St. Louis paper notes Ky. and Okla. use databases to track purchases of key meth ingredients

Pharmacies have been the first line of defense when it comes to stopping the production of methamphetamine, with many states passing laws regulating the purchase of a key ingredient, the cold medicine pseudoephedrine. In many states, purchases and buyers are logged at pharmacies, but a lack of oversight of such logs has meant they often provide little help to law enforcement.

In Kentucky and Oklahoma, however, pharmacies and police have turned those logs into online databases that have prevented illegal sales as well as led to meth lab busts. Such systems offer a model for Illinois and Missouri, which led the nation in meth busts with 1,189 — twice as many as any other state — last year, reports Christine Byers of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In Laurel County, Kentucky, police have been using MethCheck software for the past two years. (P-D photo by J.B. Forbes shows Detective Brian Lewis talking with pharmacists in the county about possible illegal purchases of pseudoephedrine.) "In the first year of using the program, the number of labs the squad seized more than quadrupled," Byers writes. "Using federal and state money, Kentucky plans to spend about $500,000 to link its 1,290 pharmacies statewide in June." The linking of pharmacies is the key, because it means meth producers can't just go from store to store, buying pseudoephedrine and signing logs that remain isolated. A similar system already is in place in Oklahoma, where officials said the database linking the state's 1,485 pharmacies has helped reduce the number of confirmed meth labs by 92 percent since 2005. "You're basically putting the 'Welcome' mat out for meth cooks to come to your state if you don't have a database," Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics spokesman Mark Woodward told Byers.

In Missouri, lawmakers have passed bills to create a system modeled after Oklahoma's, but the necessary funding won't be available until next year. In the meantime, some counties are pursuing grants to establish their own databases now. Oregon, however, has taken an alternative approach by making pseudoephedrine a prescription drug, a move the state said makes expensive databases unnecessary. (Read more) As we noted last week, meth cooks can find other ways of securing key ingredients, such as stealing from farms.