Pharmacists in Manchester have thwarted a gang's attempts to buy multiple packs of Sudafed tablets to produce crystal meth.

Pharmacists alerted police last month to a "suspicious" group of men who are believed to be touring pharmacies across the area in an attempt to buy large amounts of pseudoephedrine.

Greater Manchester police were concerned that the customers, believed to be eastern European, wanted to use the pharmacy-only drug to produce the class A drug crystal methamphetamine, known as crystal meth,, a spokesperson told C+D last week. Two labs cooking the highly addictive substance were discovered in the area in 2011, the spokesperson said.

Pharmacists raised concerns that a gang was buying pseudoephedrine to manufacture illicit drug crystal meth

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Following the pharmacists' alert, NHS England's Greater Manchester area team issued a warning to superintendents, pharmacy staff and locums in the area, urging them to be vigilant to requests for pseudoephedrine and to inform the area team of requests for multiple boxes of the tablets. It warned that the would-be buyers were travelling between pharmacies by car and visiting shops individually or as a small group.

In one incident in early July, described in an alert by NHS Tameside and Glossop CCG's medicines management team, two men in succession asked to buy Sudafed tablets from a pharmacy in Denton. The pharmacy reported that the same men had been in before with the same request.

At the Boots Crumpsall Lane branch in Manchester, a pharmacist told the shopper they were out of the medicine because she was concerned he "had all the right answers" to questions about their need for the drug, the police spokesperson told C+D. The same customer had also tried a nearby pharmacy for Sudafed.

"It's happening all over the place," said Karen O'Brien, NHS England's assistant director for clinical strategy in Greater Manchester and the area's operational officer for controlled drugs. "These people could also be going into A&E or out-of-hours GPs to try and get the medicine," she added.

Sudafed manufacturer Johnson & Johnson told C+D it was concerned to hear of "potential abuse" of its products and it worked with the MHRA and other stakeholders to minimise the risk of over-the-counter products being used to make crystal meth.

The MHRA decided against reclassifying pseudoephedrine from P to POM in 2009 following C+D's Stop the Switch campaign. But further restrictions were placed on its sale in pharmacies to minimise the medicine's misuse in the illegal manufacturing of crystal meth.