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Under pressure from law-enforcement agencies and state governments, drug companies have begun reformulating popular cold medicines to prevent criminals from converting them into methamphetamine.



"This is the direction we're moving," said Elizabeth Assey, spokeswoman for the Consumer Healthcare Products Association in Washington, D.C., a lobbying organization for the cold medicine industry.

Pseudoephedrine, a main ingredient in a number of over-the-counter drugs such as Sudafed and Sinutab, can be extracted by boiling down cold medicines. Toxic chemicals are then used to turn the substance into meth.

More than a dozen states already have restricted access, either by allowing only pharmacies to sell drugs with pseudoephedrine or making retailers sell them from staffed counters. A May report by the Office of National Drug Control Policy found a 50 percent drop in the number of meth labs in Oklahoma and Oregon, two of the first states to enact such restrictions.

But law enforcement officials and others believe that reformulating the drugs can reduce the problem even more, by helping shut down the small labs operating nationwide.

Pfizer Inc., the manufacturer of Sudafed and other leading pseudoephedrine products, plans by January to reformulate up to half of them with phenylephrine.

Leiner Health Products, which supplies generic cold and allergy drugs to retail chains such as Costco, Target, Walgreens and Wal-Mart, began shipping new products containing phenylephrine in June.

McNeil Consumer & Specialty Pharmaceuticals, a division of Johnson & Johnson, also is considering reformulation of a variety of its products, along with other major manufacturers, including Wyeth and Schering-Plough.

And the world's largest producer of phenylephrine ? Boehringer-Ingelheim of Germany ? says it can boost production capacity for the substitute ingredient by enough so the entire U.S. supply of pseudoephedrine could be replaced by 2006.

The meth problem is particularly severe in the Midwest, where rural areas provide cover for the pungent chemical odor from meth labs. In Missouri, law enforcement officers seized more than 2,700 meth labs last year ? more than any other state.

"It's such a drain," said Mark Woodward, spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics. He said meth abuse forces law enforcement to spend millions of dollars on toxic cleanup, prisons and increased caseloads in courts.

But pharmaceutical companies are moving cautiously to make sure substitutes are effective, and to await proposed federal legislation that could affect how they reformulate some of their products, said Assey, of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.

"It's the first step in a long process, from an industry standpoint," she said.

The meth problem has been a growing scourge in recent years. The National Clandestine Laboratory Seizure System, which collects data from state police agencies, shows the reported meth lab seizures increased from 6,777 in 1999 to 10,182 in 2003.

About 12.3 million Americans ages 12 and older reported trying methamphetamine at least once, according to the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

The epidemic has generated plenty of interest in phenylephrine because it's one of the best and easiest substitutes for pseudoephedrine.

Phenylephrine differs from pseudoephedrine by a single pair of oxygen and hydrogen atoms, a tiny but important difference that makes it virtually impossible to transform phenylephrine into methamphetamine.

"Structurally, when just looking at the chemistry, they are very, very similar," said Kate Farthing, an Oregon Health & Science University pharmacist.

But if cooks at illegal labs try to convert phenylephrine into methamphetamine, they get only a useless variation, Farthing said.

Still, the cold medicine industry worries that reformulating remedies containing a combination of pseudoephedrine and some other ingredient, such as ibuprofen, would require U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval that could take three to five years.

The concern is being addressed in federal legislation proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., and Sen. Jim Talent (news, bio, voting record), R-Mo.

Under the bill, consumers would have to show a photo ID, sign a log, and be limited to 7.5 grams ? or about 250 30-milligram pills ? in a 30-day period. Computer tracking would prevent customers from exceeding the limit at other stores.

The latest draft of the bill, sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, also would expedite FDA approval of reformulated drugs.

Scott Gerber, spokesman for Feinstein, said the proposal would ensure consumer access to cold remedies while targeting small illegal labs run by "people who are brewing up large batches of meth in their basements, cars, motel rooms and making it for their personal use or selling it."

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BCBudJohn said:
This is a good idea. Meth is easily the most heanous drug on this earth.

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The issue is too complex to fully address by one person, but the reason it's so complex is mostly because it's illegal. Dealers don't card their buyers, and many have no qualms to selling meth to a high school kid for quite a tidy profit. Were it legal, it would most likely be harder to acquire for these kids, because the "dealers" would then be law-abiding business owners who'd have nothing to gain and everything to lose from letting drugs like this fall into the hands of kids.

When you've created a situation where you are already taking away freedoms, like the criminalization of meth, the only way to continue it is to take away more freedoms. This is a perfect example of social Darwinism, where the government outlawed meth, so the traditional methods of legally making it died off while those who adapted and learned how to make it from common cold medicines rose to prominence. Now they will again restrict more freedoms, even changing cold medicines to stop the production of meth, and again the methods will die off and adapt. Most likely this means that more and more meth will be made in Mexico and smuggled here, which is good for some and bad for others.

The bottom line is that it's not worth it. Any gains we get from trying to stop meth are easily displaced by the harmful effects of the prohibition of it, and any attempt to stop the production and use of meth will simply be circumvented by the black market criminals who want a piece of the pie. And with meth, there's a lot of pie to be eaten.

Legalize methamphetamines today!

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They'll never need to have brain bleeds again, but to each his own.

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DXM isn't a bad drug anyway. The unsafe practices of using Coricidin are unfortunate, but it should be up to the private companies on how to deal with the abuse of both Coricidin and the use of pseudoephedrine to manufacture methamphetamine.

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votelp2008 said:
Even if the government found some way to eliminate all pseudoephedrine from the face of the earth, organized crime groups would hire people with experience in chemistry to make bulk amounts of methamphetamine using other methods (there are about 10 or 20 ways to make meth using no watched chemicals at all). This will result in the meth trade being 100% dominated by organized crime, instead of it having competition from small-time pseudoephedrine labs that are usually either for personal use or distributing to friends. Which do you prefer?

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