In Germany, more methamphetamine laboratories have been reported than amphetamine since 2008,” it said.
Africa, which appeared to have escaped the ATS menace for years, is now on the map.
The US government last year indicted members of a large international cocaine trafficking ring for alleged intent to establish a methamphetamine laboratory in Liberia.
As recently as June, a methamphetamine laboratory was discovered in Nigeria, on the outskirts of Lagos.
The question remains: Where are they getting the precursor chemicals to manufacture these amphetamine-type stimulants (ATS)? There are only nine manufacturing sites world-wide and can they not be tracked and shut down if they divert the chemicals?
Somebody is dropping the ball here or intentionally looking the other way.
Close to one in 10 Americans say they regularly use illegal drugs, including cocaine, hallucinogens, heroin, inhalants and prescription drugs used recreationally, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, USA Today reports.The most common drug is marijuana, which has around 17.4 million regular users, or 6.9 percent of the U.S. population. That’s up from the 5.8 percent in 2007. The increase corresponds with the number of states — now at 16 — approving medical marijuana.
The good news is that use of methamphetamine use, which exploded around the country for the past 10 years, has plummeted. The number of past-month users dropped from 731,000 in 2006 to reach 353,000 last year.
Since 2001, when methamphetamine began to race around the country, states have restricted or banned ingredients used to make meth, such as the pseudoephedrine often used in over-the-counter cold medications, said Peter Delany, director of the Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
“We’ve seen better attention for law enforcement and policy changes. You can’t get all the Sudafed you want anymore,” said Delany.
The federal government now needs to crack down on the Mexico border, squeeze the Mexican drug cartels that make Meth in Mexico and then smuggle the drug into the USA.
In 2005, Burdick and the three other lawmakers fashioned a law that made Oregon the first state to require a prescription for the purchase of the tablet form of pseudoephedrine … and the state’s drug and crime statistics plummeted.
Based on the success of the law there, legislators, prosecutors and others are pushing a similar law for Oklahoma, but not everyone in Oregon agrees that all the state’s good news in crime is the result of the pseudoephedrine restriction.
One statistic that almost everyone credits to the law is that meth labs have essentially disappeared from the state.
U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency statistics for 2004 show the state had 467 meth lab incidents – including police busts and dumped labs. Last year, there were only nine.
Several months ago, the Portland Police Department made a meth lab bust and it was remarkable because of its novelty, said Lt. Robert King, spokesman for the Police Department.
That’s no small accomplishment for the state.
It means the state hasn’t had meth lab fires that destroy property and people, including innocents.
It means the state hasn’t had to deal with the toxic sludge left behind by meth cooks.
It means the state hasn’t had to deal with the expenses of pursuing meth cooks and cleaning up their lab.
“We didn’t solve the meth problem … but we can honestly say we solved the home meth lab problem,” Burdick said.
Lincoln County (Ore.) District Attorney Rob Bovett said that alone is a huge accomplishment. “Just getting rid of meth labs is vital to public health and safety, (and) drug-endangered children,” he said.
But as Oregon’s leading evangelist of the pseudoephedrine restriction movement, Bovett is inclined to credit the law with a broader range of accomplishments.
The website for his Oregon Alliance of Drug Endangered Children, tulsaworld.com/oregonmeth, links the law to fewer meth treatment admissions, fewer meth-related emergency room visits, and the fact that Oregon had the nation’s largest decrease in crime in the nation in 2008 and saw its crime rate at a 50-year low in 2009.
Oklahomans pushing for the same law here have not been shy about pointing to those statistics in their arguments.
Read all of the story.
I think you can agree that this small change in the law requiring prescriptions for pseudoephedrine have made a huge difference in the quality of life for the people in Oregon.
treatment centers - public benefit addiction treatment resource directory, offering comprehensive listings of treatment centers for drug addiction, alcoholism and dual diagnosis.
Comments Off 
Entries (RSS)