Distillation in lattice QCD is a smearing method that uses the lowest eigenvectors of the spatial Laplacian to construct a subspace in which the Dirac operator can be fully inverted. However, local multiquark interpolators are expensive in this framework because the cost of the contractions scales with a high power of the number of Laplacian eigenvectors. To address this, a position-space sampling method within distillation is presented that avoids this cost scaling. Our simulations show that this method works well for meson operators, but also for local tetraquark operators. In a preliminary study, we investigate the relevance of the latter for the ground state energy of the $T_{cc}(3875)^+$ tetraquark. There we find a downward shift in the lowest level when local tetraquark operators are added to a basis of bilocal scattering operators in the variational method. However, this shift is small compared to the error of the energy.