Reply #46: PBS did a lengthy report on meth a few years back. Here's what they found out about the cold drug... [View All]

[Hekate]

I just googled for "Frontline documentary + pseudoephedrine + meth"
This is the program The Meth Epidemic, which you can watch online. If you have difficulty with that, you could ask your public library if they can get it for you.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/meth/view/

Anyway, this is what I remember: The legal manufacturers of pseudoephedrine make far more than is ever needed for the legal cold drug. Along the way, it gets stolen in its pure form and makes "pure" meth. Pure meth is extraordinarily addictive, and addicts rarely if ever manage to kick the habit. The pleasure center of their brain literally gets burned away and the only way they can experience pleasure after that is by using meth.

However, at one point the US managed to get the legal manufacturers to make less and to regulate it more so that it would not be stolen and sold in its pure form. This worked. As a result, the meth that was made by illegal drug dealers was "dirty" and there was less of it. Strangely enough, the "dirty" meth was less addictive and addicts stood a better chance of kicking the habit.

I can't remember why the US and other governments gave up the stiff regulations on the legal manufacturers, but they did. All I remember is being appalled, because it had been working.

I understand about sinus and migraine sufferers, but what I am trying to do is give a context and hopefully a plan of action. Watch the program (or at least read the blurb at the website) and contact Wyden with this information. He may be ignorant of the extent of the information out there.

Hekate

From the website:
>> "The Meth Epidemic" tells the story of two potential solutions to the crisis and examines why neither was fully tried. In the mid-80s, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration first proposed controlling the retail sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in cold medicines by having customers register at the counter and limiting how much they could buy. Pharmaceutical companies, however, resisted the DEA's plan. Allan Rexinger, a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, felt the DEA was overreacting and unfairly punishing a legitimate business: "They have a different way of thinking. DEA agents carry guns; DEA agents are killed in the jungles of South America. But when you're working in Congress, you don't need to carry a gun. We felt like we were being treated just like a Colombian drug lord." Meanwhile, Gene Haislip, a former deputy administrator at the DEA, says: "They live in the business community, where the name of the game is to make money and sell product. They're highly skilled, very well organized and very well funded, and they can be quite formidable." Faced with a choice, the White House and Congress ultimately exempted cold medication from the regulatory proposals.
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>> The second DEA approach was to regulate the source of the ingredients. Ephedrine and pseudoephedrine are highly sophisticated chemicals that can only be produced in a handful of huge, legal laboratories worldwide, thus making them potentially easy to track. But with Washington's primary focus on cocaine and heroin, meth took a bureaucratic back seat.
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>> The government's focus shifted after 1994, when a customs agent inadvertently discovered a large, illicit shipment of ephedrine on a plane traveling from India to Mexico. During an 18-month period in the early 1990s, a Mexican drug cartel had purchased 170 tons of ephedrine from Indian manufacturers and smuggled it into the United States, where it was turned into as much as 2 billion hits of meth. This accidental find was a hopeful moment in the history of the meth epidemic, and efforts to cut off the drug lords' supply escalated. Once U.S. authorities asked the manufacturers to cease exports to the Mexican cartel, the chemicals became more expensive, and the purity of meth on America's streets started to plunge—along with addiction rates. "We at Krebs Biochemicals would have been happy if the DEA or other American authorities had told us, 'You can deal with these guys, they're OK, but don't deal with these guys,'" says Dr. R.T. Ravi, an administrator at the company. "We would rather that our product did not fall into the wrong hands."
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>> Soon, however, the cartel would be back in business. Cold medicines remained unregulated for years, and the cartel took advantage of the situation, scooping up pills by the tens of thousands, even punching them out of their packets and distilling the ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in them to make meth. Today, the number of meth addicts is skyrocketing: With 1.4 million users in the U.S. alone and millions more around the world, the United Nations calls meth the most abused hard drug on earth.
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