Congressman
John E. Peterson

New drug bill an important tool in fighting the spread of meth

By Congressman John E. Peterson
March 2006

Earlier this week in Washington, my colleagues and I in Congress sent to the president the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2006 – a bill that will make it more difficult for criminals to manufacture methamphetamine (meth) and bring harm upon themselves, their friends and neighbors, and our local communities across northwest and central Pennsylvania.

I was proud to lend my support to this bill, and even prouder to be called upon to craft one of its provisions. Thanks to language I worked into the Meth Act, we will for the first timebe able to ensure that the financial burden associated with cleaning up these dangerous and disgusting meth lab sites can be placed on the meth cooks themselves, closing an existing legal loophole that severely limited the ability of a judge to order such commonsense restitution.

That policy didn’t make a whole lot of sense, so we crafted legislation to fix it. But we also realized that, if our goal was to provide relief to local law enforcement in its expensive fight against the rapid spread of meth, we had to do a whole lot more to fight the spread of materials and ingredients that criminals widely use in the drug’s creation.

That’s where things got tricky. It turns out that the precursor materials cooks use to manufacture meth in labs are in some cases the same ones that good, hard-working Americans use as palliative remedies to quell a sore throat, sneezing, or the occasional cough. 

We knew there had to be a reasonable way to strike the necessary balance between ensuring legitimate consumers fair access to the medicine they need, while at the same time cutting off meth cooks from the ingredients they require as well. And so we called before Congress just about everyone you can think of – from convenient store owners and community activists, to White House drug control experts, and local law enforcement officials – to hear their recommendations. What came of those exhaustive deliberations is a meth bill that’s comprehensive, consequential, and built squarely upon a foundation of reasonability and commonsense.

Here’s an example of some of that commonsense at play: Before the Meth Act, all a meth cook had to do to procure the necessary elements of production was walk into a local pharmacy or convenient store and purchase (or steal) as many boxes of pseudoephedrine-containing cold or allergy pills as were available. That same meth cook would then walk down the street and do the same thing at a similar store – no questions asked – until he or she was able to acquire the type and amount of ingredients needed to begin the rather simple process of cooking meth.

Allowing meth cooks to simply stroll down Main Street from gas station to convenient mart to supermarket in the illicit, and totally unimpeded, pursuit of meth ingredients didn’t make a whole lot of a sense either. So we decided to include sensible limitations on the amount of precursor chemicals one can purchase within a given time period. Now, under a provision that confines the amount of pseudoephedrine one can buy to 3.6 grams per day (or roughly 60 doses of sinus medication) and puts it either behind the counter or under lock and key, that same meth cook won’t be able to clean out a store’s entire inventory of Sudafed and Dimetapp in one fell swoop. Nor will he or she be able to purchase smaller quantities of the chemicals without showing proper identification and signing a log book first – two relatively small and unobtrusive changes that local law enforcement agents tell me will stop most meth cooks and addicts, who tend to experience extreme drug-induced bouts of paranoia, in their tracks.

Limiting the sale of pseudoephedrine to 60 pills a day doesn’t strike me as incredibly intemperate. After all, if you need more than those 60 doses of sinus medication to get relief, you probably ought to be in a hospital – not lying in bed with a heat pack and thermometer swilling Dimetapp.

That said, I’m sensitive to some of the concerns that have been raised by families and convenient store owners in my district. No one wants common, over-the-counter medication to be denied to sick children, and certainly no one wants to make any legitimate customer jump through unreasonable hoops to get a box of Sudafed.

But if you live in central or northwestern Pennsylvania, you also realize that our communities right now are in a full-fledged fight for survival with the scourge of methamphetamine. I don’t have to tell you how it rots away the core of our communities, drains valuable resources from our local law enforcement accounts, and exacts a toll on our environment that is in many cases irreparable.

Nor do I have to tell you what’s at stake. The battle against meth is one that, frankly, we cannot afford to lose. The past three years have seen huge declines in the number of meth labs seized in our state. These new guidelines, along with continued cooperation and communication among all levels of government, can only help us bring down those numbers even more.