Illegal drug world evolving in county

Change is everywhere, including the dangerous world of illegal drugs.

With methamphetamine now selling for more than its weight in gold — and heroin increasingly common in Clark County — the effects are being felt by drug users, drug dealers and the cops who go after them.

The shifting terrain also has included an arrest in four recent armed pharmacy robberies targeting OxyContin painkiller pills, a symptom of a growing problem of people diverting and abusing prescription painkillers.

Drug detectives are asking lawmakers to further restrict sales of cold pills containing pseudoephedrine, which can be used to make meth, and say the supply of heroin is up and prices are down.

"It sure seems that patrol (officers) are seeing a lot more heroin, and there are a lot of heroin dealers now," said Cmdr. Rusty Warren with the Clark-Skamania Drug Task Force.

In addition, there’s a party drug called BZP on the horizon, with stimulant effects like amphetamines. Drug detectives say they haven’t found it in Clark County so far. But 107,734 BZP pills worth more than $1 million were intercepted on June 26, as they headed into Washington, by agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection at the Canadian border in Blaine, an agency bulletin said.

Meth has been considered Clark County’s most damaging illegal drug for more than 20 years, and still is, for the toll it takes on users’ bodies, lives and families — and the many crimes including identity theft and metal theft users commit to get it.

Meth now is selling for about $21,000 a pound, Warren said.

That’s far higher than Thursday’s gold price: $913.89 per ounce, or $14,622 per pound, according to goldprice.org.

And what that money buys isn’t all meth — illegal dealers have started cutting their meth, making it less pure by adding neutral chemicals to increase the volume and weight.

"Prices are up and purity is down, which indicates that there’s more demand than supply," Warren said.

In recent years, most of Clark County’s meth has come from Mexico, but that supply has been profoundly affected by Mexico’s new laws.

In 2005, the Mexican government began restricting legal imports of pseudoephedrine and a similar chemical, ephedrine, into Mexico.

In January, use of the chemicals was fully banned, making it harder for meth cooks to get the ingredients in Mexico, according to a Situation Report by the National Drug Intelligence Center, a wing of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Not wanting to be put out of their lucrative business, many meth cooks moved their labs to California, spread from San Diego to Sacramento, often hidden in rural areas, and changed some of their tactics.

Since last year and continuing this year, cooks in California have been using organized "smurfing" rings to get large amounts of valuable pseudoephedrine cold pills, the situation report says.

In smurfing, methamphetamine cooks and their henchmen hire homeless people off the streets and drive them around to supermarkets and other pharmacies that, by law, can sell only limited amounts to a customer in a day.

The homeless folks buy the pills at store after store, then give them to the cooks in exchange for money or alcohol, the report says.

The pills, in bulk quantities, often end up at California superlabs, some that can produce around 20 pounds of meth per cooking cycle, the report said.

That form of massive, organized smurfing hasn’t been detected in Clark County, but individuals are smurfing here on a smaller scale.

"The issue is these guys will go to several stores each day and buy their legal limit at every store," Warren said.

So far this year, Warren said, the task force hasn’t found a single meth lab in Clark County.

"It’s way down from where it was several years ago," Warren said.

But local small-time smurfing still can yield enough pseudoephedrine to cook up an ounce or so of meth.

Meanwhile, the cooks in California continue to send large quantities of meth north, including into Clark County, typically using Mexican citizens who are in the U.S. illegally to deliver and distribute it, police say.

Many of these drug couriers have been arrested in recent years and sent to prisons, and later will be deported.

To tighten its grip on homemade meth, the task force again is lobbying for a law like Oregon’s, which makes cold pills that contain pseudoephedrine, and can be made into meth, available by prescription only.

Washington’s current law limits how many cold pills people can buy in stores — and requires pharmacy employees to keep a log of who’s buying them.

Detectives in Clark County can inspect the logs that pharmacists keep on cold pill purchases, and learn who’s making repeated purchases, but that’s of limited use in bringing down meth cooks, Warren said.

Warren and state Rep. Deb Wallace, D-Vancouver, are hoping to get a prescription-only bill before the Legislature next year, and have it pass and take effect in January 2011.

But the prescription idea, also being pursued on the national level, has powerful opponents including the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.

On its Web site, www.chpa info.org, the association says "Medicines containing pseudoephedrine serve an important health care need by bringing much-needed relief to consumers, conveniently and affordably, and are central to the safe and effective self-treatment of colds, allergies and sinus problems."

Making such cold pills available by prescription only "will force consumers suffering nasal congestion or allergies to spend time in their doctors’ offices and waiting rooms so a cursory examination can be administered and a prescription obtained," the association says, adding that it would cost consumers more money.

Also opposed is the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, said Chrissy Kopple, the association’s vice president for media relations.

Like the health care association, the group says it works with police to limit sales and keep records, and supports electronic sale tracking.

"These existing laws are designed to maintain the fine balance between keeping valuable products available to consumers and combating dangerous, illegal practices," Kopple said.

A prescription-only law "would be harmful to legitimate consumers," she added.

The Washington State Board of Pharmacy hasn’t considered the issue or taken a position, said Susan Tiel Boyer, executive director.

"It’s an important issue and if a proposal were made, the board would consider it seriously," she said, but it’s not on the agenda now.

John Branton: 360-735-4513 or john.branton@columbian.com.