CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. refuses to voluntarily join other retail pharmacy companies that electronically provide to drug agents the names of customers who buy illegal quantities of medications used to make methamphetamine.

Walgreen Co., Target and other stores have joined in the electronic snooping. They provide to law enforcement the names of pharmacy customers who buy Sudafed, Sinutab and other decongestant products that contain pseudoephedrine.

Pharmacies at Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, provide law enforcement with paper records or logs, except in a state that currently requires electronic reporting, such as Oklahoma.

Tommy Farmer, director of the Tennessee Methamphetamine Task Force, said stores providing electronic reports that identify people who buy pseudoephedrine in illegal amounts eliminate the need for an officer to inspect paper records in a pharmacy.

He said the electronic reporting to law enforcement “is the most effective and most efficient way and its the least obtrusive.”

“We don’t know” Wal-Mart’s reason, Farmer said. “We are working on them (Wal-Mart) and they have expressed an interest. They are going to say a patient’s rights are protected. We do too. Law enforcement does not have access to legitimate sales, only to those identified illegal.”

Dennis Alpert, a spokesman for Wal-Mart stores in Tennessee, said the company’s main objection to electronic reporting is that purchases of the medications can be considered “personal or protected health information.”

Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart corporate spokeswoman, said part of the reason is complying with laws related to privacy of health information.

She said Wal-Mart voluntarily limited sales of products containing pseudoephedrine ahead of the legal limits.

Galberth said her records show the only state that currently requires electronic filing is Oklahoma.

“While Wal-Mart cooperates with law enforcement in all of the markets we serve, we are not required to provide electronic reporting of sales of pseudoephedrine products to law enforcement in Tennessee,” the company said in a statement released by Galberth.

Mark Woodward, spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics, said Wal-Mart was “one of the last store chains to get fully operational” earlier this year with that state’s mandatory electronic reporting. Oklahoma also requires an electronic check of a customer’s past purchases before pseudoephedrine is sold. He said Wal-Mart’s slow pace was partly due to the large number of stores.

Woodward said the difference in electronic and paper reports, or logs, is “night and day” for law enforcement.

“We had a pharmacy chain in Oklahoma, a Walgreens, and they were not checking” paper logs of the transactions, he said. “Meth cooks from all over northern Oklahoma were going to Walgreens in Enid. We identified over 100 instances where meth cooks purchased over the 9 gram limit.”

Woodward said the transactions led to a financial settlement with Walgreens “because they had been warned and they did not comply.”

“That is a perfect example of if you don’t have an electronic log book they will exploit it. Paper is only a Band-Aid they will find a way around.”

Woodward said Walgreens is now a model participant in electronic reporting but “it took a pretty severe slap.”

He said tracking illegal sales of pseudoephedrine, which can be extracted by boiling the cold and allergy medicines, can “help show a pattern for a criminal case” involving charges of manufacturing meth.

Walgreens spokeswoman Carol Hively said the Deerfield, Ill.-based company’s 6,014 stores — located in every state but Hawaii and Alaska — all provide records of the transactions electronically to law enforcement.

She said customer privacy is better protected keeping the records electronically than paper logs “where it is laying out and handwritten some place.”

Farmer said Tennessee’s voluntary electronic reporting also allows law enforcement to only collect the names of customers who purchase illegal quantities of pseudoephedrine.

“We don’t have to manually go through the legitimate sales,” Farmer said. “People are identified based on their exceeding the legal limit, and then based on that, an investigation may or may not be initiated.”

Tennessee’s 2005 law aimed at reducing abuse of methamphetamine and restricting its availability put products that contain pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters. The crackdown also required pharmacists to get a signature from a purchaser. Purchases cannot exceed 3.6 grams — 120 30-milligram tablets — in a day, or 9 grams — 300 30-milligram tablets— in 30 days.

That law has greatly reduced the annual count of meth making labs in Tennessee and Farmer said computer technology is allowing the task force in some cases to use illegal purchases as a trail to meth labs.

Since March 2006, a federal law regulating purchases of pseudoephedrine has also required customers to show a photo ID and limits the purchases to 9 grams per 30 days.

Farmer said Tennessee does not require pharmacies to submit customer names to be screened electronically at the time of purchase.

“I want it to be as hassle free as possible,” Farmer said.

Farmer said a “test run” of pseudoephedrine purchase screening in Tennessee, using purchases from February 2003 through July 2007, showed 266,000 “suspect purchases” from a total of 3.2 million transactions, at a time when 5,149 labs were seized.

“It helps us identify that we have people who are smurfing pseudoephedrine products,” Farmer said. “Those are potential investigations.”

He said the smurfing in some instances involves “four, five or six people who load up in several cars and in some cases drive all the way to Ohio doing nothing but smurfing pseudoephedrine”

Farmer said an interstate electronic exchange of the drug tracking information is “our next step.”

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