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An investigation into how and why methamphetamine abuse has become the fastest-growing drug abuse problem in America.

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00:00Police officer search warrant. I think meth has destroyed this community. From just one puff off a pipe you can stay high for a day. It doesn't just take a little piece of you, it takes all of you and everything good in your life.
00:30Methamphetamine, the most addictive illegal drug in America. Since Frontline first looked at meth back in 2005, new laws have been passed to control the key ingredients in the drug, which are also found in popular cold medicines. But now, the meth cooks have found a way around the laws, and the pharmaceutical industry is fighting to stop new controls.
00:52The cold medicine industry in the United States is estimated to be about a $3 billion 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.
01:07Tonight, Frontline, in association with the Oregonian, looks again at the meth epidemic to investigate a potential new cure and the battle raging over it.
01:19The truth is, the Oregon solution works. And for states that are struggling with that issue, the stakes couldn't be higher.
01:27And your hypodermic needle that about punctured my arm fell out from your hat.
01:41He's dealing.
01:55How many bags do we have?
01:57Four baggies.
01:58You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say a cannon will be used against you in the court of law.
02:04This is the story of an epidemic that has swept across America. An epidemic of methamphetamine abuse.
02:12It begins in Oregon, one of the places hit hardest by the epidemic.
02:19104. 104. Stop right here. Stop here.
02:23When we filmed here in 2005, this trailer park in Portland was a favorite place for addicts to crash after days of speeding on meth.
02:33Can I step in and talk to you?
02:35It gives you a euphoric rush. It's like your whole body tingles all over the place. And it's a good feeling. Happy, giddy. But then when you come down off of it, then they start going, people start wanting more. And they go crazy. And that's when they do, they lose themselves.
02:58I think meth has destroyed this community. I think in all reality, I think they need to take a bomb and blow it all up. It's that bad.
03:13In 2006, inspired in part by the reporting aired in this front line, Congress mandated that cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient in meth, only be sold from behind the pharmacy counter.
03:27As a result, most states limited consumers to just three boxes per purchase.
03:34But now, meth cooks are using a new recipe that requires as little as one box of cold medicine.
03:42They call the recipe Shake and Bake.
03:46To Shake and Bake, you can buy any of the ingredients anywhere. Anywhere.
03:51You can get the pseudoephedrine at any cold medicine that has that ingredient in the pill.
04:01You'll add water. Then you'll add lye to that to make it hot. You'll add your solvent, whether it be mineral spirits, ether, coal and fuel. Then you'll shake it up real good. And boom, you have dope.
04:17But former meth cook Robert Lucier says Shake and Bake comes with new dangers.
04:22The whole thing is dangerous. There's nothing about it that's not dangerous. If your container can't handle it, it'll explode. That's like a small hydrogen bomb.
04:32It'll blow a hole from right through the floor, right through the ceiling, and then it'll just smoke everything out, turn everything black in the room.
04:41You're mixing things that are never designed to be put together. Strong acids and bases, drain cleaners and engine starters, things like that, that are never supposed to be put into the same bottle.
04:55So it's incredibly dangerous to do. But when you're strung out on meth, you're willing to do a lot of crazy things.
05:02The human cost of the epidemic has been staggering. When Frontline filmed here back in 2005, more than half of the inmates in Portland jails were meth users.
05:17Deputy Brett King's job was to book them.
05:21Sucks to be in jail, doesn't it?
05:23No, it sucks to be on the streets and stuff.
05:26Yeah. What sort of changes do you notice have taken place with you because of your meth use?
05:32It was like, oh, the whole world changed. I mean, everybody, all my friends, everything.
05:37Maybe the patient had the body stancher, you know, and they lay the pods out.
05:41And since I started doing meth, it was like everybody's not the same people anymore.
05:46Are they doing meth, too? Is that what you're talking about?
05:49Yeah, yeah. And even, well, I don't have nobody.
05:53Shocked at the effect of meth on addicts who were being arrested over and over, King started collecting their booking photos.
06:04You see changes with certain people, especially if they're using methamphetamine, that has a distinct deteriorating effect on somebody's physical appearance.
06:18One of the faces that really stood out to me was Teresa Baxter.
06:25She came in, and she was quite visibly intoxicated by methamphetamine.
06:31She looked horrible. She looked at least 20 years older than she was.
06:35Her teeth were missing, and I look back in her history, and at one time, she was a fairly attractive young woman.
06:45Some people I have been here over 100 times, and I can look over a 10, 15, 20-year period and see how they've deteriorated, how they've changed.
07:02Some were quite attractive when they began to come to jail.
07:06Young people who were full of the health and had everything going for them.
07:11Intelligent, you know, probably very skilled at what they did, or good students or good athletes.
07:18And now, they're a shell of what they once were.
07:23They were quite effective.
07:29They were fun, and they weren't here, but they're not a girl.
07:32They were very effective.
07:34They were very effective and supportive.
07:37They were very effective.
07:42They were
07:44At the Portland newspaper, The Oregonian, reporters also began to focus on the impact of meth on the people of Oregon.
07:58It's huge. It affects not merely the users, but it's the leading cause of property crime.
08:06It's the leading reason why children are removed from their homes and sent into foster care.
08:10It's very hard to go to any part of Oregon and not experience the effects of methamphetamine on ordinary people.
08:17In 2002, The Oregonian's editors decided to go after the story behind the story.
08:24How and why did the meth epidemic get so out of control?
08:29Reporter Steve Suo was assigned to the investigation.
08:33We gathered about a million different types of records.
08:36Possession arrests, emergency room admissions, identity theft arrests.
08:41And all of them really pointed in the same direction.
08:44Suo transformed his data into maps.
08:47The darker a state's color, the higher its percentage of addicts.
08:51The maps told a chilling story.
08:54In 1992, only Oregon had enough addicts to be shaded black.
09:02By 1997, the number of addicts west of the Mississippi had risen dramatically.
09:08And by 2003, meth was starting to reach the east.
09:13Oregonians know very well from experience what the east coast can expect from this drug.
09:18And it's not a pretty picture.
09:23Portland cop Travis Fields spends his days on the lookout for meth addicts.
09:28Because they commit 85% of the property crime in the state.
09:33You can see a meth user from a mile away once you've been working around meth addicts for eight years.
09:39Just like they can see the police, there's aura that's around us, and they have this aura that's around them.
09:51Got a warrant. Turn around.
09:53Whoa!
09:59Now, who are you? You were...
10:00I'm a police officer.
10:01I know, but how did you guys know I was on the bus?
10:03This guy's been arrested for assault, stolen vehicle, meth, meth, weapons, forgery counterfeit, burglary, burglary again, burglary yet again, robbery, commercial robbery with a knife, shoplifting, burglary, motor vehicle theft, aggravated assault with a knife, burglary, burglary.
10:26This garage sale is part of a meth crime wave.
10:30It's run by a meth dealer, who pays for whatever thieves bring him, not with cash, but with meth.
10:37Once they get high again, the thieves go back out and commit more crimes.
10:43Meth, since it's an ultra-stimulant, from just one smoke off the pipe, one puff off the pipe, you can stay high for a day.
10:52So you can break into somebody's house and transfer that property to a place like this in hours.
10:59You're here, and then you're gone.
11:01My name is Jim Lawrence. I'm a detective with East Precinct Portland Police Bureau.
11:05You reported a burglary back on the 7th of July, and we are at a location this morning where we've executed a search warrant, and I think we've recovered some of your property.
11:15That's mine. That's cool. My son will be having his bed set. A bunch of it's mine.
11:24I was in the midst of moving, so I went over there with people with trucks to load up my stuff, and it was gone.
11:30I mean, my refrigerator was gone. My dining room table was gone. My china cabinet was gone.
11:36They just backed up one day, and they did this in like a 10-hour stretch. That's about the time I was gone from the house.
11:45All the way down on the ground! Stay down! Stay down! Police officer, search warrant!
11:51But property owners are not the hardest-hit victims of the meth epidemic.
11:56That role belongs to the children and spouses of meth addicts.
12:01You want to get a restraining order, and it's not because you don't love him, but he needs to stay away for a while.
12:07Thomas' conduct is going to make it so you don't even get to have your kids anymore.
12:14In 2005, 50% of the children in foster care in Oregon were there because of meth.
12:20Many of them were sent to see pediatrician Carol Chervenek.
12:24A nine-year-old girl was brought to see me because her parents had been arrested for manufacturing methamphetamines in her home,
12:32and she was sent to foster care. I asked her, tell me about drug use in your family, and she said,
12:38oh, well, my dad, he taught me how to cook it. And she described in absolute detail the cooking process of methamphetamine from the beginning to the end.
12:49She described how woozy she felt when the cooking was going on.
12:53She described that her dad took her finger and stuck it in the, quote,
12:57stuff at the end and made me taste it.
13:00She described graphic domestic violence between her parents,
13:05her father pistol-whipping her mother in the driveway until she was bloody.
13:09She described pornography running on the television all day long,
13:14and sexual activity between herself and adults in the home when they were high on methamphetamine.
13:24I do think of these kids as meth orphans because their parents have been stolen from them by this drug.
13:30With families and communities across the state being devastated by meth,
13:38Oregon began the nation's most innovative treatment program.
13:42But does treatment work for meth addicts?
13:46Reporter Steve Suo tried to find an answer by comparing Oregon's program with those of other states.
13:58But what the numbers revealed was something quite different,
14:02and so unexpected that Suo thought he'd made a mistake.
14:06In every state, the number of people entering rehab rose and fell in unison,
14:12even though the states had radically different programs.
14:20Then Suo compared the number of arrests and emergency room admissions in those states,
14:24and he found the same pattern.
14:26Over the years, there had been huge simultaneous spikes in meth use,
14:33and then huge fall-offs.
14:35Suo became obsessed with figuring out why.
14:40It's a lot like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
14:45where he has this image in his head of this mountain,
14:49and he doesn't know what it means, but he just feels compelled to tear up his yard
14:53and build this giant mound in his living room.
14:55And ultimately, that leads him to the answer.
14:57I didn't get any aliens out of it, but I got some pretty interesting answers.
15:01The answers lay in the very chemistry of the brain of a meth addict.
15:08Suo learned about the neuroscience of meth from Dr. Richard Rawson of UCLA.
15:15It has most of its effect via dopamine.
15:18Dopamine is the brain's primary pleasure chemical.
15:21When people do things that the brain wants to reward, it releases dopamine.
15:27This is the slide that we used to illustrate the principle that one orgasm equals two cheeseburgers.
15:34Probably not true, but that's what this represents.
15:37However, in terms of dopamine release, the mother of them all is methamphetamine.
15:43You get an increase from this base level to about 1,250 units.
15:48It produces a tremendous release of dopamine.
15:50The brain isn't designed to produce this kind of a release.
15:53This really doesn't occur from any normally occurring, rewarding activity.
15:58That's one of the reasons why people, when they take methamphetamine,
16:01they report having this euphoric experience that's unlike anything they've ever experienced.
16:06Now, what happens when that occurs?
16:08When you take that drug and you put it in your brain over and over and over again,
16:13because you like that spike of dopamine, it actually changes how the brain operates.
16:19What researchers have discovered is that meth creates its rush of euphoria
16:25by altering the part of an addict's brain that generates dopamine.
16:29They experience it as an inability to experience pleasure.
16:33Everything feels kind of gray and hopeless, and nothing feels good.
16:38And so, in their mind, the only way they're going to feel better is to take more methamphetamine,
16:42and hence you have relapse in people going back to using.
16:45It's a wonder any meth users ever get better.
16:48965, you don't need anybody else on 130.
16:52The research showing that meth might be the most addictive drug there is,
16:57suggested to Steve Suo that one of the few things that might explain
17:01the eerily consistent rise and fall in the number of addicts,
17:05was if the meth itself were changing.
17:09For instance, what if the purity of the meth on the nation's streets
17:13had been rising and falling?
17:17To find out if he was onto something,
17:19Suo gathered data on the purity of the meth seized by the government
17:23in various states over the years.
17:26Remarkably, the purity of the meth sold on American streets formed the pattern of the mountains.
17:34It was really exciting. I mean, it was a perfect match.
17:38And you just don't often see that in data.
17:41These things were lining up on my screen, and suddenly I had an explanation.
17:45Suo's groundbreaking discovery was that it was the change in the purity of the meth that addicts were using
17:53that had caused the rise and fall in the severity of the epidemic over the years.
17:57But the solution of one mystery only produced an even greater one.
18:03What powerful forces could account for such dramatic changes in the purity of meth?
18:11Uncovering the answer would require a journey back in time through the halls of Congress,
18:17the boardrooms of the pharmaceutical industry,
18:20and the meth labs of the drug cartels, and the biker gangs of the sixties.
18:25With music heralding the birth of a wild new counterculture,
18:34a generation began experimenting with drugs,
18:37and amphetamine, or speed, became a favorite of truckers, bikers, and college students.
18:44But in the eighties, a new kind of supercharged speed came on the scene.
18:51D-methamphetamine, better known as crystal meth.
18:57From a chemical perspective, methamphetamine is amphetamine with a methyl group,
19:01if you're interested in the science of it.
19:03But it's pretty much like a high-octane gasoline versus a low-octane gasoline.
19:07Methamphetamine, of course, is the high-octane version.
19:10Unlike other hard drugs, such as cocaine and heroin,
19:14crystal meth can be made from household products.
19:18The only essential ingredient is ephedrine, or its cousin, pseudoephedrine,
19:24found in many cold medicines.
19:26When someone gets a cold, one of the things that happens is you get inflammation in the sinuses.
19:31What ephedrine does is basically shrink those blood vessels.
19:35There's less tissue swelling, and since your sinuses are a very small space,
19:39that shrinkage of the tissues actually allows people to breathe better,
19:44and they're able to carry on with their lives instead of feeling like they have a sock in their sinuses.
19:49It's a medication that in some people gives a little boost of energy,
19:54and so people see this as a way to A, relieve symptoms, and B, maybe feel a little extra zip.
19:59Similar effects to what you see with methamphetamine, but taken to the nth degree with methamphetamine.
20:04With all of the ingredients in crystal meth cheap and easy to get,
20:09amateur cooks began mixing up batches of this highly addictive drug in kitchens across the West.
20:16But a kitchen cook can only produce a small amount of meth,
20:20so some in drug enforcement were convinced there was a chance to stop the spread of meth before it became an epidemic.
20:27In fact, there was a man in Washington, D.C., who had a plan for putting the meth cooks out of business.
20:36His name was Gene Hayslip, and in 1986, he was the number three man at the DEA.
20:43He had this entirely unique idea for controlling drugs,
20:48which is to go after the chemical components that go into illegal drugs.
20:52This was a radical departure from anything the DEA had done before.
20:57Hayslip's strategy for beating the meth cooks was inspired by his recent victory over another drug, Quaaludes.
21:05A lot of people have forgotten about the Quaaludes problem, but it was a very big problem.
21:09One time it was as big as a heroin or cocaine problem, and people wonder why it's gone away.
21:15Well, it's gone away because we beat them.
21:19In the early 80s, Hayslip discovered that Quaaludes were made from a powder so chemically sophisticated
21:25that the Colombian cartels selling Quaaludes couldn't make it themselves,
21:30but had to buy it from legally operated factories.
21:34And so Hayslip traveled around the world, convincing the government of every country with a factory
21:42that made the chemical in Quaaludes to shut it down.
21:46Well, it took some time, but in the end, the Colombians could no longer get their drug powder.
21:53They didn't know what to do. They gave it up. We eliminated the problem. We beat them.
22:02Just like Quaaludes, the key ingredients in meth are so chemically sophisticated,
22:08they can only be made by a few large manufacturers.
22:12And so Hayslip was confident that with a new chemical control law for ammunition,
22:17he could regulate those chemicals and beat meth.
22:21I realized that with methamphetamine, we could turn this chemical control law
22:27into a rifle approach to the problem, not just a shotgun approach.
22:31Because there were relatively few chemicals and they had relatively few legitimate uses.
22:38So this concept was especially well suited to attack a problem such as methamphetamine.
22:46In 1986, at Hayslip's urging, Republican Senator Bob Dole introduced a bill to require distributors of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine
22:55to check the identities of their customers and to make their sales records available to the DEA.
23:01But the bill immediately ran into trouble.
23:07For while nobody had been making much money selling prescription Quaaludes,
23:11the pharmaceutical industry was making billions of dollars selling cold medicine over the counter.
23:16To industry executives like Alan Rexinger, Hayslip and the DEA were out of control.
23:23They have a different way of thinking. They have a different mentality.
23:27They carry guns. They use these guns. DEA agents are killed.
23:33Now, in the jungles of South America, they need guns.
23:37But when you're working in the United States Congress, you don't need to carry a gun with you.
23:42And we felt that we were being treated just like a Colombian drug lord.
23:48They live in the business community where the name of the game is to make money and sell product.
23:53So they're always a little bit concerned about what DEA does in a situation like this,
23:58and sometimes more than a little bit.
24:00And they know who to talk to and who to go to in Washington.
24:03They're highly skilled, very well organized, and very well funded.
24:07And they can be quite formidable.
24:09Our response was, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold it, folks.
24:14Don't rush through this because if we do things too quickly,
24:18you're going to risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
24:21Without this ingredient, we're not going to have all the products we need available to the American consumer.
24:28Now, what would you do if there was a bill out there that would negatively affect your industry?
24:33It wouldn't make any difference if you were from the dill pickle industry or from the over-the-counter medicine industry.
24:39You would naturally do what you have to do.
24:42Quite frankly, we appealed to a higher authority.
24:46Suddenly, Hayslip was summoned to a meeting of Reagan administration officials and industry lobbyists
24:53at the old executive office building next door to the White House.
24:57It was in the Indian Treaty Room, a very beautiful room.
25:00When you have a meeting there, you feel like you're really having a meeting.
25:03There was a room full of people, including many of those lobbyists, I think, for that particular industry.
25:15But I wasn't concerned.
25:18I was loaded for bear, you may say.
25:21I had the evidence, I had the presentation, I knew what I was doing.
25:26And that's the kind of presentation I made.
25:31But the meeting did not end well for Hayslip.
25:35The pharmaceutical industry made it clear to him that it wanted the bill amended to exempt cold medicine.
25:41And the White House made it clear that it expected him to work out a deal.
25:45Hayslip decided he had no choice but to agree to the loophole.
25:52I have to concede that in retrospect, it was a mistake.
25:58But what we did then, we exempted from the law the chemical when it was sold and manufactured in the form of a pharmaceutical.
26:13I agree to that, I have to tell you.
26:16We got our law, but we got it without something later we'd discover that we critically needed.
26:25Beating meth was not going to be as easy as Gene Hayslip had hoped.
26:30Industry was opposed to regulation.
26:33Congress was far more worried about cocaine.
26:36And worst of all, the meth cooks were about to dramatically increase production.
26:45What happened was right around 1989, we started hitting labs that were just huge.
26:51And it changed it forever because it became an industrial project and it was a factory.
26:58Bob Pennell was in charge of the Fresno Meth Task Force.
27:01One of his jobs was to check out remote locations in California's Central Valley
27:06to see if they might be home to meth super labs.
27:10On this day, he spots an abandoned barn with a mobile home beside it, an ideal location for a lab.
27:17And he decides to take a closer look.
27:23Using night vision goggles and infrared spotlights, Pennell and his agents plan to sneak up undetected to the barn
27:30and see if there's any sign that it's being used to cook meth.
27:35We're just going to be going in basically to take a look at this place.
27:39We want to see what kind of smells we get.
27:41We're going to use the IR spotlight so Bruce will get in closer and we'll take a look around.
27:47Stealth is essential to Pennell because super lab cooks can slip into an abandoned barn,
27:53whip up a batch of meth in under 48 hours and then vanish.
27:58And if they suspect that Pennell has his eye on one of their favorite sites,
28:02they'll use a different barn for their next cook.
28:05We're going to go straight down that way right there.
28:08Okay, y'all, you got it.
28:10To counter the strategy of the meth cooks, Pennell and his men secretly plant hidden cameras at prime sites like this one.
28:19Bruce, let's kneel down.
28:22Okay, let me see the nitrate.
28:27Can I see your nitrate?
28:29In the 1990s, Pennell's cameras captured this super lab cook on film.
28:34The containers are full of ephedrine being cooked into meth.
28:39A super lab will turn around and manufacture anywhere from 10 to 100 pounds in a cook cycle.
28:45A 100 pound cook, you're up into like $4 million is going to be made off of that cook that you're doing.
28:51Beginning in 1989, four out of every five hits of meth consumed in the U.S. were cooked in super labs in the Central Valley.
29:04Our methamphetamine started showing up everywhere.
29:07That's when we realized that we were being used basically as the industrial center.
29:12We were basically the Medellin, the way cocaine in Colombia was the Medellin cartel.
29:17Now we were basically the suppliers for everyone in the United States out of California.
29:22The drug kingpins who turned meth into big business were the Amezcua brothers of Mexico.
29:29But no supermarket in the world could sell the Amezcuas the tons of ephedrine their operation required.
29:36So where were they getting it?
29:40From the same factories where the American pharmaceutical industry bought the key ingredients in its cold medicines.
29:49Twelve miles outside Nalur, India, stands the Krebs Biochemicals Factory.
29:56In 2005, in this warehouse alone, there was enough raw material to make 10 million hits of meth.
30:06Krebs was one of just nine factories that manufactured almost all of the world's ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.
30:14Methamphetamine, unlike most other hard drugs out there, is uniquely susceptible to supply-side intervention
30:20because it's not something you can grow.
30:22It's not something you get out of poppy fields or out of coca plants.
30:25It's something you've got to cook up in a factory. You've got to make this stuff.
30:29But while the U.S. government was spending billions trying to control heroin and cocaine,
30:35meth was such a low priority that no one was bothering to monitor who was shopping at the nine factories
30:43that make the key ingredients in meth.
30:46We at Krebs Biochemicals would have been much, much happier if only there was some guidance given by the DEA
30:55or the proper authorities in the United States about these are the legitimate users.
31:02You are okay if you have any business dealings with these guys.
31:07Guidance in that fashion would have certainly helped us at Krebs Biochemicals
31:12in being perhaps a better citizen.
31:15Maybe we do not know how much of our material would have landed into the illegitimate hands.
31:20That could have certainly been prevented.
31:23During one 18-month period in the early 1990s,
31:27the Ameskua brothers purchased 170 tons of ephedrine from the nine factories
31:33and shipped it into the United States, where it was turned into 2 billion hits of meth.
31:43The meth on America's streets was suddenly cheap, plentiful, and most important, remarkably pure.
31:51And soon the addiction rate skyrocketed, creating the first great spike of American meth abuse.
32:00When you're just looking at numbers on a chart, you see this huge increase in meth use in the early 1990s.
32:06Well, that's the Ameskua brothers.
32:08The unraveling of their supply line was the key to knocking that mountain down.
32:14It happened purely by chance.
32:17In March of 1994, the plane landed in Dallas, Texas.
32:22There looked tons of light.
32:24The customs officer went aboard just to see what the cargo was
32:27and discovered that there were 120 of these cardboard chemical-type containers in there.
32:34And then he noticed that the company of origin, you could almost read it through the top cover,
32:42but it had been painted over.
32:44And he pulled a sample, and he called the DEA, and next thing you know, it came up.
32:49It was 3.4 metric tons of ephedrine destined for Mexico City that had landed in Dallas en route.
32:57Up until this point in time, the DEA, by its own admission,
33:01did not even really have a clue that the Ameskua brothers were obtaining hundreds of tons of ephedrine a year
33:08for the production of methamphetamine, much less how they were doing it.
33:13All of a sudden, the DEA has all the cards laid out in front of it
33:17and pretty much can see from shipping documents
33:20the names of the companies that actually manufactured the ephedrine.
33:23And that enables them to actually go to these companies and say, knock it off.
33:29With the cooperation of companies like Krebs, the DEA put an end to the Ameskua brothers' Indian connection.
33:37Soon, the superlabs in California's Central Valley began running out of ephedrine,
33:44and the purity of the meth on America's streets began to plunge.
33:49The impact of that decline can be measured not just in statistics, but in lives.
33:56This is On Track, a meth rehabilitation center in Medford, Oregon.
34:04When we filmed back in 2005, 20 women were living here along with their young children.
34:11Don't get impatient with yourself.
34:13The recovery from this drug is going to take years.
34:16And then for the rest of your life, you'll have to manage this every day of getting up and saying,
34:21today I'm not going to use.
34:23But I want you to know that the chemical reasons for this are real.
34:26And the depression, the anxiety, the feelings that you feel are a normal part of the recovery from this drug.
34:33When the purity of the meth on the street falls, not only do fewer first-time users become addicted,
34:39but those who are addicted find it easier to get clean.
34:43And that gives places like On Track and its director, Rita Sullivan, a chance.
34:55In early 1996, meth purity was the lowest it had been in years.
35:01The Indian connection was broken, and Congress had finally given the DEA the power to regulate the ephedrine in cold medicine.
35:08But there was a catch.
35:11The pharmaceutical industry was willing to compromise on ephedrine,
35:15as long as Congress didn't regulate pseudoephedrine,
35:18the drug from which it was making, by far, the most money.
35:23When it comes to meth, the two chemicals are interchangeable,
35:27and the meth cooks soon began buying massive quantities of pseudoephedrine pills.
35:33We go to these lab sites, and there's garbage bags and garbage bags of empty bottles.
35:38And they all have been razor cut at the bottom, and they've dumped all the pills out.
35:44With super lab cooks turning pseudoephedrine pills into meth around the clock,
35:49the purity of the meth on American streets began rising dramatically once more,
35:54creating the second mountain of meth abuse.
35:57Even worse, the number of states where meth use was reaching epidemic proportions was increasing.
36:07The epidemic had begun to spread from west to east.
36:12But it still hadn't reached across the Mississippi, and most politicians remained ignorant of the threat.
36:19When I founded the meth caucus five years ago, the people from the affected states, my co-founders, we knew about it.
36:26But as we talked to other people back here in D.C., they'd say,
36:29Methamphetamine? I don't know what it is.
36:31Or, Pseudephedrine? How does that relate to methamphetamine?
36:34They literally did not know.
36:36Back home, it was tearing families and lives apart.
36:39Here in Congress, it was as if there was no problem at all.
36:42Congress's attitude made controlling pseudoephedrine difficult.
36:47In 1996, when Gene Hayslip pushed through a regulation requiring a license to sell pseudoephedrine pills,
36:54Congress suspended the rule at the urging of the pharmaceutical industry.
36:59It's the first time in my entire career I ever saw a DEA regulation eliminated by an act of Congress.
37:08Because, essentially, the decision was made to give everyone a year to adjust to the new controls.
37:18Well, look, that gave legitimate people a year to adjust.
37:23But, on the other hand, unfortunately, it gave the traffickers a year to adjust.
37:29And that's just what they did.
37:34The DEA was swamped by thousands of bogus companies applying for licenses.
37:39And, short on staff, began issuing temporary permits.
37:44Before long, companies licensed by the government were making millions selling pseudoephedrine to the superlabs.
37:54The DEA effort to track down the bogus companies was halting and underfunded.
37:59But, by the time the agency shut down the last of them, the purity of the meth on the streets had plunged.
38:06We looked at the statistics on deaths and injuries.
38:10Because, my view has always been, if you're having success, you're going to see a fall in deaths and injuries.
38:16And, we saw that line dropping to the floor so beautifully.
38:22Once again, the meth cooks in the Central Valley began to grow desperate.
38:29Then, Bob Pennell noticed something very unusual.
38:33Now we start finding these 60 milligram, thousand count white bottles with no markings on them.
38:40And, you always had markings on them. You always had lot numbers.
38:43You always had some type of identifier.
38:45But, now we had nothing except to the bottom.
38:47There was some writing in French.
38:49We're finding them everywhere.
38:51It was two years before the DEA discovered that the mystery pills were being smuggled into the country from Quebec.
39:04Then, in 2003, the DEA and the Canadian government uncovered the Canadian connection and shut it down.
39:11Then, we started seeing smurfing.
39:20Remember how the smurfs were little gatherers.
39:22We started getting calls from different retail stores that people were buying two or three packs.
39:27That's the most you can buy.
39:29They went to one store and they bought three.
39:30They went to another store and bought three.
39:32We're seeing blister packs everywhere.
39:34Because they're sitting in the car.
39:35They're punching the pills out of the blister packs.
39:37They're putting them into freezer bags.
39:39And, they're turning them over to chemical brokers.
39:41Smurfing, an act of desperation for the super labs, had long been the main source of pseudoephedrine for kitchen meth cooks.
39:49To put an end to it, legislators in Oregon in 2003 resurrected the idea similar to what Hayslip had proposed nearly 20 years before,
40:00requiring buyers of products with pseudoephedrine to register at the store counter.
40:05But, the pharmaceutical industry continued to oppose such steps.
40:10Steve Robbins is an executive at Pfizer, the makers of pseudoephedrine.
40:14I think when we talk about methamphetamine, you have to do more on the consumption side.
40:20What is driving addiction and usage than just the supply side?
40:24So, I think the answer that, hey, if we got rid of this particular ingredient, wouldn't meth no longer be a problem?
40:29I don't agree with that argument.
40:31And, I think we've always been opposed to that because we feel like that isn't fair balance in terms of access for the legitimate consumers
40:37versus those people who are using it for illicit means.
40:40I struggle with how they can sleep at night after having accomplished what they needed accomplished
40:46to protect profits over the health, welfare, and safety of our community, in particular drug-endangered children.
40:53Rob Bovet was a leading supporter of the Oregon legislation to put cold medicines behind the counter.
41:00The DEA commissioned a study back in 2001 to look at the Portland area convenience stores.
41:05And, what that study concluded was that about 75% of the pseudoephedrine that was going into those convenience stores
41:11was being diverted to make methamphetamine.
41:14And, the pharmaceutical companies are getting paid for those products whether they're being diverted or not.
41:18It doesn't matter. They're still making their money.
41:20There's been a lot made about how much profit was made by people who were buying this for illicit reasons.
41:27On the other side of that coin, we end up paying for the shrinkage.
41:31That is the theft, okay, that these Smurfers do by going into stores and stealing products.
41:36And, I will tell you, I'm not sure that anyone's done the analysis.
41:39And, in the end, I'm not sure we made any additional money versus that product we had to actually replace
41:45because people had stolen it illegally.
41:48Finally, in 2004, Oklahoma passed a law moving pseudoephedrine behind the counter.
41:55Then, Oregon followed suit.
41:57And, some national chains took the same step voluntarily.
42:00But, the Mexican drug cartels had by then found a far better source of pseudoephedrine close to home.
42:09In 2004, Mexican pharmaceutical companies legally imported 224 tons of pseudoephedrine,
42:20twice as much as they were using to make cold medicine.
42:25Pharmacies in Mexico are currently restricted to selling only three boxes at a time.
42:31I went to a marketplace in Mexico City just to see what I could buy.
42:37I went with a Mexican citizen, and we asked, how many can you give us?
42:42We went to three different places, and all of them told us, we can give you as many as you want.
42:48The cartels cooked the extra 100 tons of pseudoephedrine into meth,
42:53then smuggled it, like other drugs, across the border into the U.S.
42:58As a result, the meth on American streets was suddenly as pure as it had ever been.
43:04That is what we're seeing coming from Mexico.
43:13Really good crystal.
43:15That amount of meth that we just got, if we had got that two or three years ago,
43:21we would have just about fainted.
43:23Nowadays, there's so much dope out here that that's commonplace.
43:27We get that amount off of one or two people every week.
43:32For the Mexican drug cartels, making meth in Mexico had an added bonus.
43:38They could use their traditional smuggling routes to bring meth to a huge new market,
43:43the eastern United States.
43:46The first to be affected were small towns throughout the southeast,
43:51which suddenly found themselves in the midst of a meth crime wave.
43:55Huge volumes of methamphetamine are being shipped up through the hub of Atlanta
44:01and are flooding the east coast right now.
44:03And that's bad and good.
44:05That's bad for the east coast because now they're feeling the meth epidemic for the first time.
44:10It's good for the west coast in the sense that Congress is finally starting to pay attention.
44:15At the urging of its meth caucus, Congress in 2006 passed the Combat Meth Act,
44:22which mandated that pseudoephedrine be put behind the counter nationwide
44:26and that buyers register at the store counter.
44:30Obviously, those of us who've had colds, we know how inconvenient it is and how unpleasant it is.
44:35But if somebody's addicted to meth, it's analogous to brain cancer.
44:38You are going to have your life ruined and probably taken ultimately by meth.
44:44So if people are inconvenienced by not being able to just go pick up their normal head cold remedy,
44:49we hope they'll understand that what we're trying to prevent is something far, far more destructive.
44:55In addition, the United States government, motivated in part by Steve Suo's reporting,
45:01convinced countries around the world to limit their imports of pseudoephedrine to just the amount they needed to make cold medicine.
45:10Now, five years later, the positive impact of that action is clear, especially in Mexico.
45:17The Mexican government recognized it had a huge problem on its hands
45:20and they began estimating how much pseudoephedrine they actually needed for cold medicine.
45:25And they determined it was very, very little.
45:28So little that they actually decided to just ban the importation altogether.
45:32That had a traumatic impact on the ability of the cartels to get their pseudoephedrine.
45:37They really, really struggled.
45:40With the Mexican cartels unable to get their hands on pseudoephedrine,
45:44the potency of the meth being smuggled into the U.S. has plunged dramatically.
45:49The cartels suddenly found themselves on the ropes and you find them turning to rather desperate measures,
45:56turning to the old biker method of manufacturing methamphetamine.
46:02It's gotten, and that has continued on through today to the point where 70% of the meth that is seized by the federal government these days
46:10is actually the old biker meth, DL methamphetamine, half as potent as the crystal meth that was on the street just five years ago.
46:19And that's good news for people who care about rates of addiction
46:23because people who experience weaker meth are likely to use far less of it
46:29and potentially not become addicted.
46:33But just as they always have before, the meth cooks have found a new way to get pseudoephedrine.
46:40Today, former cook Robert Lucier is clean after spending time in jail.
46:46But not long ago, he was running a gang of super smurfers.
46:51Other people go inside and purchase these items for you in small quantities
46:58and you just take them around to all these different stores
47:02and you just buy one or two boxes, you know, and you have four or five people
47:07and you just go from town to town loading up the trunk with boxes of pills.
47:18Meth cooks like Lucier then used the shake and bake method
47:21to turn the pseudoephedrine acquired from super smurfing into extraordinarily pure meth.
47:27I didn't get my good from doing the drug itself.
47:32I got my good from making the best monster I could build.
47:38It wouldn't be long before the word got out,
47:41oh, I know where to get the bomb, you know, and pretty soon it was gone.
47:48For nearly 30 years, the United States has been caught in a cycle of new laws
47:54followed by new strategies by the cooks to get around them.
48:01But in Oregon, some of those who experienced the worst of the epidemic
48:05say they've finally found the cure to make pseudoephedrine a prescription drug.
48:12Essentially, we've been putting band-aids on the situation for three decades now.
48:17And we got tired of putting band-aids on the situation
48:20and watching the smurfers and the meth cooks get around it.
48:24So we just simply decided to return pseudoephedrine to a prescription drug,
48:28which is what it was before 1976, and we ended the problem.
48:32We've essentially had a double whammy here in Oregon.
48:35The Mexican Drug Trafficking Organization meth is weak,
48:38and our meth cooks and smurfers can't make their own.
48:42In 2004, before the change in the law,
48:46sheriff's deputies uncovered 64 meth labs in Multnomah County, Oregon.
48:52In 2010, after the change, they found one.
48:57To Deputy Brett King, who showed us these faces of meth years ago,
49:02what matters most is the number of lives saved.
49:07Five years ago, I looked into how many methamphetamine-related arrests
49:11we had coming into the jail, and I saw that about 27% of the arrests
49:17were due to methamphetamine or directly related to methamphetamine.
49:21Today, we're down to about 4.6%.
49:24And I can attribute 100% of that to the legislation around pseudoephedrine.
49:29The incidence of identification theft has dramatically dropped.
49:35The crime overall across the board is down.
49:38To the other states who are considering addressing methamphetamine
49:42in the same way Oregon has, I would ask them, what's the holdup?
49:46But with other states now considering adopting Oregon's approach,
49:52the pharmaceutical industry is spending millions of dollars lobbying against it.
49:58They favor an improved system of tracking purchases.
50:02Thank you, Chairwoman Feinstein and Senator...
50:05In 2010, Linda Sudam, the president of a pharmaceutical industry trade group,
50:10testified to Congress.
50:12Our goal is to stop illegal pseudoephedrine sales
50:16while maintaining the over-the-counter access for legitimate customers.
50:21Maintaining access to non-prescription pseudoephedrine is important
50:25because for many consumers it is the ingredient that works best for them.
50:31A prescription mandate would be more expensive for consumers.
50:36The industry's fight against regulation emphasizes the cost to consumers.
50:41But for proponents of the Oregon model, the costs of inaction are greater.
50:48The truth is the Oregon solution works.
50:52And for states that are struggling with that issue, as many are,
50:55you know, just to do the next band-aid is no solution at all.
50:59You know, real solutions are required because lives and families are at stake.
51:03The stakes couldn't be higher.
51:06No one knows better what those stakes are than those who have been addicted to meth.
51:12I can look back and see the total devastation of all that I created
51:18and the lives affected, the houses that I destroyed.
51:23There's no, uh...
51:25There's no coming back from that kind of, of...
51:30You know, you can't fix that.
51:33And as long as you're caught up in it, it's like a whirlpool.
51:44Once you get caught in the current, you just go around and around and around,
51:49and pretty soon it just takes you under.
51:51And, uh...
51:54You gotta come through the other side.
51:57But the insanity's gotta stop somewhere in order for those things to take place.
52:10Frontline continues online.
52:12Watch the meth epidemic again.
52:14More on how meth works on the brain.
52:16It has most of its effect via dopamine.
52:19Answers to frequently asked questions about methamphetamine.
52:22Read the Oregonian's award-winning series on meth.
52:25And there's much more on Frontline's website.
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52:53Frontline's The Meth Epidemic is available on DVD.
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