Cold medicines being used in meth labs across the country.

One spring afternoon last year, three friends piled into a maroon Nissan Sentra and cruised through the gritty neighborhoods around LAX, up to Mid-City, along the tony streets of West LA and finally ending near the beaches of Santa Monica that evening. Along their route the trio, Daniel Hernandez, Kenia Munguia and her boyfriend Edwin Alas, visited twelve different CVS locations, a national drugstore chain, purchasing boxes of cold medicine at each store.
Unbeknownst to them, a team of detectives from a multiagency task force were tracking their every move, pulling empty pill boxes and receipts from trashcans and checking store logs to build a case against the three for pseudoephedrine “smurfing,” a practice that provides the main supply for production of the highly potent synthetic and addictive drug methamphetamine.
Pseudoephedrine, a chemical decongestant used in general cold medicines such as Claritin, Sudafed and Aleve, is only one molecule away from that of methamphetamine, making it the ideal ingredient for meth lab production. Though smurfing is prevalent nationwide, Special Agent Gary Boggs of the DEA, the federal drug enforcement agency, says the State’s situation is grave: “California is one of the epicenters of this type of activity.” According to Boggs, smurfed pseudoepedrine is now the main supply source for clandestine meth labs across the country,which are also on the rise: there were 5,859 lab incidents in 2008, up from 5,488 in 2007. The DEA maintains that a crackdown on smurfing is the most effective way to roll back meth production. “Smurfing” is a direct and remarkably effective response to the federal restrictions that Congress set during a mushrooming meth problem in the first half of the decade. Individuals were only allowed to purchase 3.6 grams of pseudoephedrine per day, or 9 grams every 30 days. Criminal organizations used recruiters to gather ordinary people (often unemployed, homeless or undocumented) and drive them to multiple pharmacy locations to purchase the maximum legal amount. The term, which refers to the blue-skinned dwarves of a popular children’s cartoon, was initially used by law enforcement in money laundering cases where several people deposited or transferred ill-gotten cash to a “clean” account.


Link: http://thecrimereport.org/2009/08/17/cold-medicines-become-a-hot-commodity/