Kansas leads the nation with new meth-fighting initiative
8:17 a.m. Thursday, August 14, 2008
We know methamphetamine is a growing problem across the United States, especially in rural areas like Kansas, and authorities are doing what they can to track down meth labs.
But now they can do that at the source, the drug store. Pharmacists and their computers are becoming the first line of defense in the fight against meth.
The next time you go into a pharmacy to get some pseudoephedrine, like Sudafed, it'll involve handing over your driver's license, as usual.
But now, your drivers license goes into a system, and it's tracked by drug stores and law enforcement across the state. This is Meth Shield, and Kansas is the first state in the union to take part in this tracking system.
That information goes to a database and law enforcement officials can get that off a Web site, emailed to them, even sent to their cell phones.
Without the Meth Shield system, it sits in a singe pharmacy's database and isn't easily shared.
"We can keep track of information, and we have hotlines to share information and things like that. But if someone wants to scam the system, guess what, they do. And we all know what happens. We just want to be the facilitator of something that can stop that from happening," Dandurand Pharmacy's Mike Dandurand said.
In all, Kansas will have 128 pharmacies in 62 counties in the Meth Shield system, most in Western Kansas.
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