Federal bills target sale of cold pills

WASHINGTON -- The days of buying certain cold remedies off the drugstore shelf may soon be gone, a casualty of the methamphetamine epidemic.

Picking up on laws already passed in more than a dozen states, Congress is thinking about requiring the nation's retailers to sell medicines like Sudafed behind the pharmacy counter to make it harder to get the ingredients needed to make highly addictive meth.

A similar law in Kansas took effect this week, and a bill in Missouri is awaiting Gov. Matt Blunt's signature.

Retailers, who once resisted the idea as burdensome for consumers, now seem ready to go along with it in hopes of avoiding a tangle of state regulations. This month, a Senate committee will hold hearings on a bill that places sharp new restrictions on the sale of cold and allergy pills containing pseudoephedrine, which is used to "cook" meth in makeshift labs across the country.

"There's a lot of public pressure to do something," said Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo., who together with Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced a bill to limit the sale of cold medicines. "I think retailers -- most of them -- do not want to sell their products to meth cooks and they know they have to do something."

Their bill, modeled on an Oklahoma law that took effect in April 2004, requires medicines with pseudoephedrine to be sold only by a pharmacist or pharmacy personnel. Customers would have to show a photo ID, sign a log and be limited to 9 grams -- or about 300 30-milligram pills -- in a 30-day period. The government can make exceptions in areas where pharmacies are not easily accessible.

Some stores, like Target and Wal-Mart, have already adopted their own guidelines to move cold products behind pharmacy counters. And last month, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores endorsed a set of principles that includes limiting access to the drugs.

"We do think it's time for a federal solution," said Mary Ann Wagner, the association's vice president of pharmacy regulatory affairs. "It's just becoming so complicated when you look at a map across the country and no two laws are anything alike."

Supported by Pfizer

The drug industry has not raised major objections to federal legislation. Jay Kosminsky, a spokesman for Pfizer, which makes Sudafed, said the company supports having a national standard that would put pseudoephedrine behind the counter.

"I do think there really is an opportunity for a national consensus on this issue and I don't think there was a year ago," Kosminsky said.

Talent said he and Feinstein plan to unveil a new version of their bill this month that addresses some of the concerns of retailers. The updated measure would, for example, carve out exemptions for children's cold medicines, where the pseudoephedrine is too difficult to extract.

House Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., is revising a similar bill in the House and has made meth enforcement one of his top priorities.

The biggest problem for retailers, Wagner said, is requiring a pharmacist to sell the medication. She said store personnel should be able to make sales as long as they are under the pharmacist's supervision.

The effect on sales is a key issue. In Oklahoma, where pharmacists must supervise transactions, cold medicine sales have dropped. Sales have not suffered in Illinois, which has less restrictive rules and allows other store workers to dispense the drugs.

The Bush administration has not taken a formal position on the Talent-Feinstein bill. But John Horton, associate deputy director for state and local affairs for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said early signs show state laws are having a positive effect.

An ONDCP report issued last month found there has been a 50 percent drop in the number of meth labs in Oklahoma and Oregon, two of the first states to enact laws restricting the purchase of pseudoephedrine-containing products.

"We know that when we prevent the methamphetamine cooks from getting the ingredients they need to make the meth, that the problem becomes smaller," Horton said.

Horton estimates about a third of the meth comes from small labs in the United States, while two-thirds is smuggled in bulk from big labs outside the country, mainly Mexico.

The meth problem is particularly bad in the Midwest, where rural areas provide cover for the pungent chemical odor coming from meth labs. In Missouri, law enforcement officials seized more than 2,700 meth labs last year, more than any other state.

"The labs themselves are a huge problem in communities," Talent said. "They are toxic waste dumps, they're fire hazards, they're threats to children and they're overwhelming law enforcement."