When traveling from her home in Raceland, Sarah Thibodaux has to remember to throw another item in her overnight bag that she can’t leave without — her Claritin.If she forgets her medicine when traveling to shoot pictures for work, Thibodaux worries that she may have to suffer through a cold.
“That’s the last thing I want to be dealing with,” she said.
Pharmacies are now electronically told when to turn away any customer who has surpassed the legal limit of over-the-counter cold medicine per month to be in compliance with a new state law. The law is to prohibit the sale of cold medicine containing pseudoephedrine in an effort to try and prevent manufacturing methamphetamine.
Lawmakers passed legislation last year, making Louisiana the third of 10 states to sign a contract allowing Appriss, a Kentucky-based company, to provide their tracking system known as National Precursor Log Exchange or NPLEx to the pharmacies.The database allows the pharmacist to pull up the buyers’ information and see if they have exceeded the legal limit for the month before selling the cold medicine, said Anna Vu, a pharmacist at Dutchtown Pharmacy.Before when a questionable person would walk in wanting to buy pseudoephedrine, Vu said she would have to decide “do you sell or not sell based on appearance?”
A pharmacist doesn’t want anyone to not get their medicine, but at the same time Vu said she would be concerned about enabling a crime.Now the tracking system will print out a slip of paper that says if the person is allowed or denied to buy the cold medicine, said Kelly Lambert, a pharmacist at Albany Drugs.”It gives us an actual excuse not to sell it to them,” she said.
The database is designed to monitor the sale of cold medicine, said Jim Acquisto, an Appriss spokesman.”We have the ability to prevent the crime from occurring,” Acquisto said. “We block a ton of pseudoephedrine that doesn’t go out the door.”
Since the cold medicine companies have agreed to pay for the service, states that pass legislation for NPLEx can use the database for free, he said.All pharmacies are required to be on the system as of June 15, he said. In the state contract, a store without Internet access can apply for an exemption through the State Police Department.
Federal law required stores to keep a written log of such purchases, but Louisiana police say they didn’t have a system that organized those sales before this year.”There wasn’t a good system for the implementation of that law,” said Sgt. Markus Smith, State Police spokesman.
State police will play a major role in monitoring the database — called MethCheck on the law enforcement side — and will keep the information in the system for the record, Sgt. Smith said.
Since the database is uploaded in real time, police can be notified of cold medicine transactions as they occur, he said.But some police say the system has flaws to the bigger picture of preventing the spread of meth.
When Detective Danny Perkins with the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s office used the database, only a handful of one of his suspect’s record appeared in the system.”We had information that he was purchasing pseudoephedrine every day from Gonzales, Mississippi and New Orleans,” he said. “This guy had been everywhere.”
While the database can be a useful tool to spot illegal purchases once all the pharmacies are online, it’s not the remedy for catching all the meth cooks, Detective Perkins said.
Most meth cooks buy their ingredients from smurfers — the people who purchase the pseudoephedrine and sell it to the cooks, he said. Many smurfers have fake ID’s and know which stores use a database and which don’t.
Rapides Parish Sheriff’s office Lt. Michael Lacour said his division uses the database as an investigative tool after identifying a suspect.
“You need a suspect first,” he said. “If you don’t [have one,] you’re closing your eyes and throwing a dart.”
The tracking system’s main purpose isn’t to catch the smurfers in the act, but to keep them from purchasing the ingredients needed to make meth, Sgt. Smith said.
“It’s not so much designed to set someone up for arrest, but as a monitoring [tool],” he said.
Lt. Carl Townley with the     Caddo Parish Sherriff’s office said his department was one of the first in the state to begin using MethCheck.
The system has improved as more pharmacies are logging their sales in the database and does use the system to find the meth cooks, Lt. Townley said.
“Before [MethCheck] we could go look at the books,” he said. “Nothing was computerized. It was all foot work.”
– 
Contact The Daily Reveille’s news staff at [email protected]