Grandma's Arrest Highlights Trouble Tracking Meth Makers

ROCKVILLE, Ind. -- Rushing into the store this winter to buy cold medicine more often might lead to a crime, and it's possible no one would stop you and you'd never know about it.

Consumers have to hand over identification to buy cold medicine from behind the counter at pharmacies because of laws that are supposed to keep methamphetamine makers from getting key ingredients.

Sometimes, the effort goes awry, such as in the case of Sally Harpold, 6News' Rafael Sanchez reported.

Harpold, a grandmother of 12, made headlines in July when her mug shot was featured on the front page of the local newspaper after she was arrested for buying too much cold medicine within a week.

"I was photographed, fingerprinted … all over cold medicines," Harpold said. "This can't be true. This is just a mistake."

The medication included pseudoephedrine, the main ingredient used to make meth.

"You might come in my house some night and catch me making a cake late at night, or cookies, brownies or pies," she said. "You are not going to catch me doing anything illegal."

Indiana law allows consumers to buy 3 grams of pseudoephedrine within seven days. Harpold said she had no idea that buying a box of Zyrtec-D and a box of Mucinex-D would total 3.6 grams, violating the law.

Charges against Harpold were dismissed, but the arrest is still on record.

"I want my record cleared," she said.

The law was, of course, meant to target illicit drug makers, not grandmothers who were buying medicine for sick relatives. But in a year when police expect to dismantle a record number of meth labs, the pressure is on to stop the problem.

Stores collect boxes of data with information on what consumers buy, but in Indiana, retailers aren't required to share the collected data with other stores.

Consumers can accidentally break the law if they buy too much when they go to different stores.

Knowledgeable meth makers skirt the law by going from store to store, buying the limit at each in hopes of staying under the radar.

Several Indiana cities along the border with Kentucky are experimenting with a new system that shares information about every pseudoephedrine sale.

Louisville-based MethCheck electronically records every pseudoephedrine purchase in five Indiana counties and all of Kentucky, providing real-time information to police and pharmacies.

"What we believe, because we're able to block the sale that exceeds federal or state limits, that pseudoephedrine or cold medicine going out the door to be made into meth actually remains in the store," said Jim Acquisto, government affairs director for Appriss, the company that runs MethCheck.

Indiana State Police said they don't plan to use MethCheck or a similar service.

"We don't expect our pharmacists to do our job," said Indiana State Police Lt. Nikki Crawford. "The pharmacist's responsibility is that single sale in front of them."

Crawford said Indiana will unveil a new system in March, called the Indiana Meth Intelligence System, which will provide law enforcement with information about pseudoephedrine sales and will also combine cold medicine sales with federal crime reports and calls to drug tip lines to help investigators connect networks of pill buyers and meth makers.

"Having the intelligence database makes the info law enforcement is getting 100 times better than having pseudo sales alone," Crawford said.

ISP currently gets pseudoephedrine sales data electronically and through paper logs. In March, all retailers will be encouraged to submit the information by computer.