Hands-Off Our Runny Nose: Meth & Cold Medicine Link

CNS News ^ | March 28, 2005 | Kerri Houston

[DBrow]

Hope I don't get too many colds or the vice squad will be after me.

..................

Chances are that if you buy "too much" PSE they'll check to see if you are buying lots of lithium batteries and toluene too, and have a habit of hanging around anhydrous tanks with old barbecue propane tanks, and if your neighbors report strange smells coming from your house.

THEN they'll come after you!

[freepatriot32]

I've read that clerks in our local convenience stores who sell more than one bottle of some cold medicines are subject to arrest.

Yep even if they are seventy years old and hard of hearing another great victory against liberty brought to you by the drug warriors/small goverment "conservatives"

Clerk Convicted Of Selling Meth Ingredient (10 Bottles of Cold Medicine Could Bring 10 Years)

[TKDietz]

"IMO, by the time they put all that together, the meth is made and out the door. But I can't back that up with facts, and can't know for sure whether it's effective or not."

Apparently meth lab busts have dropped by about 80% in Oklahoma since they passed those laws which seems like a pretty major success to me. How often do you see a major success in the war on drugs? How many zillions of dollars and how many thousands of people would have to have been put in prison for law enforcement to have had this kind of success just arresting people? I think these are pretty amazing results and speaking as someone who has represented a ton of people on meth cooking and related charges I personally would love to see us pass the same laws in my state.

[TKDietz]

"If Sudafed is outlawed, only Outlaws will have Sudafed. And they WILL find a way to get it. It'll just go underground. In fact, I'm sure some drug warlord is already pulling together a plan to keep the supply coming."

That's true. There will still be meth labs. The big labs out west and in Mexico will still have their illicit sources, but it would cut way down on the number of little small batch kitchen meth labs and that would be a huge benefit at least where I live. These aren't big labs producing huge amounts of dope going through barrels and barrels of chemicals and incredible amounts of pseudoephedrine they buy in large quantities from illicit suppliers who wouldn't come anywhere near the average tweaker on the street. These are little tiny operations often producing just two or three grams or maybe a little more per batch.

These little labs are getting busted all the time where I live. If every week we are getting new meth lab or possession of paraphernalia with intent to manufacture cases then you can there are a lot more out there who aren't getting caught. I've handled a ton of these cases and I'm always getting new ones. Usually, they are only cooking up small amounts but there are several people involved gathering the pseudoephedrine and other chemicals and doing thing like scraping the strike pads off of matchbooks to get the red phosphorous. These little helpers that are always involved are helping out for free or cheap dope.

The people involved with these little small batch meth labs seem to be those becoming the worst addicts in town. If these people had to pay full price for their dope a lot of them wouldn't ever do it enough to become addicts. With these little meth labs we always seem to have four or five people hanging around getting free or extra cheap dope and with that they are able to pretty much stay high which increases dramatically the chance that they'll become addicted. It also increases the numbers of incidents we see where people do completely crazy things because they've been tweaking for days without sleep and they've become irrational and paranoid and in many cases started hallucinating. These little meth labs fuel a lot of the real problem use around here and I'd like to see the number of them diminish significantly. An 80% drop like they've seen in Oklahoma would be great.

[MarkL]

It is annoying. The only stuff that works for me is the sudafed (or a generic) with pseudophedrine hydrochloride and triproladine hydroxide (sp?). That's the stuff that you have to jump through the hoops to get.

Why is this?!?!?! You'd think that if things have the same ingrediants, they'd work the same. The only thing that works for me is Cold Formula Advil. Even if I take the pse and ibuprofin, it just doesn't help. It seems that it also effects everyone differently, where certain things work, and others don't.

Mark

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Boy, an 80% drop would be terrific. Wisconsin has a terrible problem with it, too, mainly in north eastern Wisconsin.

http://www.dailycardinal.com/news/2005/02/24/News/Meth-Surge.Threatens.To.Engulf.Wisconsin-875961.shtml

The source of Wisconsin's meth problems lies just across the Mississippi River.

"We are experiencing it coming through the Minneapolis-St. Paul drug corridor," said Dr. Shawna Kovach, director of the L.A. Phillips Treatment Center, which is located near Eau Claire.

Eau Claire Police Department Police Chief Jerry Matysik said the Twin Cities are a major point of meth distribution.

"Much of it is imported from large 'super labs' from gangs in Mexico, Southern California and Arizona," Matysik said. He added, however, that incidents of homemade meth labs are also drastically increasing in the state.

Although a new phenomenon in Wisconsin-St. Croix County District Attorney Erik Johnson said his county, which borders Minnesota, has been dealing with methamphetamine abuse for five or six years-it has quickly spiraled out of control.

Kovach reported a statewide increase of almost 450 percent in criminal meth cases in the past five years (see chart, p. 1).

Lawmakers gasped when Matysik said meth cases in the small city of Eau Claire have increased from nine to more than 80 in just the past two years.

"Within two to three years the epidemic will reach the levels in Madison as it has in Northwestern Wisconsin," said Rep. Scott Suder, R-Abbotsford, who chairs the Criminal Justice and Homeland Security Committee.

With the spread of meth into Wisconsin comes an increase in violence.

"The addiction is so high that [users] will do anything to get it," Kovach said.

"This is the largest problem, by far, that we have as law enforcement in our region," Matysik said. "We are being so overwhelmed with violence and crime and gun crime all related to methamphetamines. It's extremely frightening."

(Yes, it is extremely frightening.)

[Know your rights]

Apparently meth lab busts have dropped by about 80% in Oklahoma since they passed those laws which seems like a pretty major success to me.

Or maybe it just means the cookers have hidden themselves better. Any evidence that the street price of meth has gone up, or use gone down?

[Know your rights]

how about busting those Mexican gang-run "superlabs" that make 80% of the meth?

It's easier to push around cold sufferers.

[Michamilton]

> Why can't law enforcement find and close down
> the meth clinics instead of making us suffer?

You need to find the meth labs somehow, and tracking the primary ingredients for meth is one of the best ways to do so.

[hershey]

I heard they were going to limit purchases to one package at a time.

[Sybeck1]

My wife's ex-father in law is a meth producer. He hires people to go to stores and buy the one or two boxes the law allows.

My wife was in divorce proceeding with her then husband, when he drowned on meth two years ago. The guy hadn't worked in two years and a Tuesday afternoon fishing trip for him cost him his life.

I'm now raising his 7 year old girl and 8 year old boy.

Any help with this stuff would help in my opinion.

[tacticalogic]

Misleading. The truth is is that sodium hydroxide (lye, drain cleaner) is used in it's manufacture, as it is for many chemical processes and pharmaceuticals.

Don't forget hominy.

[TKDietz]

"Or maybe it just means the cookers have hidden themselves better. Any evidence that the street price of meth has gone up, or use gone down?"

It is highly unlikely that the cooks have hidden themselves better to the extent that 80% more than last year are getting away with it especially since Oklahoma is now spending a lot more money and effort busting these people. What's going on is that most of the labs out there were little small batch kitchen labs and these guys can't get enough pseudoephedrine to make it worth their while to cook dope anymore. I have property in Oklahoma, know a lot of lawyers and cops there, and am generally there once a month or more. I also have a lot of clients from there, and what they are doing is going into neighboring states to get their pseudo if they happen to live close to the border. The reduction would probably be greater if neighboring states had the same laws.

As for price going up and use going down, we aren't going to see a tremendous amount of that because most of the meth people are using out there is not coming from these little labs, it's coming from big labs out west and in Mexico. What I think we will see though is a little less problem use of the drug. I'm in an area where an awful lot of people are cooking dope and tons more are helping out, both by gathering supplies and helping in the cooking process which can be labor intensive especially if they are using the red phosphorous/iodine method and gathering their red phosphorous by scraping it off of matchbooks. These people are getting free dope this way and doing much more than they would be able to do if they had to pay full price for it. What I'm seeing as a public defender is that an awful lot of my clients who are getting in trouble all the time are involved with cooking dope. I truly believe that we'd see less people around here become hardcore addicts, the problem users, if so much dope cooking wasn't going on.

Let me give you one example of how cheap these guys are able to get dope. A couple of weeks ago I handled a case where my client had a deal with a guy where he'd get an eight ball (3.5 grams) of meth for every twenty boxes of pseudoehedrine tablets he brought him. The cook was using the "nazi method" with anhydrous ammonia which is not a common method around here and he was cooking up about a quarter pound per batch which is a whole lot more than most of these guys out there scraping the matchbook strike pads for red phosphorous are cooking up per batch. My client and two others were caught leaving a store where they had just purchased several boxes each of pseudoephedrine. He had told the other two he was getting two grams for twenty boxes and they were helping him in exchange for a half a gram each plus he'd smoke some of his with them.

Normally, people are paying $25 for a quarter gram, $50 or so a half gram, and an eighth of an ounce generally goes for $250 if they buy that much at one time. So however you calculate it he was getting between $250 and $350 worth of meth for twenty boxes of pills which they could get for well under $50 buying (or stealing) generic from discount stores. That's some pretty cheap dope, and my client had conned his friends such that he was actually getting two and a half grams in exchange way less than that because they were putting up most of the money to buy the tablets. They were doing this several times a week, and you know the guy putting out a quarter pound per batch had several others out there collecting pills for him who would recruit others to help them just like my client was doing because it takes a heck of a lot of pills to make a quarter pound of dope.

So think about this, we're in a small rural county with a population of less than sixty thousand and we get several cases every month involving meth labs, and you know as well as I do that they are probably only busting a small fraction of these guys. So many of my clients admit to me that they've been involved with cooking it. That's all people seem to talk about over in the jail, where to get supplies, where to cook it, how to cook it and get the best yields, and so on. It's being cooked everywhere around here and so many out there who wouldn't be able to afford to do it very often (this is a poor county) if they had to pay full price are getting it dirt cheap or even free by cooking it, or helping gathering supplies, or providing a trailor home or something out in the boonies to cook it in.

You know as well as I do that most people who use drugs go through a phase in their lives where they fool around with these things and then they grow out of it without becoming addicted and without causing anyone any real problems. I fooled around with drugs myself. I even messed with some of the hard stuff. Cocaine was a lot more popular than meth back in those days and I messed around a little with it, but I was young and I didn't have much money to blow on it. I'd wake up the next day and think of all of the useful things I could have bought with all the money I had blown the night before and it would just make me sick. I liked it, but because of the expense it could only be something for special occasions for me. If I could have gotten it dirt cheap or free I probably would have done it a lot more.

The situation is pretty much the same with meth. Most of these people are young, and most don't have any money. Meth is pretty expensive and most who mess around with it don't do tons of it both because most at least don't want to become addicts and because they could afford to do much of it anyway. But now a lot of these people are seeing that they can get meth almost for free by doing nothing more than going out and buying a few boxes of cold medicine. That's a pretty big temptation. There isn't much else to do around here and fooling around with drugs is kind of fun. I don't think anyone wants to become an addict but you know how it is when you are young and invincible. None of these people think they'll be stupid enough to get caught or week enough to become addicted, yet it happens to a percentage of these people and the more they do this stuff the greater the likelihood becomes that they'll end up with a lifelong addiction.

These guys involved with cooking it are often able to do huge amounts of dope day in and day out. That's almost a sure fire way to get hooked. Not only that, but we keep getting cases where these kids are tweaking for days on end without sleep running around paranoid thinking aliens or whatever are out trying to kill them. They totally lose it, and I see these cases all the time. A lot of the time it's sort of funny because they'll do something stupid like jump in a cop car and tell the cops Salvadorians are chasing them with laser guns or aliens are spawning everywhere just like in a video game killing everyone in sight, but sometimes the outcomes aren't so funny at all. Some of them get violent.

We'd see less of that if there wasn't so much dope cooking going on. We'd probably have close to the same number doing meth, but not so many would be doing it constantly such that they become hopeless addicts and/or crazy nuts who are a menace to society. In other words, I believe it would reduce problem use.

[DBrow]

Oh, and how about busting those Mexican gang-run "superlabs" that make 80% of the meth?

.....................

Funny how many things come back to borders, Mexico, Bush and Fox.

[Redcloak]

Taking Claritan-D means that you're a Hippie.

[FreedomCalls]

The effects of Meth:

Penny Wood - 1998	Penny Wood - 2002

[FreedomCalls]

This thread is worth a re-read:

Meth Addiction Leading to Rotting Teeth

MARYVILLE, Mo. - The growing use of highly addictive methamphetamine throughout the country is creating a prominent scar on an increasing number of users — rotting, brittle teeth that seem to crumble from their mouths.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Why can't law enforcement find and close down the meth clinics instead of making us suffer?

Perhaps making you suffer is the intention. They admit that they don't stop much drug traffic.