Washington, DC - U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and five Senate colleagues introduced legislation today to close the loophole that allows illegal drug producers to purchase large quantities of the cold and allergy drug pseudoephedrine in blister packs and use the drug to make methamphetamine.

The bill, cosponsored by Senators Charles Grassley (R-IA), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Joseph Biden (D-DE), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and Tom Harkin (D-IA), would close the loophole that requires people who buy more than 9 grams of pseudoephedrine in bottles to give their name and address, but permits individuals to purchase unlimited quantities in blister packs without providing this identification information.

The following is Senator Feinstein's statement on the legislation:

"This is a simple bill, and directly follows recommendations made by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration in a 2002 study requested by Congress. All this legislation does is make it harder for meth dealers to get the precursor pseudoephedrine products necessary to make this illegal drug.

Making it harder for meth dealers to make and obtain their drugs is something beneficial not just to California, but to the entire nation.

Once predominantly found in the American Southwest, methamphetamine's presence now stretches from coast to coast. I'm sorry to say that my home state of California has been referred to as the "Colombia of meth production." In fact, our state is known as the "source country" for the drug, producing roughly 80 percent of the nation's methamphetamine supply. According to the DEA, 1,847 clandestine meth labs were found in California in 2001 alone.

In each of these meth labs across the country, those who make methamphetamine combine a number of precursor drugs, from red phosphorus, which is difficult to obtain, highly flammable and toxic, to pseudoephedrine, which can be found in common cold medicine in every supermarket, pharmacy, and convenience store in America.

Recognizing the easy availability of pseudoephedrine, Congress has acted several times to make it more difficult for meth dealers to purchase it in bulk.

First, we placed a 24-gram limit, which represented almost 1000 pills. Then, just a few years ago, we reduced this threshold to just 9 grams - still some 366 30-milligram pills. Anyone buying more than this amount of pseudoephedrine at one time would be required to give his or her name and address.

As it turns out, this reporting requirement is considered too burdensome by most retail stores, so instead of keeping track of purchasers, most retailers simply limit single transaction sales of pseudoephedrine pills to less than 9 grams. This is an even more beneficial result than the reporting requirements. Such limits, which now often go as low as three or even two packages of cold medicine, make it much harder for meth manufacturers to get this precursor drug. Instead of simply going to the local WalMart or Costco and clearing the shelves of thousands of packages at once, they must now buy just a few packages at a time.

But through all of this, there is one gaping loophole in the law, that allows any of this product packaged in so-called "blister-packs" to avoid these reporting requirements. Only loose pills in bottles face the 9-gram restrictions in the law.

Blister packs are the most common form of packaging for cold medicine, as anyone who goes grocery shopping knows. Most people who buy pseudoephedrine will find it in blister packs, as will most meth dealers. As a result, the 9-gram limit in the law has become fairly useless - we limited the sales of pills, so meth dealers simply migrated to blister packs.

This loophole in the law exists because of previous doubts, by some, that meth dealers would bother to use blister-packed products. These foil and plastic containers hold each pill individually, and as a result it is harder to gather the thousands of pills necessary to manufacture methamphetamine in bulk.

Those of us from California have known for some time that blister packs are a problem, because California's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement has been finding blister packs at meth lab sites for years. But to answer the doubts of those not lucky enough to come from my home state, we authorized DEA to do a study into this issue in 1999.

Well, that study is back, and guess what - DEA has given us clear, incontrovertible evidence that these blister packs are making up an increasing percentage of the pseudoephedrine found at lab sites. In some instances, meth manufacturers use sophisticated, industrial "deblistering" machines to quickly extract pills from blister packs. In others, I have been told, children are employed to sit in the meth lab and pop out thousands of pills, by hand, into nearby buckets.

According to the report we requested from the DEA, which was released in March of 2002, blister packaged pseudoephedrine products seized at clandestine methamphetamine laboratories and other locations, such as dumpsites, have involved seizures of over a million tablets.

The seizure of so many blister packaged pseudoephedrine products shows convincingly that blister packaging is not a deterrent to ordinary, over-the-counter pseudoephedrine use in clandestine methamphetamine laboratories. So clearly, what we argued in 1999, and in 1996, is true. Meth manufacturers are using blister packs, and something must be done to stop them as best we can.

In order to address this problem, DEA recommended in its report that the blister pack loophole be closed, and that the current retail sales limit of 9 grams for bottled pseudoephedrine be extended to blister packed products as well. And that is all that this bill would do.

According to DEA, this is the single best thing we can do to help them in the fight against methamphetamine.

This legislation will clear up confusion among retailers who may find it hard to train employees to limit the sales of certain cold medicine if sold in bottles, but not the same medicine in other packaging.

This legislation will help DEA enforce the retail sales thresholds by making it harder for sellers to claim ignorance or confusion a bout the law.

This legislation might make it less likely that meth dealers will employ young children to pop pills out of the blister packs, all within harms reach in meth labs around the country.

This legislation will NOT negatively impact the ability of pharmaceutical manufacturers to make legitimate profits.

This legislation will NOT be a burden on consumers, because the 9 gram limit still represents 366 pills - 30 packages of 12 pills, or 15 packages of 24 pills, two of the most common amounts.

It is hard for me to imagine that an average person - or even a large family - needs to buy more than 366 cold pills at one time. In fact, many stores throughout the country have already voluntarily limited pseudoephedrine sales to just a few packages at a time, and there has been little outcry from consumers unable to purchase more.

This bill is not a panacea for the meth problem in the United States - far from it. I have been working on various parts of the meth problem for many years, and I know that this must be a multi-faceted approach - tougher penalties, money for training, enforcement and clean-up, restrictions on precursor chemicals, tools for prosecutors, and so on.

But to fail to enact this legislation is to make it far easier for meth dealers to continue to easily ply their trade.

I urge my colleagues to look at this bill, join us in supporting it, and help us to pass it as soon as possible to assist the DEA in the very uphill battle against the illegal and pervasive manufacture and sale of methamphetamine."