How far is too far?


Meth and the rights of Americans
Another where I wish I was kidding. And in my backyard.

Under the new laws, all those medications must be kept behind the counter, available for purchase only after customers sign a special logbook.  Every month, the logbook would be faxed to police.

And, as Phoenix Police Sgt.  Don Sherrard explains it, even though the pages now make a stack eight feet high, they didn't just end up in the trash .  .  .  or even in a file cabinet somewhere.  The cops actually read them.

And that led them to Anthem.

As the officers pored over the logbook, Sherrard says, they kept noticing the same name, over and over, and the same Anthem address.

So they went out to investigate.

Now, it might be funny if Anthem, a cookie-cutter enclave northwest of the city, harbored a coven of tweakers, systematically "cooking" cold medicine into an illegal drug.  It's not hard to imagine cops busting the place, sending dozens of skinny soccer moms to jail.

But that isn't what happened when the police officers made their trek up I-17.

Instead, they found a big family that had been racked by the flu.

The members of this family weren't stocking up on pseudoephedrine.  They were buying cold medicine.

"The way the log reads, the amount purchased can be deceiving," Sherrard says.  "All we see is that the mother's name appeared four or five times -- what it doesn't tell you is that she's buying Children's Tylenol."

( And if mom had wanted to make meth, five boxes of Children's Tylenol was hardly going to do the trick.  )

Needless to say, Sherrard says dryly, "we closed that case."

Sherrard says he thinks the city restrictions were worth doing: "If we can stop just one meth lab, it's worth it."

But he's more than willing to admit that, for Phoenix, the law's effect has likely been minimal.  Other than that mom in Anthem and, as it turned out, two other people purchasing large but legal quantities, Sherrard says the logbook has provided few leads.

That might indicate that addicts have suddenly stopped cooking meth here, and stopped using.  But, as Sherrard is quick to point out, the number of meth lab busts plummeted long before December's legislation.

Years ago, most Arizona addicts made the switch from home-grown labs to purchasing cheaper, more potent meth from Mexican dealers.

"It's just economics," Sherrard says.

So here are the questions.

Why are we criminalizing cold medicine if the laws are doing nothing to prevent the activity?

Why are we making suspects of people who are just protecting their family?

If the laws aren't working, why aren't we repealing them?

Hat tip to Drug War Rant.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - April 4, 2006 at 03:23 PM  Tag


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