Posted on 10/15/2010 9:03:59 AM PDT by jaydubya2
If you’d been in a CVS in Los Angeles during 2008, you might have witnessed people coming into the store and clearing the store’s shelves of cough and cold medicines. It also might have occurred to you that they weren’t just facing a bad case of the sniffles.
According to federal prosecutors in L.A., those folks were “smurfing”: making “multiple purchases of pseudoephedrine in small amounts with the intent to aggregate the purchases for use in the illegal production of methamphetamine.” And CVS became smurfing central as those folks discovered that those stores, “unlike other large chain retail pharmacies, allowed customers to make repeated purchases of pseudoephedrine that exceeded federal daily and monthly sales limits,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California says.
That big whoopsy-daisy is costing CVS $75 million in civil fines (and the estimated $2.6 million it made on the medications).
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
The pseudophedrine that finds its way into super-lab meth is primarily from India,
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.