The War on Drugs in... Walgreen's?

[klaatu]

www.ocala.com
April 30, 2006

In case you missed it, I recently visited the front lines in America's War on Drugs. Did I stealthily accompany undercover DEA operatives to Medellin to observe the world's best known cocaine cartel at work? Was I embedded with a U.S. Army unit in Afghanistan to survey that government's crackdown on poppy farmers, the force, according to a U.N. estimate, behind nearly 90 percent of the world's opium trade?

Nope. I went to Walgreen's.

One of my twin sons had an ear infection not long ago and I picked up his prescription. Stacked neatly behind the druggist's counter was row after row of Sudafed and the house knockoff, as well as other drugs containing pseudoephedrine or ephedrine, the key ingredient to making methamphetamine, the outlaw drug currently touted as the biggest scourge in a nation that loves to live better through chemistry. The pharmacist had even secured the Vick's nasal inhalers, which, online sources say, contain methamphetamine.

This was the first time I had noticed compliance with a state law passed last year to combat the nefarious meth trade. Just this month, a similar provision to move cold meds behind the counter took effect nationally as part of the recently renewed USA Patriot Act.

Now, don't get me wrong. The drug trade in certain quarters is violent and deadly and has ruined the lives of many of those who couldn't control their appetite for destruction.

But the government's drug war has always been reminiscent of Samuel Johnson's characterization of second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience.

The only effective progress we've made in this long, twilight struggle has come from the very costly and time-consuming tactic - at least for police, prosecutors, judges, jailers and the taxpayers who pay them - of locking up everybody carrying anything more than a joint. Now, we've had to effectively criminalize the common cold.

Yet a few important facts are worth remembering: meth is illegal; its use is spreading; and Marion County ranks in the top three counties in Florida for the number of meth labs found.

All that would be enough cause for concern. But a group here in Ocala, led by Sheriff Ed Dean and comprised of police, health officials and child welfare advocates, is zeroing in on a policy to deal with a more worrisome aspect of the attack on meth: rescuing children found inside the toxic mills where this crud is cooked.

Among that group is Special Agent Eddie Velez of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, a member of a special multi-agency anti-drug task force operating in Marion, Alachua, Levy and Gilchrist counties.

To understand the concern, Velez likened making meth to baking a cake: it's a few key ingredients with a pinch here and a dash there of the cook's personal favorites tossed in for fun.

Except this cake's recipe calls for, besides cold medicines, anhydrous ammonia, used to make fertilizer, and muriatic acid, a swimming pool cleaning agent. Meth cooks also use red phosphorous, sulfuric or hydrochloric acid, kerosene, drain cleaner, or paint thinner.

As sick as it seems, the knuckleheads who make this junk allow children in and around their labs.

The Web site for a group called Common Sense Drug Policy highlights a Dallas Morning News report from September that noted, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, 10,000 meth labs had been cleaned up around the country within the previous year - with more than 3,000 children removed from them.

Drug agents in Marion County will encounter a child in a meth lab perhaps 15 percent of the time, Velez said. Not that frequent, but even that's too much.

When a cleanup crew moves in after a bust, they're wearing decontamination suits because of the chemical overload. Meanwhile, "these kids are in it and exposed to it," Velez observed, "you can collect their clothes, but now we have to figure out what to do with them." Often, they're taken out with open sores on their little bodies and respiratory ailments.

Dean says he wants child welfare experts on the scene to help treat these children and place them in appropriate settings.

Velez believes the cold-med lockdown works by forcing meth makers to work harder for their goods. By this time last year, his troops had busted half of the 30 or so labs they found in Marion County. So far this year, they've uncovered six.

The downside, albeit Velez says he hasn't seen it here yet, is that as the Sudafed market dries up, meth heads turn to more powerful doses imported from Mexico.

We've locked up plenty in the War on Drugs, including now the Sudafed. As ridiculous as that seems, though, some things are worse. You could be a kid trapped in one of these chemical compounds.


Klaatu