By Christine Gwynne / Alternet
If you’re coming down with a cold this winter and you stop by the local pharmacy to pick up some pseudoephedrine (commonly sold as Sudafed), you will get carded, but it has nothing to do with age. Pseudoephedrine is a key ingredient in methamphetamine. And since 2006, pharmacies have been carding cold sufferers to track their purchases and ensure they do not buy more pseudoephedrine than is legally allowed (3.6 grams per day or 9 grams per month).
The law, however, has done more to inconvenience chronic cold sufferers than curb methamphetamine abuse. Regulating pseudoephedrine didn’t end meth production. It simply changed the game. So long as Americans are willing to take drugs to improve performance in an increasingly exhausting work culture, those without access to legal amphetamines like Adderall will use what is available. Just as some college kids take Adderall to study, some Americans who don’t have access to psychiatrists will use meth to increase productivity.
Implemented in 2006, the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005 established restrictions and record-keeping mandates for pseudoephedrine purchases. Some states took the law even further, requiring prescriptions for and electronic tracking of pseudoephedrine purchases. Despite serious efforts to curb methamphetamine production, the results have been dismal.
After a short-lived decline in methamphetamine use following Sudafed legislation, use rates began trending upward again as Mexican traffickers and American manufacturers figured out how to meet lingering demand. While Mexico is increasing its share in the US meth market with high-purity, cheap methamphetamine, underground meth manufacturers in the U.S. are getting around the pseudoephedrine limits by adding new, dangerous chemicals to the mix — battery acid included.
New Meth in America
Meth might be typically associated with rural areas, but officials are reporting a spike in some meth-manufacturing and sale in some U.S. cities, says a new report by theAssociated Press. The cause is two-fold: While Mexican traffickers are using established urban smuggling routes to transport larger quantities of higher quality meth to cities, locals are warming up to meth-manufacturing as well.
Following pseudoephedrine legislation, Mexican drug traffickers moved quickly to supply Americans with methamphetamine. From 2007 to 2011, the amount of seized meth along the southwest border rose from 4,000 pounds to more than 16,000 pounds, while the purity of Mexican meth spiked from 39 percent in 2007 to 88 percent by 2011, theAP reported. But while Mexican meth was becoming more prevalent and potent, it was also getting cheaper: the price fell 69 percent, dropping from $290 per pure gram to less than $90, according to the AP.
Alongside Mexican meth’s growing presence in America and urban areas in particular comes a rise in homemade meth in cities and suburbs, where there are more pharmacies to score from and people to recruit as pseudophedrine buyers. In 2011, St. Louis and Jackson counties in Missouri reported three times the meth lab seizures than 2009, while the Evansville, Indiana area saw a 500 percent rise in seizures since 2010.
Because urban manufacturers do not have the same space necessary for a meth lab, new methods of use arise. With “one-pot” or “shake-and-bake” techniques, meth-makers can make quicker, albeit smaller batches that do not create the same heavy ammonia odor that made rural environments ideal for production. To do so, however, they must combine meth amphetamine with “toxic substances such as battery acid or drain cleaner in 2-liter soda bottles,” the AP said.
“We know the fuel for domestic labs is pseudoephedrine,” Tom Farmer, coordinator of the Tennessee Methamphetamine and Pharmaceutical Task Force, told the AP. “The source for that is pharmacies and the majority of pharmacies are in urban areas.” Farmer added, “Pseudoephedrine has become as good as currency.”
With the increase in meth production in cities and suburbs comes an increase in the danger associated with this particular black market, including violence among gangs becoming increasingly involved in the sale of meth and accidents associated with meth-production. “I’m seeing car fires from meth in urban areas now, more people getting burned,” Farmer told the AP.
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really the government steps in to stop something and it gets cheaper more potent and prevalent hahaha sounds like marijuana………can the buffoos in the DEA do anything thing right? just a bunch of politically connected ignorant bueaucrats wasting tax payer dollars and inconveniencing sick law abiding citizens and for what? to make meth more potent cheaper and available…… congrats to the DEA for following union rules “DON”T KILL THE JOB”
Here follows an extract from “Notes on Democracy” by Henry Louis Mencken, written in 1926, during alcohol prohibition (1919-1933):
The Prohibitionists, when they foisted their brummagem cure-all upon the country under cover of the war hysteria, gave out that their advocacy of it was based upon a Christian yearning to abate drunkenness, and so abolish crime, poverty and disease. They preached a [crime, poverty and disease free] millennium, and no doubt convinced hundreds of thousands of naive and sentimental persons, not themselves Puritans, nor even democrats.
That millennium, as everyone knows, has failed to come in. Not only are crime, poverty and disease undiminished, but drunkenness itself, if the police statistics are to be believed, has greatly increased. The land rocks with the scandal. Prohibition has made the use of alcohol devilish and even fashionable, and so vastly augmented the number of users. The young of both sexes, mainly innocent of the cup under license, now take to it almost unanimously.
In brief, Prohibition has not only failed to work the benefits that its proponents promised in 1917; it has brought in so many new evils that even the mob has turned against it. But do the Prohibitionists admit the fact frankly, and repudiate their original nonsense? They do not. On the contrary, they keep on demanding more and worse enforcement statutes — that is to say, more and worse devices for harassing and persecuting their opponents.
The more obvious the failure becomes, the more shamelessly they exhibit their genuine motives. In plain words, what moves them is the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate — which is to say, upon everyone who is free from their barbarous theological superstitions, and is having a better time in the world than they are.
They cannot stop the use of alcohol, nor even appreciably diminish it, but they can badger and annoy everyone who seeks to use it decently, and they can fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offences, and they can get satisfaction thereby for the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy. And all this they can do with a safe line of policemen and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal risk.