State and local police arrested 305 people and seized 10 methamphetamine labs in a four-day, multi-county sting operation that ended Tuesday.
Operation Cast a Net was the largest effort of its kind that anyone can remember, said Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Director Darrell Weaver.
"I think this is a snapshot of what we're up against in northeast Oklahoma," Weaver said. "I'm not shocked by much, but this shocked me."
The arrests stemmed from sting operations at 20 cooperating pharmacies in Tulsa, Broken Arrow, Sand Springs, Sapulpa, Skiatook, Owasso, Claremore, Pryor, Owasso, Jay, Grove, Miami, Bartlesville and Tahlequah.
Undercover officers sat in pharmacies and watched for pseudoephedrine buyers who were behaving suspiciously. Pseudoephedrine, a legal allergy medicine, is a common precursor drug used to manufacture methamphetamine.
After the sales were witnessed, officers outside the pharmacy would stop the buyers for probable cause.
"Once we target and visit with these customers, many of them immediately admitted they were trying to purchase pseudoephedrine to make meth or take to another cook to manufacture the drug for them," bureau spokesman Mark Woodward said.
A $5 purchase could be resold for $50 to a meth cook, one of the undercover officers said.
In some cases, agents were able to use information from the arrests to track back to the meth cooks who were working with the buyers -- known as "smurfs."
Defendants face a variety of charges, including obtaining a controlled dangerous substance by fraud, illegal possession of pseudoephedrine, and possession of a precursor with intent to manufacture.
Oklahoma police are on pace to deal with 900 meth labs this year, Woodward said.
Under state law:
--Pseudoephedrine buyers can purchase no more than 3.6 grams of the drug a day.
--Pseudoephedrine buyers can purchase no more than 9 grams a month.
--Anyone with a meth conviction in the past 10 years is banned from purchasing or possessing pseudoephedrine.
The state tracks all pseudoephedrine sales electronically, though Tulsa drug police recently testified to lawmakers that they are too busy cleaning up abandoned meth labs to track pseudoephedrine sales routinely.
Tulsa County District Attorney Tim Harris said the arrests are strong evidence that the state needs to make pseudoephedrine a prescription drug.
"This proves that we have an epidemic," he said.
Harris and other prosecutors back a proposed law to require a doctor's prescription to purchase pseudoephedrine. The law is pending in the state House of Representatives, though some lawmakers have said they prefer an alternative pushed by the trade group for the over-the-counter drug manufacturers -- linking Oklahoma to a multistate pseudoephedrine sales tracking network.
The sales targeted in the operation were within the legal limit and wouldn't have been caught through a registry, Harris said.
"Tracking is not a solution," Harris said. "Making pseudoephedrine hard to get is going to drive meth labs out of northeast Oklahoma."
Agents will continue to follow leads developed from the effort, and further arrests are possible, Woodward said.
Similar operations are planned in the future around the state, he said.
Some 200 agents, officers and deputies were involved in the effort, Woodward said.
Assisting in the sting operation were agents and officers from the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, police departments from Tulsa, Owasso, Broken Arrow, Sapulpa, Sand Springs, Claremore, Pryor, Tahlequah, Skiatook, Miami, Muskogee, Bartlesville, and Jay, as well as sheriff's departments in Tulsa and Creek counties, plus the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.
Copyright 2011 - Tulsa World, Okla.
McClatchy-Tribune
