A new initiative launched by Oklahoma’s narcotic watchdogs to stop illicit use of the key ingredient in making methamphetamine is already having an effect.

Since Nov. 1, a birth date is required to purchase pseudoephedrine at pharmacies. And out-of-state drivers’ licenses or identification cards no longer will be accepted.

The birth date requirement will help eliminate sales to individuals using fake or multiple identification cards to purchase more of the methamphetamine ingredient than state law allows, said Mark Woodward, spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

“It already has,” Muskogee Drug Warehouse Pharmacy Manager Brian Jones said Friday.

“We’ve already had two or three (rejections) this week.”

The latest initiative has the OBNDD working with the Department of Public Safety to implement the data-sharing program that allows the pseudoephedrine tracking program to reject sales from customers using identification cards not currently in the state system, Woodward said.

Epperson said before a purchase of pseudoephedrine is complete, information is plugged into the system to make sure the purchaser hasn’t already exhausted his legal monthly supply.

All of the state’s law enforcement community is plugged into the new system, Woodward said.

The system limits the purchase to nine grams of pseudoephedrine per card per person in 30 days.

Dan Epperson, a pharmacist at Drug Warehouse on West Okmulgee Avenue, said if a person purchases one box of Claritin-D that contains 15 pills — that’s 3.6 grams of pseudoephedrine.

That person could purchase one more such box that month and then would have to go to a cold medicine that contained 2.8 grams or less of pseudoephedrine for a month’s limit.

Because all products containing pseudoephedrine must be kept behind the counter in the pharmacy department, people who want to purchase it must ask the pharmacist for it and sign for it, Epperson said.

It’s not uncommon for several people to come in together at one time to buy the product, he said.

A lot of stores in Muskogee are cooperating and tipping off law enforcement to repeat pseudoephedrine buyers, said Muskogee County Sheriff’s Deputy Mike Morrison.

Sometimes as many as six or seven people will show up in one car and buy Actifed, Sudafed or a similar brand of product containing pseudoephedrine, he said.