A SPRING BREAK ROAD TRIP TO THE DRUGSTORE

Police Say Lax State Laws Governing Key Ingredient In Meth Lured Trio To MD.

The three students from Indiana piled into a shiny blue Mazda last
week and made an 11-hour trek to their ideal spring break
destination: Anne Arundel County.

Anne Arundel may have less girls-gone-wild cachet than South Beach,
but authorities said it was an ideal location for their plot to buy
20,000 pills of an over-the-counter cold medicine used to make
methamphetamine. The students could have received a 20-year prison
term for possessing that much of the drug in Indiana, but in Maryland
it's not a crime.

"They definitely did their homework," said Lt. David Waltemeyer, a
spokesman for Anne Arundel police.

Maryland and the District are among the few jurisdictions in the
country that have no restrictions on the sale of pseudoephedrine, the
cold medication used to produce methamphetamine, making them magnets
for meth dealers desperate to get the drug. At least 41 states place
controls on the drug.

"The chain is only as strong as the weakest link," said Gene
Voegtlin, legislative counsel for the International Association of
Chiefs of Police, which supports tighter controls of the drug.
"States that have less-strict laws are going to become the stopping
point for people looking to pick up pseudoephedrine."

A federal law that takes effect Friday will make it illegal to
purchase more than 3.6 grams, or about 120 pills, of the drug in one
day, but law enforcement groups said they will continue to lobby for
passage of state laws so local officials have their own tools to combat meth.

The phenomenon of drug dealers crossing state lines to buy
pseudoephedrine -- sometimes known as "pseudo smurfing" -- has been
increasingly common since Oklahoma passed the first statewide control
on the drug in 2004.

The Washington region has recently experienced the same problem, law
enforcement officials said. After Virginia required last fall that
that pseudoephedrine-based cold medications be placed behind the
counter, drug dealers began crossing into Maryland and the District
to buy the drug, according to Scott Burns, deputy director of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy.

"It is more common than one would think," said Burns, who said meth
producers will travel as far as necessary to get cold medications.
"You've got to have flour to bake a cake, and you've got to have
pseudoephedrine to make methamphetamine."

But the incident last week in Anne Arundel appears to have been one
of the largest documented efforts to pseudo smurf. The students,
whose names were not released because they were not charged with a
crime, left Indiana on Monday with $6,000 and GPS mapping software
used to find stores across Anne Arundel that sold pseudoephedrine, police said.

One store owner became suspicious after the students cleared out his
cold medication shelf and alerted the police, who stopped the
students Tuesday. Police said the trio -- a 17-year-old woman and two
male students, 21 and 22, from a two-year college in Evansville --
were found with 103 packets of cold and allergy medication.

The students said the pills were going to be used to make meth,
police said. But after consulting with the office of the state's
attorney, police realized they couldn't charge the students with a crime.

"It frustrates us," Waltemeyer said. "We should be able to charge
somebody for doing this."

The students might yet face prosecution. Jerry Tooley, a narcotics
detective at the Evansville Police Department, said he plans to
question the students and might be able to charge them with
conspiracy to manufacture methamphetamine, a felony.

"How are we supposed to keep on top of this?" Tooley said. "Here we
thought we were doing good by keeping track of our local people, and
now we're finding them 11 hours away buying pills."

Tooley said residents can buy cold medications worth $2.99 out of
state and resell them on the black market for $25 in Indiana. Jeffrey
Milner, a narcotics detective with the Vigo County Drug Task Force,
north of Evansville in central Indiana, said that after the state
placed restrictions on the purchase of pseudoephedrine, meth dealers
began traveling to Illinois. But Illinois then enacted its own law,
so meth dealers began trekking to Ohio and now, apparently, Maryland.

"We know people have been making road trips," Tooley said. "But
obviously we didn't know that they were using this kind of money and
buying this many pills."

Anne Arundel police said the students told them that others from
Indiana had traveled before to the county to buy cold medications.
Waltemeyer said the students didn't explain why they chose Anne
Arundel instead of another Maryland county.

Although the meth problem in the Washington region is relatively
small compared with other parts of the country, the number of meth
lab seizures in Virginia, Maryland and the District has jumped in
recent years from zero to more than 80.

Tooley said Anne Arundel -- which had three meth labs seized in six
months last year -- should be particularly concerned that it has
become a destination for drug dealers looking for pseudoephedrine.

"These folks are traveling to places like Maryland to buy the pills,
but soon they're going to decide to just stay and set up shop there,"
he said. "I mean, it's probably already happened."