In the Trenches of the War on Meth

Nov. 2, 2005 — -- When methamphetamine cooks set up a lab in the middle of downtown Morris, Minn., in an empty building where the town's largest grocery store used to be, it was a wake-up call to the town of 5,200 people.

The lab was shut down shortly after it opened, but the fact that people would be brazen enough to take over an abandoned building in the heart of town to make drugs came as a shock to the community, says Mayor Carol Wilcox.

"It had been hidden and I think some people were naïve," Wilcox said of the discovery four years ago. "Until people got desperate and started doing desperate things."

Methamphetamine has taken a toll on communities across the country, hitting rural areas and Western and Midwestern states particularly hard. The powerful stimulant is relatively cheap and easy to make using pseudoephedrine -- found in many common cold medicines -- and other readily-available chemicals like battery acid, paint thinner and drain cleaner.

"It doesn't take long to set up and produce [meth]," Wilcox said. "It can be mobile, can be in a hotel."

The fact that the labs -- with their toxic chemicals and the volatile, harmful and sometimes fatal gasses they produce -- can be anywhere led lawmakers to take some unorthodox steps to try to prevent meth "cooks" from getting their supplies.

But while police in the states where those laws have been passed say they are seeing fewer labs, some law enforcement officials say the new regulations haven't slowed the flow of meth into their communities.

Oregon and Oklahoma have been among the most aggressive states in fighting meth production in smaller labs.

Oregon law enforcement officials took a novel approach to the problem, according to Rob Bovett, legal counsel for the Oregon Narcotics Enforcement Association. Bovett and others went straight to the source and asked the advice of meth dealers, users and "smurfers" -- the people who go from store to store buying Sudafed and other pseudoephedrine-based products for cooks.

"We asked them what would work," Bovett said.

The answer was that making pseudoephedrine hard to get would cripple small-time operators. In 2001, Bovett drafted state legislation that would do just that, but the bill was quashed, due in large part to intensive lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, he said.

Then, in 2003, an Oklahoma police officer was shot and killed by a meth addict during a routine traffic stop. That was the impetus for an Oklahoma law, passed in April 2004, restricting the sale of products containing pseudoephedrine. Those medicines are now sold from behind the pharmacy counter, and people also have to show ID to the pharmacist, who also keeps a monthly record of individual purchases.

That move has been a major victory in the war on meth, said Tom Cunningham, the coordinator of the Oklahoma's Drug Task Force. Local law enforcement saw results immediately.

"What we saw immediately was in the month of April there was almost a 50 percent reduction in meth labs being seized," Cunningham said.

Officials were busting about 1,300 smaller labs a year in Oklahoma at the height of meth production in 2002 and 2003, said Cunningham. Since the law has passed, there's been an 80 percent to 90 percent reduction in lab seizures, he said. Plus, the state has seen fewer meth-related cases being handled by child welfare and other social service programs.

"This was a game winner for us," Cunningham said. "This freed up resources; it's millions of dollars the state is saving."

Oregon and more than 30 other states have adopted laws restricting the sale of pseudoephedrine. But Cunningham, Bovett and other law enforcement officials readily admit that shutting down domestic labs has not kept anyone from getting meth.

"What has happened is that demand is being met by trafficking from other states or Mexico," said Cunningham. But he still calls the restrictions a boon for the welfare of the state. "What we don't have are these deathtrap labs, destroying property and putting kids at risk."

In September, the U.S. Senate passed the Combat Meth Act, which would require all states to adopt Oklahoma's rules and move products containing pseudoephedrine behind the pharmacy counter and limit the amount an individual could buy.

Another bill making its way through the House of Representatives, called the Methamphetamine Epidemic Elimination Act, is more far-reaching than the Senate bill, with provisions that would closely monitor international trade of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

Bovett and others say cracking down on pseudoephedrine internationally is crucial to affecting supply in the U.S.

Drug cartels in Mexico are importing tons of pseudoephedrine from other countries, manufacturing meth in "superlabs" there, then smuggling it back into the U.S., said Bovett.

With only nine factories in the world making the vast majority of pseudoephedrine, the House bill gives the U.S. State Department the authority to inspect those factories' export records and revoke economic aid to countries that produce the drug and ship vast quantities to Mexico.

Bovett says that is a good first step, but adds, "The State Department's got to be willing to utilize that power."

The House bill also calls for tougher sentencing for those who make, use and sell meth -- provisions that many policy experts and some senate Democrats find troubling.

Bill Piper, the director of national affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit group working to reform drug laws, says that in many ways, this bill repeats the mistakes of the 1980s "war on crack," when jails filled up with low-level drug offenders.

"Increasing sentencing for nonviolent drug offenders does nothing to deter the availability of drugs," says Piper.

Bovett agrees and says that tough-on-crime rhetoric is "a heck of a 30-second soundbite," but by locking up "street level dealers and addicts, you're not accomplishing anything but spending a lot of tax dollars."

Another complaint is that the bill provides no funding for treatment, and states can't deal with treating addicts on their own, says Bovett.

"Here in Oregon, we've been in a recession, we're tapped out," he said. "We've got tens of thousands of meth-addicted parents. We can't afford to lock them up. We know how to treat meth addicts ... but it costs money."

Some policy experts and op-ed writers question another "war on drugs" that they say is overhyped and doomed to fail. People like Bovett, who are the frontline for fighting meth use in their communities, say the drug's dangers are very real. But he's confident that there are strategies that will work to curb the drug's availability and use -- if they are implemented correctly.

And local officials say the federal government has to step up to the plate in recognizing meth's unique dangers. This summer, national drug czar John Walters said marijuana was still considered the No. 1 priority in the war on drugs.

Bovett says there is no comparison between meth and marijuana when it comes to the collateral damage to communities.

"Meth devastates families and destroys communities," he said. "There's just no comparison in the addictive liability of meth. It's not even comparable to crack cocaine.... And with marijuana, you're in just a totally different universe."