Bill restricting sales of cold medications passes Senate, House fate uncertain

The Iowa Senate this morning (Thursday) unanimously passed a bill that would establish tough new restrictions on the sale of cold medications. The goal: cut the use of cold remedies in the manufacture of methamphetamine. But the bill faces an uncertain future in the House because House Speaker Christopher Rants, a republican from Sioux City, says the bill goes too far. “It is very easy to get carried away in cracking down on this stuff,” Rants says. His beef? The bill says Iowans who buy more than six-thousand milligrams of pseudoephedrine in an over-the-counter medication in one month would be breaking the law. Rants says someone who takes Claritin D every day to deal with allergies could not purchase a month’s worth of pills. He says that leaves Iowans two choices: go to a different pharmacy and buy more — which would be breaking the law and if they’re caught they could land in jail — or they will have to go to the doctor and get a prescription for the stuff. “Everybody’s acting for noble purposes, but it’s very easy to get carried away and I for one am concerned that we’re getting carried away,” Rants says. . Rants predicts there’ll be a “backlash” from Iowans once they find out about the details of the legislation. But Senator Michael Gronstal, a democrat from Council Bluffs, disagrees. “When it’s all said and done, I think Iowans will accept that inconvenience if it’s about busting the illegal drug trade and that’s what this bill is all about,” Gronstal says. House Democrat Leader Pat Murphy of Dubuque says he supports putting all products with pseudoephedrine behind the pharmacy counter and requiring someone to show an I-D and write down their name and address in a log when they buy it. “I would recommend first of all that before the speaker shoots from the hip that he would at least do what I did,” Murphy says. He met with a Dubuque pharmacist, and learned that 80 percent of the store’s products that contained pseudoephedrine were being stolen. “The other thing that the speaker needs to wake up to is are we going to wait for the same thing that happened in Oklahoma to happen in Iowa, where you have three state troopers killed because of a meth lab bust,” Murphy says. He says a meth lab poses a health risk to anyone who comes near it, and poses a financial hardship to taxpayers because it costs between five- and 10-thousand dollars to send a Hazardous Materials team to clean up a meth lab. Senate Co-President Jack Kibbie, a democrat from Emmetsburg, says next week, Boards of Supervisors in Kossuth and Palo Alto Counties will consider local ordinances that restrict the sale of the cold medications that’re used by meth-makers. “Everybody that I know involved in public safety in this state is behind this bill,” Kibbie says. “If it’s inconvenient, that’s a price we’ve got to pay.”