Warning on flu tablet bid

A WA Police push to make some cold and flu tablets prescription-only to help stop an increase in backyard drug laboratories will not succeed unless all States take the same measure, according to the WA Pharmacy Guild.

Guild director Matthew Tweedie told a pharmacists' conference yesterday that the profession was open to the police proposal to re-classify medication such as Sudafed and Codral which contain pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient in methamphetamine.

Police Commissioner Karl O'Callaghan told the conference that most of the cold and flu drugs used to make methamphetamine in WA were bought at pharmacies.

Making the drugs prescription- only would make it far harder for criminals to get pseudoephedrine.

But Mr Tweedie said reclassifying pseudoephedrine-based medications as schedule four drugs, which would make them prescription-only, would need to be made across all States otherwise criminals would simply buy the drugs interstate.