By Kent Atkinson of NZPA

Wellington, Oct 6 NZPA - Advice being considered by the Government for tighter monitoring of people buying cold tablets containing pseudoephedrine may hold a hidden danger of boosting the "P" drug culture, a drug educator says.

MethCon director Mike Sabin, a former police detective, said today that constraints in the United States on over-the-counter sales, even with elaborate electronic monitoring, had a limited effective life.

Pseudoephedrine is the main precursor chemical for methamphetamine and can be extracted from some cold tablets.

"What (US) law enforcement saw was that though people could only purchase three packets and they had a limit for each month, what (illicit manufacturers) did was simply increase the amount of people shopping for them," Mr Sabin said .

Instead of having 10 shoppers buying cold tablets containing pseudoephedrine, the supply chains increased to 100 shoppers, who were also drawn into the drug culture as potential customers for P.

"What it actually did as an unintended consequence of restricting the amount of pseudoephedrine available was to expand the number of potential targets among those involved in the illicit purchase," he said.

The Government was expected to announce in the next few weeks what measures it would take to crack down on the P epidemic in New Zealand.

A report prepared for Prime Minister John Key by his chief science advisor Sir Peter Gluckman has been delivered to Mr Key and taken to Cabinet.

Mr Key has said Sir Peter recommended a number of options, one of them to ban over-the-counter and non-hospital use of pseudoephedrine.

If the Government went down this track, pseudoephredrine-based cold tablets would become prescription-only medicine.

Mr Sabin said the unsatisfactory American experience with simply tightening restrictions on sales meant states were shifting away from monitoring of customer purchases to making the cold remedies prescription-only.

In the United States around 25 percent to 30 percent of the labs discovered were making from locally-accessed pseudoephedrine, he said.

In New Zealand, where there is currently only a system of voluntary monitoring of sales through pharmacies, up to 70 percent of labs at the end of last year were using locally bought precursor chemicals.

"Were we to have a prescription-only situation in NZ, there would likely be a significant fall away in domestic manufacture."

But there were likely to be massive increases in imports of the drug from China and South-East Asia, Mr Sabin said.

A prescription-only approach might help wean consumers off the cold remedies, and move them to using medications that did not contain pseudoephedrine, and did not require a doctor's visit, he said.

He said making the medications prescription-only wouldn't eliminate the problem entirely, it was the most effective way.

Mr Key has described illicit methamphetamine use as a "$1.5 billion problem" which was "wrecking lives and it's wrecking families".