ELKHART – This year, Indiana has removed more than 100 children from homes where methamphetamine labs were found – on track to be the most ever.
Indiana State Police 1st Sgt. Niki Crawford said Friday the agency hopes a new Web-based program that was years in the making will help streamline efforts to combat the drug.
In a conference room at the Indiana State Police’s Toll Road post, in a region of the state that has seen much of the drug’s activity, Crawford demonstrated elements of the website and rattled off statistics that motivated its creation. More than a third of the children removed from homes where meth labs are found test positive for the drug, she said.
“There is not a drug out there that is more addictive and damaging to people, homes and families than methamphetamine,” Crawford said.
Indiana’s campaign against the drug has been well-documented since the state police found their first lab in 1991; last year, police seized more meth labs in Indiana than any year before.
The highly addictive stimulant is often created by addicts using volatile chemical reactions, and a key ingredient is the common medication pseudoephedrine, sold as brand-name Sudafed or as a store brand.
Since 2005, pseudoephedrine has been kept behind pharmacy counters and can only be sold in limited quantities, and retailers have had to keep track of who buys it.
But in most cases, that information was kept on paper logs that officer had to spent hours poring over to find repeat buyers or past offenders. From 2006 through last year, officers with the state police’s meth unit made more than 6,800 visits to retail outlets, the state police said.
Friday’s demonstration included a website for the public, with information on how to report meth-related crimes and how to clean up meth labs and current laws regulating pseudoephedrine.
That website is paired with a free online system for professionals set up by the Tennessee Meth Task Force, which provides the needed software to any agency that requests it.
The program allows all law enforcement officers – not bound by state lines – to share intelligence, and it allows retailers to dump their pseudoephedrine purchase logs into the system electronically.
It gathers pseudoephedrine sales data in real time, lab seizure reports required by the federal government, and community and law enforcement tips.
Crawford said the effort the state put into deciding whether to use Tennessee’s system was considerable. Several private companies in recent years have also created programs to help retailers and police track pseudoephedrine purchases.
MethCheck, a program used in Kentucky, is a private system that doesn’t share information with Indiana. While some officials in Kentucky have said the system has recorded hundreds of thousands of sales and blocked transactions that would have violated the state’s laws, others have said its effect on the number of clandestine labs found in the state has been negligible.
A major concern of retailers involved in the process has been keeping customers’ information secure, Crawford said. That’s another reason the free Tennessee software was chosen: purchases of pseudoephedrine within the legal purchasing limits stay in a section of the database that isn’t searchable by law enforcement.
Meanwhile, the software flags people who make purchases from different pharmacies within a short period and flags associates who have been arrested together in the past for meth-related offenses.
A growing contingent of law enforcement officers believe the only way to keep pseudoephedrine out of meth cooks’ hands is to require a doctor’s prescription to buy it. The drug was regulated until the 1970s.
So far, the Indiana State Police has not taken a position on the issue. But Crawford said Friday she expects the new database to get results with or without that legislative change.
No tracking system can prevent meth labs; state police actually expect the number of meth lab seizures to go up because of the enhanced tools for finding production activity, Crawford said.
“We indicate that as success, because we know there’re labs out there we don’t find,” she said.
