The Peoples Business

DES MOINES – What do you do when a common legal drug available in every corner store doubles as the main ingredient in a highly addictive illegal drug that’s defied all efforts to control its spread?

It’s a tough question. And Iowa lawmakers are struggling to find an answer.

The legal drug is pseudoephedrine. It’s a common nasal decongestant found in dozens of cold, flu and allergy remedies. A few are probably in your medicine cabinet.

The illegal drug is methamphetamine, which you can’t make without pseudoephedrine. Meth makers, cooking their drug in hundreds of makeshift, volatile labs, will do anything to get their hands on that precious ingredient.

Drug control agents - who spend much of their time hunting labs and cleaning up their noxious remnants - want the state to limit access to that main ingredient. So Gov. Tom Vilsack urged lawmakers to designate pseudoephedrine as a Schedule V controlled substance which only pharmacists can dispense. Buyers would have to show a valid ID and sign a log book.

That, however, didn’t sit well with retailers who argued that such a move would hurt small stores without pharmacists and small towns without pharmacies. Rural Iowans, they argue, would be forced to drive through the night for a box of Tylenol Cold.

So lawmakers were faced with the prospect of being callous and tough on drugs or of being sympathetic to parents with sick children and soft on meth.

And in keeping with a grand Statehouse tradition, they tried to please everyone.

The Iowa Senate approved a bill that would designate some products with more than 360 milligrams of pseudoephedrine as Schedule V substances. Other products with fewer milligrams could be sold in retail stores, but only if they’re placed behind the counter or under lock and key to thwart theft.

Iowans would be limited to buying two packages at a time and no more than 6,000 milligrams each month. Stores would be expected to keep track.

Everybody happy? Not quite.

Retailers say the record-keeping requirements are too much. House Speaker Christopher Rants points out that law-abiding Iowans who want to buy a month’s supply of the allergy medication Claritin-D – 7,200 milligrams – would have to either get a prescription or break the law.

Drug-fighters argue the bill is too weak, its exceptions are too large and its purchase limits are too high. They want full-blown Schedule V as Vilsack intended.

It’s hard to blame them for wanting to get tough. Meth makers are like rats. Leave them an opening, no matter how small, and they’ll find a way to crawl through.

Limit access to ephedrine, and cookers use pseudoephedrine. Put single-ingredient decongestants under lock and key, they start stealing multi-ingredient medicines. Use tank locks to secure anhydrous ammonia – another meth ingredient – in one county, cooks go to another. Cut off the supply of anhydrous entirely, they use red phosphorus to make their poison. Get tough in one state, they’ll cross the border. Pass tough penalties, lab seizures still soar.

If lawmakers truly want to defeat that kind of enemy, half-measures won’t cut it.

But is it worth it?

Retailers, the house speaker and others raise valid concerns about the wisdom of slapping restrictions on law-abiding citizens to snare a few lawbreakers. Restrictions would be a hassle for rural residents, although let’s face it, small town Iowans are used to driving for necessities.

More than 80 percent of Iowa’s meth comes from out of state, so will shutting down labs accomplish much?

And what about civil liberties issues? What actually happens to all the information Iowans will be required to give every time they buy a bottle of Nyquil?

All this adds up to the kind of decision lawmakers hate to make – a stark choice between hammering lawbreakers and creating a hardship for law-abiding Iowans.

Instead, they’ll scramble to seek middle ground and declare victory. But if that fails, a meth-weary state will be asking another tough question.

Now what?