drug-screen

LINE UP TO STOP A DRUG SCOURGE

American students of math and science supposedly are falling behind their counterparts in other industrialized nations.  But apparently there still are plenty of capable amateur chemists out there.  And they are the reason it's going to get harder for victims of the common cold to get relief.

It takes but a few moments on Google to turn up step-by-step instructions describing how to turn over-the-counter cold pills such as Sudafed into methamphetamine.  For example, one -- which claims to be the "Birch" or "Nazi" method -- starts out this way:

* Crush tablets finely in blender.  * Soak in bucket with 3 volumes ( to the solid ) of acetone, preferably anhydrous acetone, for six hours.  * Vacuum filter, wash solid with extra acetone, filter through, collect solid and dry at 50 degrees C or low heat in a griller on a Pyrex dish.  * Discard acetone.

And it goes on from there.  I'm not chemist enough ( by a long shot ) to say whether the recipe is genuine.  But officials who know about such things say the process is fairly easy.  That's why it's such a problem.

Meth "cooks" use a menu of chemicals, but ephedrine and especially pseudoephedrine are the key.  Underground chemists working in meth labs turn them into methamphetamine, a powder that can be further processed into crystal methamphetamine.  That's "a powerful and highly addictive synthetic stimulant," according to the National Drug Intelligence Center.  It's a growing threat in Florida, the NDIC says.  But meth has been an epidemic for years on the Pacific coast.

Because of some persistent drug-busters, it has become increasingly difficult for criminals running meth labs to buy pseudoephedrine in bulk.  So they taught themselves how to extract it from cold medicines.  Now, as The Washington Post and other news media reported last week, drugstores and chains such as Wal-Mart are phasing in restrictions on the sale of cold treatments.  Technically, they'll remain over-the-counter, but customers won't be able just to fill up the shopping cart.  They'll have to ask for the remedies and, in many cases, produce identification and sign a log.

Compared with other inconveniences caused by drug abuse, that's not so bad.  Addicts desperate for money rob houses and steal cars.  Drug traffic blights neighborhoods and spawns violence that doesn't discriminate between criminals and the innocent.  Abuse of legal drugs, particularly alcohol, bleeds over to society at large.  Drunken drivers kill thousands each year, and alcohol can escalate family disagreements into domestic violence.

Those effects are so ubiquitous that they no longer seem strange.  Having to sign a log and show ID just to unplug a stuffy nose still is.

But if the cold-medicine problem seems new, it really isn't.  Last year, The Oregonian newspaper in Portland ran a series by reporter Steve Suo that described the meth epidemic and two decades of attempts to restrict access to ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.  If law-enforcement types realized as far back as 1986 that illegal drug manufacturers were fond of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, why is there still a problem? The Oregonian series provides one part of the answer:

Drug industry lobbyists.

After the Drug Enforcement Administration had success battling the illegal Quaalude trade by restricting access to the chemicals necessary to make the drug, officials at the agency realized that they could use the same strategy to battle lots of illegal drugs, including cocaine and methamphetamine.  But pharmaceutical industry lobbyists exploited all their contacts, including their pull with the White House, to stop law enforcement from placing any restrictions on the key chemicals in cold medicines.  The lack of restrictions scuttled any financial incentives to replace the chemicals with versions harder for the meth cooks to distill.

Now that a crisis -- which means untold suffering and expense -- has forced action, drug companies stand to lose millions in sales.  A problem that could have been solved decades ago wasn't.  There are lessons for government today, if some political chemist just could distill them.