An amendment that would restrict sales of some common cold medicines and require stores to stock them behind the counter in a pharmacy was added in the House to a Senate bill that reduced the amount of pseudoephedrine a person can purchase and increased the jail time for people making dangerous drugs in the vicinity of children.

The amendment, added on the House floor April 18, also requires pharmacies to keep a registry of everyone purchasing medications with pseudoephedrine and further restricts the amount of the medicine that can be purchased, from nine grams per transaction in the original bill to nine grams per month. Although it initially was voted down, the amendment was eventually added after a roll call vote of 30-27.

Pseudoephedrine is the key ingredient in the manufacture of methamphetamines. The amendment only applies to pseudoephedrine medicines in pill or tablet form — such as Sudafed or Actifed — but would not affect similar medications in liquid or gel form.

Leff: Doesn’t Solve The Problem

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Barbara Leff, R-11, said the amendment was unacceptable and would inconvenience honest citizens, while not addressing the true problem of pseudoephedrine and methamphetamine being smuggled in from Mexico.

“It’s a good sound bite, but it doesn’t really solve the problem,” she said.

Rep. Tom O’Halleran, R-1, the sponsor of the amendment, said the language was modeled on a similar law in Oklahoma, where news reports say the number of clandestine meth labs has been reduced by 80 per cent since the law went into effect. He said Arizona law enforcement agencies are in support of his amendment.

“There is not one law enforcement person in this state that I’ve talked to that has shown resistance to this amendment,” he said.

Ms. Leff said she would not concur with the amendments made by the House and would request a free conference committee be appointed to negotiate changes to the bill.

She said she would be willing to look at putting pills containing pseudoephedrine behind the counter or locking them up, similar to cigarettes, in order to prevent their theft. However, Ms. Leff said she would not accede to Mr. O’Halleran’s desire to only sell the medication in stores with a pharmacy or the use of a log book. She also opposed the provision to further limit the amount of pseudoephedrine that can be purchased.

Mr. O’Halleran said the compromise being offered by Ms. Leff would not be adequate at stopping the drug labs.

“It hasn’t worked in any other states it’s been tried,” he said of Ms. Leff’s proposal.

He said it may cut down on theft of the pills, but does not address how much a consumer can buy. Recently, he said, he and an undercover police officer tested the original language of S1473 by seeing how much pseudoephedrine he could buy. Within 20 minutes, he said, he had purchased 27 grams, enough to produce several ounces of methamphetamine.

Ms. Leff says the log book also presents problems and could expose law-abiding citizens to identity theft. A person buying the medicine in order to manufacture drugs, she said, could take a photograph of the log entries using a camera phone or steal the page outright.

Further, she said it was a waste of time and money to scour the log book to see if someone purchased more than the nine grams of pseudoephedrine in a month under the amendment.

“I don’t think that we should be using the few precious resources we have chasing down people using a log book when the meth users are going to be using fake IDs,” she said.

Mr. O’Halleran said there is “zero” chance of the log book being used to facilitate identity theft. The only information the law would require to be recorded in the book is the purchaser’s name and date of birth.

“[Stores] ask for more information to return a purchase than this bill does,” he said. —