INDIANAPOLIS – The Indiana Medical Licensing Board on Thursday lifted the emergency suspension of a Fort Wayne oncologist who in January was charged with leading police on a high-speed chase while having illegal drugs in his system.Indiana’s methamphetamine problem continued to flummox law enforcement this year, as state police seized more meth labs in 2009 than ever.
The agency’s meth unit hopes the launch early next year of a long-discussed database to track methamphetamine-related information will drive down the blight. The effectiveness of similar programs in other states is still being evaluated, however.
The Indiana Meth Intelligence System would put data from pseudoephedrine sales into a database searchable by law enforcement agencies. It will also track tips from the state police tip line and law enforcement officers.
“All of that info will bounce off one another,” said Indiana State Police 1st Sgt. Niki Crawford, who heads the state’s Meth Suppression Section.
The highly addictive stimulant methamphetamine is often concocted in volatile chemical reactions by addicts who have frustrated law enforcement for years by developing new ways to produce the drug.
One key ingredient remains the common cold medicine pseudoephedrine, sold under the brand name Sudafed or a store brand. Since 2005, the drug has been kept behind pharmacy counters, and limits have been placed on the amount a customer can buy within a given time.
Pharmacists are required by law to take a customer’s information, but in most cases, that information has been kept in paper logs that officers must spend hours searching by hand, Crawford said.
Sometimes investigators can spend eight hours on a misdemeanor pseudoephedrine purchase violation, which might turn out to be nothing more than a mother accidentally buying too much cold medicine for her sick children. Crawford said that doesn’t follow the spirit of the law, which is meant to help police seize meth labs, not create a nanny state.
“It is going to make law enforcement more efficient in doing these investigations,” she said.
If someone buys medicine for a cold or sinus infection, that information will not be available to law enforcement. Crawford said only sales deemed suspicious under the parameters of the program will be included in the database, based on state and federal law and a few other red flags, such as past methamphetamine-related crimes.
The program also aims to fight “smurfing” – when people who travel from pharmacy to pharmacy, buying up as much pseudoephedrine as they can within a short period. The database flags people who buy from different pharmacies during a short time and flags associates who might be working together to buy the drug, Crawford said.
“We’re actually protecting the info and the identity of those people who don’t violate the law,” she said.
Growing need
The database has been discussed for several years, and the need has grown during that time, police say. The number of meth labs found in Indiana increased by a third last year, the second-highest haul since Indiana State Police began tracking annual totals, Crawford said.
Although a final tally is not available, the Indiana State Police said the previous 2004 record of 1,115 meth lab seizures was passed this year by early December. Many northeast and north-central counties, such as Elkhart, Kosciusko, LaGrange and Steuben, ranked high.
That means last year’s haul of 1,059 meth lab seizures is the third-highest ever, according to the state police.
Funding concerns held up the creation of the database, as did debate over what kind of database would be best.
Crawford said Indiana decided to use a program developed in Tennessee because it would cost the state less. All Indiana has to do is build the computer system, and Tennessee gives the program away, she said.
It has other benefits, too, in that any information on the database can be shared with other states that use the program, Crawford said.
Crawford sees that as an advantage over some of the for-profit databases that have been created in recent years. Kentucky uses a for-profit program called MethCheck, but the information MethCheck collects isn’t shared with Indiana.
In March, Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear announced that some counties in extreme southern Indiana had agreed to a pilot program with Kentucky for free access to the MethCheck program for a year.
Similar to Indiana’s new database, MethCheck connects law enforcement with pharmacies’ pseudoephedrine log data electronically, according to Kentucky-based Appriss Inc., which developed the program.
In 2008, nearly a third of the meth labs found in Kentucky were in two counties bordering Indiana, the governor said at the time.
Kentucky contends that MethCheck has recorded more than 850,000 sales and blocked more than 13,000 transactions that would have violated state and federal law in its first nine months of operation. That equals 44,000 grams of pseudoephedrine that could have been used to make meth, a statement from the governor’s office said.
But in a letter posted by the Oregon Alliance for Drug Endangered Children, which supports legislation that would make pseudoephedrine a prescription-only drug, Kentucky State Police Commissioner Rodney Brewer said the system appears to have had little effect on the number of clandestine labs discovered in the state.
By including tips from law enforcement and the public in its database, Indiana hopes its system will have an effect on the number of labs found. If nothing else, the state hopes it will ease some of the burden not just on law enforcement but on pharmacists who are required to take down customer information.
The program has been tested at two Martin’s Super Markets in the South Bend area. Pharmacists there said it was less cumbersome and easier to use than paper logs, said David B. Adams, Martin’s director of pharmacy operations.
Martin’s, a small chain with headquarters in South Bend, hopes to roll out the program to the rest of its 13 pharmacies by the end of the year.
The pharmacies already had Internet access, so it was simple to log on to the state police’s secure Web portal, Adams said.
To get the rest of the state’s pharmacies on board, the state will need a powerful computer to handle the Web traffic.
Crawford, of the Indiana State Police, said that’s the final decision in the works – whether the state should spend some of the grant money on a better computer system. Federal grant money the state saves could be spent on an intelligence analyst, Crawford said.
