Limits on drug sales requested

Allen County commissioners threw their support behind efforts of the Southeast Kansas Drug Task Force to make pseudoephedrine more difficult to obtain. However, the call will have to be made by city governing bodies.
The drug found in allergy medicines is used in the manufacture of methamphetamine.
Sheriff Bryan Murphy said the goal of the task force was for purchases of the medicine be made possible only with a prescription, which is the case in Parsons and Chanute.
In Iola and Humboldt purchase of anything containing pseudoephedrine may be done through a pharmacist, who records each sale in electronic tracking. Also, sales are limited by month to amount appropriate for the drug’s intended use. But, no doctor’s prescription is required.
Even so, Murphy said that shouldn’t be difficult for legitimate users, whose pending purchases could be confirmed by a telephone call to the person’s doctor, and not require an office call.
“A doctor will know if the patient needs the medicine,” he said.
Murphy said having to have a prescription means illegal purchases should be reduced to practically nil. “Now, some people buy (the drug) at one pharmacy and then use false identification to buy at another,” he explained.
Some states have made the purchase of pseudoephedrine possible only with a prescription.
One is Oregon, where the number of meth labs — generic reference to the illegal drug’s manufacture — dealt with by authorities dropped from 584 in 2001 to five by 2010. During the same time in California, such drug busts fell off from 1,715 to 119.
Murphy is eager for the same results in the six southeast Kansas counties where the drug task force is active.
“It (meth manufacture) affects so many people, including children,” he said. “There are fire and explosion hazards and the clean-up is crazy bad. We’ve spent $3,000 so far this year on meth lab clean-up in Allen County.”
The drug task force is a consortium of law enforcement agencies in southeast Kansas and the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

MURPHY also told commissioners that his department would participate in intensified enforcement of the seatbelt law during Memorial Day and Labor Day holiday weekends.
The effort will be supported by a $3,000 grant from the Kansas Department of Transportation. Grant money will pay for overtime from having additional officers on duty those weekends.