The Meth Epidemic

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I was 5 1/2 months pregnant with my daughter and I was shooting the whole time from just one puff off a pipe. You can stay high for a day. I think meth has destroyed this community speed. Crank. Crystal by any name man is today the most talked about drug in America. But there is an untold story about meth. The story of a fierce battle over the key ingredient to a drug which is also the key ingredient in many very profitable cold medicines the cold medicine industry in the United States is estimated to be about a three billion dollar money maker for the drug companies. And to say that you're going to make it more difficult for companies to sell this product really is not a very popular idea yet Congress and many states are now considering action to put America's favorite cold medicine under lock and key. Tonight on Frontline how meth use spiraled out of control and became the fastest growing drug abuse problem in America. This program was produced in association with The Oregonian.

That's. Meth. And your hypodermic needle that about punctured my arm fell out of your hat. He's dealt deal in a body bag. We have four baggies. He has the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. This is the story of a disease that is sweeping across America. It begins here in Portland Oregon. Where an epidemic is raging an epidemic of methamphetamine abuse. Even using meth. Use. Here's how you first get into it. My mother told. Me. Mom. She was using. Then how do you when you first use. For. 10.

Or 12 years old. Because not once but twice. She chose drugs over. Many kids. I have. One daughter. Called How's your daughter. Six. Or almost. Really. No. 1 0 4. Stop right here in. This trailer park in Southeast Portland is a favorite haunt of couch surfers addicts who have crashed after days of speeding on meth. Can I stop and talk to you. It gives you. Work. Rush. It's like your whole body tingles all over the place. It's a good feeling. Happy giddy. But then when you come down off of it then they start when people start. Wanting more and they go crazy and that's when they do they lose themselves. I think. Meth has destroyed this community. I think in all

reality I think they need to take a bomb and blow it up. It's that bad. Have the county jail in Portland deputy Brett King's job is booking new arrestees. More than 50 percent of them are meth users. Sucks to be in jail. All this nonsense on the streets. Yeah. What sort of changes do you know that have taken place with you because you're Matthews. It's like the whole world changes every month. All my friends are many days in a body snatchers you know like the tides. Since I started getting messages like amazed that same people say why are they doing my two hour talking about. Yes. Well I don't. Shocked at the effect of meth addicts who were being arrested over and over. King started collecting their booking photos.

You see changes with with certain people especially especially if they're using methamphetamine that has a distinct deteriorating effect on somebody's physical appearance. Of the faces that really stood out to me was Teresa Baxter. She came in and she was quite visibly intoxicated by methamphetamine. She looked horrible. She loved her at least 20 years older than she was. Her teeth were missing. And I looked back in her history and at one time she was a fairly attractive young woman. Some people I have in here over a hundred times I can look over a 10 15 20 year period and see how they've deteriorated how they've changed. Some were quite attractive when they began to come to jail young people

or for their health and had everything going for him intelligent. You know probably very skilled at what they did. Or good students are good athletes. And and now they're they're a shell of what they once were. At. The Portland newspaper The Oregonian the impact of meth on the people of Oregon has been front page news for years. It's huge it affects not merely the users but it's the leading cause of property crime. It's leading reason why children are removed from their homes and sent

into foster care. It's very hard to go to any part of Oregon and not experience the effects of methamphetamine on ordinary people. In 2002 the Oregonians editors decided to go after the story behind the story. How and why did the meth epidemic get so out of control. Reporter Steve Suso was assigned to the investigation. He gathered about a million different types of records. Possession arrest emergency room admissions identity theft arrests and all of them really pointed in the same direction. So transformed his data into maps the darker estate's color the higher its percentage of addicts. The maps told a chilling story. In 1992 only Oregon had enough addicts to be shaded black. By 1997 a number of addicts west of the Mississippi had risen dramatically. And by 2003 meth was starting to reach the east.

Oregonians know very well from experience what the East Coast can expect from this drug and it's not a pretty picture. Portland cop transfuse spends his days on the lookout for meth addicts. Because they commit 85 percent of the property crime in the state. You can see a meth user from a mile away once you've been around meth addicts for eight years. Just like they can see the police. There's all of this around us. That had his arms around them. I. Went. Around. You. You are on please. I know you guys know but. This guy's been arrested for assault stolen vehicle mass mass weapons forgery counterfeit burglary burglary

again burglary again robbery robbery with a knife shoplifting burglary and motor vehicle theft aggravated assault with a knife burglary burglary. His name would Charolais. No it's not actually Carol. It's funny. A. Lot of the burglars are doing or just to get IDs passports tax information no stealing your TV or your house steal your identity. Obama by myself a better TV. This garage sale is part of a meth crime wave. It's run by a meth dealer who pays for whatever thieves bring him. Not with cash but with meth. Once they get high again. The thieves go back out and commit more crimes. Meth since it's a Ultra's stimulant from just one smoke off the pipe one puff off a pipe you can stay high for a day. So you can break into somebody's house and transfer that property to a place like this in ours and you're here and then you're gone.

My name is Jim Lawrence on a detective with East precinct and police. You reported a burglary back on the 7th of July. And we are at a location this morning where we execute a search warrant and I think we've recovered some of your property. This year. Fine. That's cool. I certainly hope we get there. It's like. I was in the midst of moving so I went over there with people with trucks to load up my stuff. It was hard. I mean my refrigerator was gone. My dining room table was gone. My. Cabinet was gone. They just patched up one day and they did it like a 10 hour stretch. That's. The time I was going to the house. All the way down on the ground stay down stay down. You saw property owners are not the hardest hit victims of the meth epidemic. That sad road belongs to the children and spouses of meth addicts.

You want to get a restraining order not because you don't love him but he needs to stay away for a while. Thomas's conduct is in the making so you don't even get to have your kids anymore. Fifty percent of the children in foster care in Oregon are there because of meth. Many of them are sent to see a pediatrician. Carol Herbenick a 9 year old girl was brought to see me because her parents had been arrested for manufacturing methamphetamines in her home and she was sent to foster care. I asked her. Tell me about drug use in your family and she said Oh well my dad. Taught me how to cook. And she described in absolute detail the cooking process of methamphetamine from the beginning to the end. She described how she felt when the cooking was going on. She described that her dad took her finger and stuck it in this stuff at the end and made them taste it. She described graphic domestic violence between her parents her father pistol

whipping her mother in the driveway until she was bloody. She described pornography running on the television all day long. And sexual activity between herself and adults in the home when they were high on methamphetamine. I do think of these kids as meth orphans because their parents have been stolen from them by this drug. With families in communities across the state being devastated by meth. Oregon began the nation's most innovative treatment program. But does treatment work for meth addicts. Reporter Steve Soulard tried to find an answer by comparing Oregon's program with those of other states. But what the numbers revealed was something quite different and so unexpected that who thought he'd made a mistake.

In every state the number of people entering rehab rose and fell in unison even though the states had radically different programs. Then compare the number of arrests and emergency room admissions in those states and he found the same pattern over the years. There had been huge simultaneous spikes in meth use and then huge fall offs Sewell became obsessed with figuring out why it's a lot like Richard Dreyfuss in close encounters of the third kind where he has this image in his head of this mountain and he doesn't know what it means but he just feels compelled to tear up his yard and build this giant mound in his living room and ultimately that leads him to the answer. I didn't get aliens out of it but I got some pretty interesting answers. The answers lay in the very chemistry of the brain of a meth addict. See the

judgment center sual learned about the neuroscience of meth from Dr. Richard Rossen of UCLA. It has most of its effect the adult. Dopamine is the brain's primary pleasure chemical. When people do things that the brain wants to reward it releases dopamine. This is the slide that we use to illustrate the principle that one orgasm equals two cheeseburgers. Probably not true but that's that's what this represents. However in terms of dopamine release the mother of them all is methamphetamine. You get a decrease from this base level to about twelve hundred and fifty units. It produces a tremendous release for me. The brain isn't designed to produce this kind of a release. This really doesn't occur from any normally occurring rewarding activity. That's one of the reasons why people when they take methamphetamine they report having this euphoric experience is unlike anything they've ever experienced. Now what happens when that occurs when you take that drug

and you put it in your brain over and over and over again because you like that spike of dopamine it actually changes how the brain operates. What researchers have discovered is that meth creates its rush of euphoria by altering the part of an addict brain that generates dopamine. They experience it as an inability to experience pleasure. Everything feels kind of grey and hopeless and nothing feels good. And so in their mind the only way they're going to feel better is to take more methamphetamine and hence you have relapse and people going back to using. So wonder any meth users ever get better here. The research showing that meth might be the most addictive drug there is suggested to you that one of the few things that might explain the eerily consistent rise and fall in the number of addicts. Was if the method itself we're changing.

For instance would have the purity of the meth nomination streets had been rising and falling. To find out if he was on to something. Zuo gathered data on the purity of the meth seized by the government in various states over the years. Remarkably the purity of the math sold on American streets formed the pattern of the mountains. It's really exciting. I mean it was it was a perfect match. And you just don't often see that in Indiana these things were lining up on my screen and suddenly I had an explanation. Swots groundbreaking discovery. Was that it was the change in the purity of the mathematics we're using that had caused the rise and fall and the severity of the epidemic over the years. But the solution of one mystery only produced an even greater one. What powerful forces could account for such dramatic changes in the purity of meth. Uncovering the answer. Would require a journey back in time through the halls of

Congress the boardrooms of the pharmaceutical industry. And the meth labs of the drug cartels. And the biker gangs of the 60s. With music heralding the birth of a wild new counterculture a generation began experimenting with drugs and amphetamine where speed became a favorite of truckers bikers and college students. But in the 80s a new kind of supercharged speed came on the scene. Methamphetamine better known as crystal meth from a chemical perspective. Methamphetamine is amphetamine with methyl group if you're interested in the science of it but it's pretty much like high octane gasoline versus a low octane gasoline. Methamphetamine of course is the high octane version. Unlike other hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin. Crystal meth can be made from household products. The only essential ingredient is

ephedrine. Or its cousin pseudoephedrine found in many cold medicines. When someone gets a cold one of the things that happens you get inflammation in the sciences. What ephedrine does is basically shrink those blood vessels there's less tissue swelling and since your sinuses over a very small space that shrinkage of the tissues actually allows people to breathe better and they're able to carry on with their lives instead of feeling like they have a sock in their sinuses. It's a medication that in some people gives a little boost of energy. And so people see this as a way to relieve symptoms and be maybe feel a little extra zip. Similar effects to what you see with methamphetamine but taken to the nth degree with methamphetamine. With all of the ingredients in crystal meth cheap and easy to get. Amateur cooks began mixing up batches of this highly addictive drug in kitchens across the west. But a kitchen cook can only produce a small amount of meth. So some in drug enforcement were convinced there was a chance to stop the spread of meth

before it became an epidemic. This in fact there was a man in Washington D.C. who had a plan for putting the meth cooks out of business. His name was Jean Hayslip. And in 1986 he was the number three man of the DEA. He had this entirely unique idea for controlling drugs which is to go after the chemical components that go into illegal drugs. This was a radical departure from anything the DEA had done before. Hayslip strategy for beating the meth cooks was inspired by his recent victory over another drug. CWE. Ludes. A lot of people have forgotten about the problem but it was a very big problem. One time it was as big as the heroin cocaine problem. And people wonder why it's gone away. Well it's gone away because we beat them in the early 80s. Hayslip discovered that corny Ludes were made from a powdered soap chemically sophisticated that the Colombian cartels selling queer ludes couldn't make it themselves would have to

buy it from legally operated factories. And so Hayslip traveled around the world convincing the government of every country with a factory that made the chemical includes to shut it down. Well it took some time but in the end the colonias could no longer get their drug power. They didn't know what to do. They gave it up. We eliminated the problem. We beat them just like quail ludes. The key ingredients in meth are so chemically sophisticated they can only be made by a few large manufacturers. And so Hayslip was confident that with a new chemical control law for ammunition he could regulate those chemicals and beef meth. I realize that with methamphetamine we could turn this chemical control law into a rifle approach to the problem not just the shotgun approach

because there were relatively few chemicals and they had relatively few legitimate uses. So this concept was especially well suited to attack a problem such as methamphetamine that payslips erging. Republican Senator Bob Dole introduced a bill to require a license to import ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in powder form. And mandating that buyers of cold medicines containing the drugs register at the store counter. But the bill immediately ran into trouble. For. Well nobody had been making much money selling prescription quail's. A pharmaceutical industry was making billions of dollars selling cold medicine over the counter. To Industry executives like Alan rec's and her. Hayslip and the DEA were out of control. They have a different way of thinking. They have a different mentality. They carry guns. They use these guns. DEA agents are killed.

Now in the jungles of South America. They need guns. But when you're working in the United States Congress you don't need to carry a gun with you. And we felt that we were being treated just like a Colombian drug lord. They live in the business community where the name of the game is to make money and sell products. So they're always a little bit concerned about what the DEA does in a situation like this and sometimes more than that and they know who to talk to and who to go to in Washington. They are highly skilled very well organized and very well-funded and they can be quite formidable. Our response was well all. Hold it. The men folks don't rush through this because if we do things too quickly you're going to risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Without this ingredient we're not going to have all the products we need available to the American consumer. Now what would you do if there was a bill out there that would negatively affect your industry. Wouldn't make any

difference if you were from the dill pickle industry or from the over-the-counter medicine industry. You would naturally do what you have to do quite frankly. We appealed to a higher authority. Suddenly. Hayslip was summoned to a meeting of Reagan administration officials and industry lobbyists at the Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House. It was in the Indian Treaty Room a very beautiful room when you have a meeting there you feel like you're really having a meeting. There was a room full of people including many of those lobbyists. I think for for that particular industry. But. I wasn't concerned. I was loaded for bear you may say. I had the evidence I had the presentation I knew what I was doing. And that's the kind of presentation I made. At the meeting did not end well for Hayslip. The

pharmaceutical industry made it clear to him that it wanted the bill amended to exempt cold medicine. And the White House made it clear that it expected him to work out a deal. Hayslip decided he had no choice but to agree to the loophole. I have to. Concede that in retrospect it was a mistake. But what we did then we exempted from the law the chemical when it was sold and manufactured in the form of a pharmaceutical I agree to that. I have to tell you. We got our law but we got it without something. Later we discover that we critically need it. Beating meth was not going to be as easy as Jean Hayslip had hoped. Industry was opposed to regulation. Congress was far more worried about

cocaine. And worst of all. The meth cooks were about to dramatically increase production. What happened was right around 1989 we started hitting labs that were just huge. And it changed it forever because it became a industrial project and it was a factory. Bob Pennell is in charge of the Fresno meth task force. He's checking out a remote location in California's Central Valley to see if it might be home to a meth Super Lab. Satisfied that the abandoned barn with a mobile home next to it is an ideal location for a lab. He decides to take a closer look. Using night vision goggles and infrared spotlights. Pennel and his agents plan to sneak up undetected to the barn. And see if there's any sign that it's been used to cook meth.

We're just going to be going in basically to take a look at this place want to see what kind of smells we get. We're going to use the spotlight. So Bruce will get in closer and we'll take a look around. Stealth is essential to Pennel. Because Super Lab crooks can slip into an abandoned barn. Whip up a batch of meth in under 48 hours and then vanish. And if they suspect that Pennel has his eye on one of their favorite sites they use a different barn for their next cook. We're going to go straight down now where they're going. To counter the strategy of the meth cooks Pennel and his men secretly plant hidden cameras at prime sites like this one. That's mailed out. Right. Here. In the 1990s. Penalize cameras captured this Super Lab cook on film. The containers are full of ephedrine being cooked into meth.

A Super Lab will turn around a manufacturer anywhere from 10 to 100 pounds in a cookie cycle. 100 pound cook up into like 4 million dollars. Going to be made off of that cook that you're doing. Beginning in 1989. Four out of every five hits of meth consumed in the U.S. were cooked in super labs in the Central Valley. Our methamphetamine started showing up everywhere. That's when we realized that we were being used basically as the industrial center. We were basically the mid-teen the way cocaine in Colombia was the marine cartel. Now we were basically the suppliers for everyone in the United States out of California. The drug kingpins who turned meth into big business with the Amezcua brothers of Mexico. But no supermarket in the world could sell them as was the tons of ephedrine. Their operation required. So where were they getting it. From the same factories where the American pharmaceutical industry bought the key ingredients in

its cold medicines. 12 miles outside Nellore India stands the Krebs biochemicals factory. In this warehouse alone. There is enough raw material to make 10 million hits of meth. Krebs is one of just nine factories that manufacture almost all of the world's ephedrine and pseudoephedrine methamphetamine unlike most other hard drugs out there is uniquely susceptible to supply side interventions because it's not something you can grow. It's not something you get out of poppy fields or out of coca plants. It's something you gotta cook up in a factory you got to make this stuff. But while the U.S. government was spending billions trying to control heroin and cocaine. Math with such a low priority. That no one was bothering to monitor who was shopping at the nine factories that make the key ingredients in math. We had biochemicals would have been much much happier if

only. There was some guidance given by the B or the proper authorities in the United States about these are the legitimate users. You are OK if you have any business dealings with these guys guidance in that fashion would certainly help with it as like him comes in being perhaps a better citizen. Maybe we did not know which of our retail would ever landed it could be in legitimate hands that have been presented. During one 18 month period in the early 1990s. The Amezcua brothers purchased 170 tons of ephedrine from the nine factories. And shifted into the United States. Where it was turned into two billion hits of meth. The meth on America's streets was suddenly cheap plentiful. And most important remarkably pure. And soon the addiction rates skyrocketed creating the first great spike of

American meth abuse. When you're just looking at numbers on a chart you see this huge increase in Mathew's in the early 1990s. Well that's the Amezcua brothers. The unraveling of their supply line was the key to knocking that mountain down. It happened purely by chance. March of 1994. Plane landed in Dallas Texas. Lufthansa flight customs officer went aboard just to see what the cargo was and discovered that there were a hundred and twenty of these cardboard. Chemical type containers in there. And then he noticed that the company of origin you could you could almost read it through the top cover but it had been painted over. And he pulled the sample. And he called the DEA and next thing you know it came up it was three point four metric tons of ephedrine destined for Mexico City that had landed in Dallas in route up until this point in time.

The DEA by its own admission did not even really have a clue that the M-S quote brothers were obtaining hundreds of tons of ephedrine a year for the production of methamphetamine much less how they were doing it. All of a sudden the DEA has all the cards laid out in front of them and pretty much can see from shipping documents the names of the companies that actually manufactured the ephedrine and that enables them to actually go to these companies can say knock it off. With the cooperation of companies like crabs. The DEA put an end to the Amezcua brothers Indian connection. Soon the super labs in California's Central Valley began running out of ephedrine. And the purity of a meth on America's streets began to plunge. The impact of that decline can be measured not just in statistics. But in lives.

This is on track. A meth rehabilitation center in Medford Oregon. Currently 20 women are in residence here along with their young children. Don't get impatient with yourself. The recovery from this drug is going to take years. And then for the rest of your life you'll have to manage this every day of getting up and saying today I'm not going to you. But I want you to know that the chemical reasons for this are real and the depression the anxiety the feelings that you feel are a normal part of the recovery from this drug when the purity of the meth on the street falls. Not only do fewer first time users become addicted but those who are addicted find it easier to get clean. And that gives places like on track and its director Rita Sullivan a chance. So tell me how can we as a society expect you to know how to treat that beautiful baby of yours. If you were never given that yourself unlike most treatment

centers which have no place for kids why Sullivan enables recovering mothers to keep their children with them believing they are the strongest motivation the women have to kick meth. And I think this should be the standard of care all over the world. In some cases the biggest act of love is to relinquish your child if you're not in a position to care for them. But most of the time the vast majority of the time the children and the moms do better if they're kept together. So we need to rehabilitate whole families. Hard as it is to kick meth on track shows that it can happen. And it also shows that keeping meth purity as low as possible can make a big difference in people's lives. In early 1996 meth purity was the lowest it had been in years. Indian connection was broken. And Congress had finally given the DEA the power to

regulate the ephedrine in cold medicine. But there was a catch. A pharmaceutical industry was willing to compromise on ephedrine. As long as Congress didn't regulate pseudoephedrine. The drug from which it was making. By far the most money. When it comes to math. The two chemicals are interchangeable and the meth cook soon began buying massive quantities of pseudoephedrine pills. We go to these lab sites and there's garbage bags and garbage bags of empty bottles and they all have been razor cut at the bottom and they've dumped all the pills out. But when they dump the pill out you know they have to remove a binder you know which holds the pill together. Lots of times that bind is cornstarch. So what they did is they would use huge huge containers full of denatured alcohol and they'd evaporate it off. Well now we sort of have it fires and explosions. Now we started getting ranch's blowing up all over our state. And before you know it 60 percent of lands we were dealing with her for fires and explosions.

To avoid the danger. The cartel bosses left the actual cooking to migrant workers tempted by the chance to get rich quick. We raided a lab years ago with the Fresno Police Department and we hit this slab was at a ranch. And boy I tell you what it was a beautiful ranch but it was it's a farm house for labor. This guy had three four kids I can't remember. And they brought all the chemicals through the children's bedroom all the way that was spelling was all on the carpet where the kids lived and slept. We hit the place and of course the owner of the property pulls up. What are you doing on my property. Well we just raided a very very large methamphetamine lab. I'll never forget this. Well. He's that one of the best employees I've ever had. He's worked for me for nine years. I just gave him a raise to six dollars an hour. And we're just looking at him. And we walked the rancher over to the little farm laborers truck and in a paper sack is $27000. And we tell them well you might give him a raise to six dollars an hour for nine years but it appears the second job is paying a little better and that's what it's all about. You know you know what's wrong

the greed kicks in. Now all of a sudden there's more money than you can ever imagine. But what happened to this guy's life was changed forever. With migrant's Super Lab cooks turning pseudoephedrine pills into meth. Around the Clock. The purity of the meth on American streets began rising dramatically once more. Creating the second mountain of meth abuse. Even worse. The number of states where meth use was reaching epidemic proportions was increasing. The epidemic had begun to spread from west to east. But it still hadn't reached across the Mississippi. And most politicians remained ignorant of the threat. When I found that the math caucus five years ago the people from the affected states I call the founders we knew about it but as we talked to other people back here in DC they say methamphetamine. I don't know what it is or pseudoephedrine. How does that relate to methamphetamine. They literally did not know. Back home that was tearing families and lives apart here in

Congress. It was as if there was no problem at all. Congress's attitude made controlling pseudoephedrine difficult. In 1996 when Jean Hayslip pushed through a regulation requiring a license to sew pseudoephedrine pills. Congress suspended the rule at the urging of the pharmaceutical industry. It's the first time in my entire career I ever saw a DEA regulation eliminated. By an act of Congress because essentially the decision was made to give everyone a year to adjust to the new controls. Well look that gave legitimate people a year to adjust. But on the other hand unfortunately it gave the trafficker's a year to adjust. And that's just what they did. The DEA was swamped by thousands of bogus companies applying for licenses. And short on staff. Began issuing temporary permits.

Before long. Companies licensed by the government were making millions selling pseudoephedrine to the super labs. They were primarily supplying tablets only to the taverner fact I recall one deal it was a case in Florida where the trafficker's actually asked this particular business would you stop putting the binder in these tablets because it makes it more difficult for us to use them. So they were producing Thalys with that binder. All they had to do is brush up. The DEA effort to track down the bogus companies was halting and underfunded. But by the time the agencies shut down the last of them. The purity of the meth on the streets had plunged. We looked at the statistics on deaths and injuries. Because my view has always been if you you're having success you are going to see a fall in death and injuries. And we saw that line dropping to the floor so beautifully.

Once again. The meth cooks in the central valley began to grow desperate. Them Bob Pennel notice something very unusual. Now we start finding the 60 milligram thousand count white bottles with no markings on it. And you always had markings on him he always had a lot numbers always had some type of identifier but now he had nothing except for the bottom. There was some writing in French. We're finding him everywhere. It's almost like a newsletter is sent out to the whole network of cookers and they make this transition over all at one time. It was two years before the DEA discovered that the mystery pills were being smuggled into the country from Quebec. Just as in the U.S. bogus Canadian pharmaceutical companies were shipping unregulated pseudoephedrine to the meth cooks in California. Then in 2003 the DEA and the Canadian government uncovered the Canadian

connection and shut it down. Then we started seeing smurfing. Remember how the Smurfs were little gatherers. We started getting calls from different retail stores that people were buying two or three packs. That's the most you can buy. They went to one store they bought from another store bought the same blister packs everywhere because they're sit in the car. The punch and the pills are the blister facts there put them in the freezer bags and they're carrying them over to chemical brokers. Smurfing an act of desperation for the super labs had long been the main source of pseudoephedrine for kitchen meth cooks. To put an end to it. Legislators in Oregon in 2003 resurrected the idea that Hayslip had proposed nearly 20 years before requiring buyers of products with pseudoephedrine to register at the store counter. But the pharmaceutical industry continued to oppose such steps. Steve

Robbin's is an executive at Pfizer. The makers of Sudafed. I think when we talk about methamphetamine you have to do more on the consumption side what is driving addiction and usage than just the supply side. So I think the answer that hey if we got rid of this particular ingredient wouldn't meth no longer be a problem. I don't agree with that argument. I think we've always been opposed to that because we feel like that is a fair balance in terms of access for the legitimate consumers versus those people are using it for illicit means. I struggle with how they can sleep at night after having accomplished what they needed accomplished to protect profits over the health welfare and safety of our community in particular drug endangered children. That was a leading supporter of the Oregon legislation to put cold medicines behind the counter. The DEA commissioned a study back in 2001 to look at the Portland area convenience stores and what that study concluded was that about 75 percent of the pseudoephedrine that was going into those convenience stores was being diverted to make methamphetamine. And the

pharmaceutical companies are getting paid for those products whether they are being diverted or not it doesn't matter they're still making their money. There's been a lot made about how much profit was made by people who were buying this for illicit reasons. On the other side of that coin we end up paying for the shrinkage that is the theft. OK. That these surfers do buy going into stores and stealing products. And I will tell you I'm not sure that anyone's done the analysis. And in the end I'm not sure we made any additional money versus that product we had to actually replace because people had stolen it illegally. The 2003 Oregon bill to regulate pseudoephedrine was defeated. But in 2004 Oklahoma passed its own law and some national chains began voluntarily moving the drug behind the counter for kitchen cooks finding pseudoephedrine was getting harder. For the Mexican drug cartels. That was a far more reliable source close to

home. In Tijuana alone. There are now by some estimates 1000 more pharmacies than sales to the public can support. Not coincidentally the city is now believed to house as many as 1000 meth labs. Pharmacies in Mexico are currently restricted to selling only three boxes at a time. I went to a marketplace in Mexico City just to see what I can buy. I went with a Mexican citizen and we asked how many can you give us. We went to three different places and all of them told us we can give you as many. In 2004. Mexican pharmaceutical companies legally imported 224 tons of pseudoephedrine. Twice as much as they needed to make cold medicine. The extra 100 tons was cooked into meth. Then smuggled. Like other drugs across the border into the

U.S.. As a result. The meth on American streets is as pure as it's ever been. That is what we're seeing coming from Mexico. Really good crystal. That amount of math that we just got. If we got two or three years ago we would have just about fainted. Nowadays. There's so much dope out here that. That's commonplace. We get that amount off of one or two people every week. The consequences are sobering. For with meth being made in Mexico. The drug cartels are now using their traditional smuggling routes to reach the eastern United States. Among the first to be affected are small towns throughout the southeast which have become part of the meth crime wave. Soon. Eastern states may face the same plant as Western ones where over 50 percent of those in prison. Are meth addicts.

The price for their communities will include not just the property they will steal and the money is spent keeping them behind bars. But the cost to their families and the children abandoned and abused. They are having multiple traumatic events. Physical abuse sexual abuse domestic violence exposure to drug use and criminal behavior. And. We are producing an entire generation. Of. People who believe criminal behavior and activity and drug use is normal. That. That has just tremendous costs for our society. If we don't do something drastically now to change that. Huge volumes of methamphetamine are being shipped up through the hub of Atlanta and are flooding the East Coast right now and that's bad and good that's bad for the East Coast because now they're feeling the meth epidemic for the first time. It's good for the West Coast in the sense that Congress is finally starting to pay attention.

Members of both parties have begun to question the Bush administration's response to meth. In 2005 the deputy drug czar argued that the administration's strategy is not to focus on one illicit drug over another. We also have to deal with heroin in the Northeast where they would laugh if you told them there is a meth epidemic. We have to deal with cocaine and gangs in Chicago where they would laugh if you told them there's a meth epidemic we have to deal with the fact that our kids are in treatment for marijuana than for all other drugs. Combine that approach angers Congressman Mark Souder in whose Indiana district there are prisons where 80 percent of the inmates are meth addicts. I believe the Office of the drug czar has had a laughable position that meth is only a minor problem. It's not an epidemic and that it only represents 8 percent of drug use of America. I believe the number is higher. I believe the impact is higher. I believe it's catastrophic in regional areas and that the statistical methods that they're using are focusing on youth focusing on traditional blast are wrong.

And when you combine this together it's led them to this what is probably the biggest drug epidemic in the last couple of years because there are whole models and constructs along. At the urging of it's meth caucus. Congress is now considering the combat meth act. Which mandates that pseudoephedrine be put under lock and key in stores nationwide. And that buyers register at the store counter. Obviously those of us who have had calls we know how inconvenient it is and how unpleasant it is. But if somebody is addicted to meth it's analogous to brain cancer. You are going to have your life ruined and probably taken ultimately by meth. So if people are inconvenienced by not being able to just go pick up their normal head cold remedy we hope they'll understand that what we're trying to prevent is something far far more destructive. The Act also calls upon the Bush administration to implement a worldwide strategy to control the flow of pseudoephedrine.

The bottom line is what you have to do is get back to the source. There's basically nine major factories in the whole world that make the key ingredient in meth. It would seem that the logical way to tackle this would be to go there. They need to help us track what they're producing and where it's going. We have a system for making sure that countries don't import more coding than they need. Well we actually have an international system for estimating the legitimate demand. Country by country and capping the imports at that level. That same system could be implemented for Federer. In November 2005. Mexico admitted that drug cartels had artificially inflated demand for pseudoephedrine and agreed to reduce imports to the level legitimately needed for cold medicine. It is the kind of hard nosed measure that Jean Hayslip has been advocating for 20 years. The international part of this whole effort is absolutely critical.

You've got to have a sort of chemical controls are visiting all these countries making friends establishing connections because people trust when they meet I face to face not once but frequently then people trust then information flows then cases are made then things happen then that beautiful magical lines fall and death and injuries. One day you see that happen. According to the United Nations. Math is today the most abused hard drug on earth. With its rising popularity around the world. Creating as many addicts as cocaine and heroin combined. In America alone. There are one and a half million addicts and rising. They are men and women whose lives have been shattered by the drug. Debbie Vick. Her addiction tracks the history of the meth epidemic. She started using soon after crystal meth came on the scene.

I was 5 1/2 months pregnant with my daughter and I was shooting the whole time. And I just kept justifying it should be ok. I was not going to punish that baby because of my addiction. After her daughter McKayla was born without meth in her blood. Debbie swore she'd get clean. But after marrying another addict Debbie continued to use even as she gave birth to three sons. If he hadn't been drinking I think things would've been different. You can't be around anybody or places that. Do that if you want to stay clean so. He can't. It was just a matter of time. Finally in 1998 Debbie's meth addiction led to a charge of child endangerment for which he was sent to prison. She began to fear she might lose her children permanently. And then I went to treatment invasion and it was great it was awesome and I was going to make it. I was here to stay clean I didn't get my kids back because my husband has to make it. I was going to be at 22 percent. That never goes

back. I was on that train set. When I overdosed on March 20 nights away. And I woke up to empties. And cops sirens and everything everywhere. This. The last time. Every. Paramedic. There's more to explore on frontlines website. A state by state map you can learn about the situation in your own state. Answers to frequently asked questions about methamphetamine is what we're seeing

coming from Mexico. Charts tracking the epidemic and the Rise and Fall of the drugs purity. A closer look at how math works on the brain most of its effect. Plus special video and reports the chance to watch the program again online. And join the discussion at PBS. Next time on Frontline. These women have been torn from their lives taken from their families. And sold into slavery. They are victims of a multibillion dollar international business. At tractrix. An estimated five hundred thousand women a year. Frontline goes undercover. To tell the tragic story of the sex trade. Next time. On Frontline.

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