Oklahoma Stepping Up Effort To Crackdown On 'Smurfing'

Attorney General Scott Pruitt was in Tulsa Thursday to kick off a new effort to crackdown on smurfing.

Smurfs are people who buy lots of medicine with Pseudoephedrine in it, then sell them to people who make meth.

Oklahoma is on the forefront of tracking Sudafed sales electronically, but now the attorney general is taking the tracking that goes on one step further so authorities can make arrests.

The message from the AG is clear: “If you buy meds to make meth, police are taking names and will make arrests.”

In the coming months, Oklahoma pharmacies won't just have you swipe your license to purchase allergy meds, but you may see anti-smurfing signage.

"So this is about a tracking system that works across state lines where we don't have folks that are coming in from Arkansas and Missouri or bordering states buying a great deal of Pseudoephedrine and then using those ingredients to create meth,” Pruitt said.

Authorities also rely on pharmacists like Chris Schiller to tip them off when someone is smurfing or buying cold meds that will end up in meth; it's a challenge even for pharmacist.

“We just don't know. We don't know if they are buying Sudafed for themselves or if they are buying it for someone else whose asked them to, so there is no way for us at the pharmacy counter to tell,” Schiller said.

So be prepared to be carded. That is not new, but now the electronic system at Oklahoma's pharmacies will be compared to other databases.

"But then what do we do with that information? How do we take that tracking information and go after bad guys that are doing harm to our citizens? That is what we're bridging to and that's exciting to make sure we are going about these traffickers in the right way,” said Pruitt.

They warn the new system may inconvenience some law abiding citizens.

"Husband buys a box, goes home, they both take it, husband comes back in to buy another box, he can't till the end of the month or till the next month, depending on how much they buy. So then they have to send the wife in or something like that, so that really inhibits just regular people from buying the Sudafed,” said Schiller.

The crackdown on meth is already working, OBN said last year after new laws passed to create a meth offender block list, the state has 50 percent fewer meth labs.