Illegal Drug Makers Buying Up Sinus Pills From Stores

Neighborhood groceries, drugstores and other unlikely retail outlets are increasingly being stripped of over-the-counter sinus medicines. But the popular remedies are not being used for hay fever or the common cold.

Authorities say “meth cooks” are snatching up legal decongestants to convert them into illegal methamphetamine, increasingly a drug of choice in Southern California.

The drug cooks are buying cold medicines for one of their main ingredients--pseudoephedrine--which is needed to make “meth,” also known as “crank” or “speed” on the street.

A chemically similar drug called ephedrine has heretofore been used by illegal drug manufacturers to make speed. But the recent regulation of ephedrine sales by federal authorities has caused cooks to seek a substitute.

They are finding it in generic cold pills with names such as Peptab, XLI and Mini-thins.

Law enforcement officials say that gas stations, antique stores and head shops are among retail outlets in Southern California that are stocking thousands of pseudoephedrine tablets for resale to drug cooks.

“It’s an obvious subterfuge,” said Gerard Murphy, who runs the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, a region known to authorities as the nation’s meth capital. “Why does a gas station or a deli need to carry more tablets than a drugstore?”

Murphy said the DEA is addressing the problem by targeting unlikely retail outlets that order the drug in large quantities from East Coast drug manufacturers and brokers. Agency officials have also assisted U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) in drafting legislation that would restrict sales of pseudoephedrine.

Cooks who produce smaller quantities of meth are resorting to more obvious places for the key ingredient: drugstores.

“We do have documentation of guys who will go to Thrifty’s and buy 10 bottles, then they’ll go to [a different store] and buy another 10 bottles, and then they’ll go somewhere else,” said Gary Hudson, who heads the state Department of Justice meth lab enforcement team for Orange County. “It’s legal to sell it, but you’ve got guys coming in and buying hundreds of cases.”

Hudson said agents found “bags and bags” of generic cold medicines at three of four methamphetamine labs raided by his team in the past two weeks. His team is attempting to educate store owners about identifying potential meth cooks who come to buy over-the-counter drugs, he said.

Some store managers have cooperated with authorities, promising to closely watch their inventories and not to sell it by the case, Hudson said. But many stores close their eyes to the possibility that the product will end up in street drugs.

A Thrifty pharmacy manager in Orange County, who spoke on condition that her name not be used, said there was little that drugstore managers could do to prevent sales of pseudoephedrine to illegal drug makers.

“If we see someone buying a large quantity, we ask them what they use it for,” she said. “You have to ring it up. We’re not law enforcers. The most we can do is [provide] other stores in the area with a description of the customer.”

Alison Davis, a spokeswoman at the Wilsonville, Ore., headquarters of Thrifty’s Payless Drug Stores, said store officials were aware of reports of pseudoephedrine sales to potential drug dealers, adding that “as a whole, retailers would have a hard time controlling this.”

“We’re not changing anything in our stores,” Davis said. “We want to have the product available to customers who [suffer] from colds or allergies. There is no good alternative for these products.”

The popularity of meth has become a growing concern for hospital and law enforcement officials in California.

Meth provides a cheaper, longer high than cocaine. But authorities say its use can trigger nervousness, irritability, restlessness, paranoia, chest pains, irregular heartbeat and seizures.

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A recent study by the nonprofit Public Statistics Institute in Irvine revealed that the use of amphetamines has skyrocketed in the last decade. The 10-year study showed that amphetamine-related hospital admissions, a commonly accepted indicator of drug use, increased 366% in California over the past decade.

Across the state, the Department of Justice raided 431 labs in the 1994-95 fiscal year, a 51% increase over the 285 labs that agents found and dismantled just five years earlier.

The drug’s growing popularity and the relative simplicity of cooking it from readily available ingredients has fueled a growing cottage industry in Southern California. Meth makers operate out of motel rooms, trailer parks, apartments and well-groomed, middle-class neighborhoods.

All that is needed are a few flasks and beakers, select ingredients from chemical houses and hardware stores, and a supply of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine.

The pseudoephedrine is chemically freed from the cold tablets with heat source. It is then extracted and used as a prime ingredient in the volatile cooking process that makes speed.

As recently as two years ago, meth manufacturers used ephedrine that they purchased from any number of legitimate chemical manufacturing firms.

Since the DEA began requiring makers of ephedrine to keep detailed sales records and report all buyers to the agency, however, illegal lab operators have been switching to pseudoephedrine tablets, which can be found in more than 100 over-the-counter cold, diet and allergy pills.

Manufacturers of the pills are not required to keep records of their customers.

After the DEA began to regulate ephedrine, sales of pseudoephedrine soared.

Between August 1994 and June 1995, a Rialto family that operated three “head shops” in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties sold about 82,000 pounds of pseudoephedrine tablets worth about $5 million to meth dealers throughout Southern California, according to federal court records.

The amount was about 100 times more than drug manufacturers had sold to hospitals and pharmacies in the region over the same period, said Stephen G. Wolfe, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles.

“The most surprising thing was these [sales] were taking place through legitimate outlets,” Wolfe said. “People were walking into these stores and buying [pseudoephedrine]. They were not underground transactions.”

When DEA officials realized that the regulation of ephedrine sales had resulted in booming sales of pseudoephedrine, they fired off a letter warning drug makers that “pseudoephedrine drug products are listed chemicals, and that any person possessing or distributing a listed chemical knowing . . . that the listed chemical will be used to illegally manufacture a controlled substance could be fined and imprisoned.”

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Five members of the Rialto family, and three employees of their head shops, were arrested in October.

Members of the family have pleaded guilty to illegal possession of listed chemicals and money laundering. They will be sentenced in federal court in Los Angeles within the next two months.

Court records show that the DEA has seized records of Xpressive Look Inc., or XLI, the company that supplied the pseudoephedrine tablets to the Rialto family operation. It is also described in court documents as the major supplier of pseudoephedrine tablets to the Riverside area.

Carl Armbrust, the prosecutor in charge of the Narcotics Enforcement Team at the Orange County district attorney’s office, said pseudoephedrine buyers often pose as doctors or drug distributors to get their hands on large quantities without raising suspicions.

“They’re buying it through other wholesale distributors or through the [drug] companies themselves, and using fictitious identification, saying, ‘I’m a doctor. I need this stuff,’ ” Armbrust said. “Sometimes they say they’re wholesale distributors. They order a large amount and claim to be distributing it to other drugstores and companies.”

Until drug sellers are required to report all pseudoephedrine sales to law enforcement officials, Armbrust said, the situation will continue to pose a dilemma for authorities.

The problems involving pseudoephedrine are so prevalent that Feinstein two months ago introduced legislation requiring pharmaceutical companies to report buyers of that drug, and other chemical ingredients of methamphetamine.

Under the proposed law, buyers of iodine, red phosphorous and hydrochloric gas--other chemicals used in the manufacture of methamphetamine--also would be required to provide evidence that their purchase is for a legitimate purpose.

But authorities say the use of over-the-counter pseudoephedrine demonstrates the adaptability of meth cooks.

Cooks and their runners are buying pseudoephedrine in smaller batches, making it difficult for authorities to track.

Said Hudson: “No matter what we do, they’ll figure out a way to do something different.”