Frontline (1983–…): Season 24, Episode 3 - The Meth Epidemic - full transcript
An investigation into how and why meth use spiraled out of control and became the fastest-growing drug abuse problem in America.
--
Police officers, 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 take just a little
piece of you,
it takes all of you, and
everything good in your life.
NARRATOR: Methamphetamine--
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.
The 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.
NARRATOR: Tonight, Frontline,
in association with
the Oregonian looks again
at the meth epidemic
to investigate a potential new
cure
and the battle raging over it.
The truth is that the Oregon
solution works.
And for states that are
struggling with that issue,
the stakes couldn't be higher.
(siren wailing)
Yep, that's meth.
And your hypodermic needle that
about punctured my arm
fell out from your hat.
He's dealing.
How many bags do we have?
Four baggies.
You have the right to remain
silent.
Anything you say can and will be
used against you
in a court of law.
NARRATOR: This is the story
of an epidemic
that has swept across America--
an epidemic of methamphetamine
abuse.
It begins in Oregon,
one of the places hit hardest by
the epidemic.
104, 104. Stop right here.
NARRATOR: When we filmed here
in 2005,
this trailer park in Portland
was a favorite place
for addicts to crash after days
of speeding on meth.
Can I step in and talk to
you?
It gives you a euphoric rush.
It's like your whole body
tingles all over the place,
and it's a good feeling-- a
happy, giddy...
but then when you come down off
of it,
then they start pulling...
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 all up.
It's that bad.
NARRATOR: In 2006, inspired
in part by the reporting
aired in this Frontline,
Congress mandated
that cold medicines containing
pseudoephedrine,
the key ingredient in meth,
only be sold from behind the
pharmacy counter.
As a result, most states limited
consumers
to just three boxes per
purchase.
But now, meth cooks are using a
new recipe
that requires as little as one
box of cold medicine.
They call the recipe "shake and
bake."
To shake and bake, you can
buy any of the ingredients
anywhere, anywhere.
You can get the pseudoephedrine
at any cold medicine
that has that ingredient in the
pill.
You add water and you add lye,
to that, to make it hot.
And you'll add your solvent,
whether it be mineral spirits,
ether, Coleman fuel.
And then you'll shake it up real
good.
And boom, you have dope.
NARRATOR: But former meth
cook Robert Lucier
says shake and bake comes with
new dangers.
The whole thing is dangerous.
There's nothing about it that's
not dangerous.
If your container can't handle
it, it will explode,
just like a small hydrogen bomb.
It will blow a hole right
from... right through the floor,
right through the ceiling,
and then it will just smoke
everything out,
turn everything black in a room.
You're mixing things that are
never designed
to be put together-- strong
acids and bases,
drain cleaners, engine starters,
things like that,
that were never supposed to be
put into the same bottle.
So it's incredibly dangerous to
do.
But when you're strung out on
meth,
you're willing to do a lot of
crazy things.
NARRATOR: The 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.
Deputy Bret King's job was to
book them.
It sucks to be in jail,
doesn't it?
No, it sucks to be out in the
streets.
Yeah. What sort of changes do
you notice
have taken place with you
because of your meth use?
It was like everyone... the
whole world changed on me.
Everybody, all my friends,
everything.
Remember in Invasion of the Body
Snatchers,
you know, where they lay the
pods out?
And since I started doing meth
it was like everybody's not the
same people anymore.
Are they doing meth too?
Is that what you're talking
about?
Yeah.
NARRATOR: Shocked at the
effect of meth on 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.
One of the faces that really
stood out to me
was Theresa Baxter.
She came in and she was quite
visibly intoxicated
by methamphetamine.
She looked horrible.
She looked 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
100 times.
And I can look over a ten, 15,
20-year period
and see how they've
deteriorated,
how they've changed.
Some were quite attractive when
they...
when they began to come to jail.
Young people who were... who
were full of the health and,
and had everything going for
them.
Intelligent, you know, probably
very skilled
at what they did or good
students or good athletes.
And now they're a shell of what
they once were.
NARRATOR: At the Portland
newspaper the Oregonian,
reporters also began to focus on
the impact of meth
on the people of Oregon.
It's huge.
It affects not merely the users
but it's the leading cause of
property crime.
It's the 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.
NARRATOR: In 2002, the
Oregonian's editors
decided to go after the story
behind the story--
how and why did the meth
epidemic get so out of control?
Reporter Steve Suo was assigned
to the investigation.
We gathered about a million
different types of records--
possession arrests, emergency
room admissions,
identity theft arrests.
And all of them really pointed
in the same direction.
NARRATOR: Suo transformed his
data into maps.
The darker a state'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, the 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.
NARRATOR: Portland cop Travis
Fields spends his days
on the lookout for meth addicts,
because they commit 85% of the
property crime in the state.
You can see a meth user from
a mile away
once you've been working around
meth addicts for eight years.
Just like they can see the
police,
there's an aura that's around
us,
they have this aura around them.
I have a warrant, turn around.
Now who... who are you? You
are?
I'm a police officer.
I know but how did you guys
know I was on the bus?
This 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.
I have shoplifting, burglary,
motor vehicle theft,
aggravated assault with a knife,
burglary, burglary.
NARRATOR: This garage sale is
part of the 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 an
ultra-stimulant,
from just one smoke off the
pipe,
one puff off the pipe, you can
stay high for a day.
So you can break into somebody's
house and transfer that property
like to a place like this in
hours.
You're here and then you're
gone.
My name is Jim Lawrence.
I'm a detective with east
precinct,
Portland police bureau.
You 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.
Is this yours?
That's mine. That's cool.
My son'll be happy his bed's
back.
A bunch of it's mine.
I was in the midst of moving,
so I was over there with people
with trucks to load up my stuff,
and it was gone.
I mean, my refrigerator was
gone.
My dining room table was gone.
My china cabinet was gone.
They just backed up one day and
they did this in, like,
a ten-hour stretch.
That's about the time I was gone
from the house.
All the way down on the
ground!
Stay down! Stay down!
Police officers! Search warrant!
NARRATOR: But property owners
are not the hardest-hit victims
of the meth epidemic.
That role belongs to the
children and spouses
of meth addicts.
You want to get a restraining
order.
It's not because you don't love
him,
but he needs to stay away for a
while.
Thomas' conduct is going to make
it
so you don't even get to have
your kids anymore.
NARRATOR: In 2005, 50% of the
children in foster care
in Oregon were there because of
meth.
Many of them were sent to see
pediatrician Carole Chervanek.
A nine-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,
he taught me how to cook it."
And she described in absolute
detail the cooking process
of methamphetamine from the
beginning to the end.
She described how woozy she felt
when the cooking was going on.
She described that her dad took
her finger and stuck it in this,
"the stuff at the end and made
me 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 house
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.
NARRATOR: With families and
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 Suo 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 Suo
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 Suo compared 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.
Suo became obsessed with
figuring out why.
It's a lot like Richard
Dreyfus
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 any aliens out of
it,
but I got some pretty
interesting answers.
NARRATOR: The answers lay in
the very chemistry of the brain
of a meth addict.
Suo learned about the
neuroscience of meth
from Dr. Richard Rawson of UCLA.
It has most of its effect via
dopamine.
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
what this represents.
However, in terms of dopamine
release,
the mother of them all is
methamphetamine.
You get an increase from this
base level to about 1,250 units.
It produces a tremendous release
of dopamine.
The brain isn't designed to
produce this kind of a release.
This really doesn't occur
from any normally occuring
rewarding activity.
That's one of the reasons why
people,
when they take methamphetamine,
they report having this euphoric
experience
that's 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.
NARRATOR: What researchers
have discovered
is that meth creates its rush of
euphoria
by altering the part of an
addict's brain
that generates dopamine.
They experience it as an
inability
to experience pleasure.
Everything feels kind of gray
and hopeless,
and nothing feels good.
And so in their mind,
the only way to feel better is
to take more methamphetamine.
And hence you have relapse and
people going back to using.
It's a wonder any meth users
ever get better.
NARRATOR: The research
showing that meth
might be the most addictive drug
there is suggested to Steve Suo
that one of the few things that
might explain
the eerily consistent rise and
fall
in the number of addicts was if
the meth itself were changing.
For instance, what if the purity
of the meth
on the nation's streets had been
rising and falling?
To find out if he was onto
something,
Suo gathered data on the purity
of the meth
seized by the government in
various states over the years.
Remarkably, the purity of the
meth sold on American streets
formed the pattern of the
mountains.
It was really exciting.
I mean it was a perfect match.
And you just don't often see
that in data.
These things were lining up on
my screen,
and suddenly I had an
explanation.
NARRATOR: Suo's
groundbreaking discovery
was that it was the change in
the purity of the meth
that addicts were using that had
caused the rise and fall
in 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.
(Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild"
plays)
With music heralding the birth
of a wild new counterculture,
a generation began experimenting
with drugs.
And amphetamine, or speed,
became a favorite of truckers,
bikers and college students.
But in the '80s, a new kind of
super-charged speed
came on the scene--
d-methamphetamine,
better known as crystal meth.
From a chemical perspective,
methamphetamine is amphetamine
with a methyl group,
if you're interested in the
science of it.
But it's pretty much like a high
octane gasoline
versus a low octane gasoline.
Methamphetamine, of course, is
the high octane version.
NARRATOR: 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
is you get inflammation in the
sinuses.
What ephedrine does is basically
shrink those blood vessels,
there's less tissue swelling,
and since your sinuses are a
very small space,
that shrinkage of the tissue
actually enables people
to breath 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, a, relieve symptoms
and, b, maybe feel a little
extra zip.
Similar effects to what you see
with methamphetamine,
but taken to the nth degree with
methamphetamine.
NARRATOR: 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.
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 Gene Haislip,
and in 1986 he was the number
three man at the DEA.
He had this entirely unique
idea for controlling drugs,
which was to go after the
chemical components
that go into illegal drugs.
This was a radical departure
from anything
the DEA had done before.
NARRATOR: Haislip's strategy
for beating the meth cooks
was inspired by his recent
victory over another drug--
Quaaludes.
A lot of people have
forgotten
about the Quaalude problem, but
it was a very big problem.
One time it was as big as the
heroin or cocaine problem.
And people wonder why it's gone
away.
Well, it's gone away because we
beat them.
NARRATOR: In the early '80s,
Haislip discovered that
Quaaludes were made
from a powder so chemically
sophisticated
that the Columbian cartels
selling Quaaludes
couldn't make it themselves,
but had to buy it from legally
operated factories.
And so Haislip traveled around
the world,
convincing the government of
every country with a factory
that made the chemical in
Quaaludes to shut it down.
Well, it took some time,
but in the end the Colombians
could no longer
get their drug powder.
They didn't know what to do.
They gave it up.
We eliminated the problem.
We beat them.
NARRATOR: Just like
Quaaludes,
the key ingredients in meth are
so chemically sophisticated
they can only be made by a few
large manufacturers.
And so Haislip was confident
that with a new
chemical control law for
ammunition,
he could regulate those
chemicals and beat meth.
I realized that with
methamphetamine,
we could turn this chemical
control law
into a rifle approach to the
problem,
not just a 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.
NARRATOR: In 1986, at
Haislip's urging,
Republican senator Bob Dole
introduced a bill
to require distributors of
ephedrine and pseudoephedrine
to check the identities of their
customers,
and to make their sales records
available to the DEA.
But the bill immediately ran
into trouble,
for while nobody had been making
much money
selling prescription Quaaludes,
the pharmaceutical industry was
making billions of dollars
selling cold medicine over the
counter.
To industry executives like Alan
Rexinger,
Haislip 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 like 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 product.
So they are always a little bit
concerned about what DEA does
in a situation like this,
and sometimes more than a little
bit.
And they know who to talk to and
who to go to in Washington.
They're highly skilled, very
well organized,
and very well funded, and they
can be quite formidable.
Our response was, "Whoa,
whoa, whoa.
"Hold it a minute, 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 effect
your industry?
Wouldn't make any difference if
you were
from the dill pickle industry
or the over the counter medicine
industry.
You would naturally do what you
have to do.
Quite frankly, we appealed to a
higher authority.
Suddenly, Haislip 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.
It was a room full of people,
including many of those
lobbyists,
I think, 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 was the kind of
presentation I made.
NARRATOR: But the meeting did
not end well for Haislip.
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.
Haislip 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 agreed to that, I have to tell
you.
We got our law,
but we got it without something
later we'd discover
that we critically needed.
NARRATOR: Beating meth was
not going to be as easy
as Gene Haislip 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 an industrial
project, and it was a factory.
NARRATOR: Bob Pennal was in
charge
of the Fresno meth task force.
One of his jobs was to check out
remote locations
in California's central valley
to see if they might be home to
meth superlabs.
On this day, he spots an
abandoned barn
with a mobile home beside it, an
ideal location for a lab,
and he decides to take a closer
look.
Using night vision goggles and
infrared spotlights,
Pennal and his agents plan to
sneak up undetected to the barn
and see if there's any sign that
it's being used to cook meth.
We're just going to be going
in basically to take a look
at this place.
We want to see what kind of
smells we get.
We're going to use the IR
spotlight,
so Bruce will get in closer and
we'll take a look around.
NARRATOR: Stealth is
essential to Pennal,
because superlab cooks can slip
into an abandoned barn,
whip up a batch of meth in under
48 hours, and then vanish.
And if they suspect that Pennal
has his eye
on one of their favorite sites,
they'll use a different barn
for their next cook.
We're going to straight down
that way right here.
NARRATOR: To counter the
strategy of the meth cooks,
Pennal and his men secretly
plant hidden cameras
at prime sites like this one.
Bruce, let's kneel down.
NARRATOR: In the 1990s,
Pennal's cameras captured this
superlab cook on film.
The containers are full of
ephedrine
being cooked into meth.
A superlab will turn around
and manufacture
anywhere from ten to a hundred
pounds in one cook cycle.
A hundred pound cook, you're up
into like...
$4 million dollars is going to
be made off
that cook that you're doing.
NARRATOR: Beginning in 1989,
four out of every five hits of
meth consumed in the U.S.
were cooked in superlabs 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 we're basically the Medellin.
The way cocaine in Colombia was
the Medellin cartel,
now we were basically the
suppliers
for everyone in the United
States out of California.
NARRATOR: The drug kingpins
who turned meth
into big business were the
Amezcua brothers of Mexico.
But no supermarket in the world
could sell the Amezcuas
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 2005, in this warehouse
alone,
there was enough raw material to
make ten million hits of meth.
Krebs was just one of nine
factories
that manufactured almost all
of the world's ephedrine and
pseudoephedrine.
Methamphetamine, unlike most
other hard drugs out there,
is uniquely susceptible to
supply side intervention
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 gotta make this stuff.
NARRATOR: But while the U.S.
government
was spending billions trying to
control heroin
and cocaine, meth was such a low
priority
that no one was bothering to
monitor who was shopping
at the nine factories that make
the key ingredients in meth.
We at Krebs Biochemicals
would have been
much, much happier if only there
had been some guidance
given by the DEA or the proper
authorities
in the American states about,
"These are the legitimate users,
"you are okay if you have any
business dealings
with these guys."
Guidance in that fashion could
have certainly helped us
at Krebs Biochemicals in being
perhaps better citizens.
We do not know how much of our
material landed
into the illegitimate hands.
That could certainly have been
prevented.
NARRATOR: During one 18-month
period in the early 1990s,
the Amezcua brothers purchased
170 tons of ephedrine
from the nine factories and
shipped it
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 rate
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
meth use 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, a plane landed
in Dallas, Texas,
a Lufthansa flight.
Customs officer went aboard just
to see
what the cargo was and
discovered that there were
120 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 a sample and he
called the DEA,
and, next thing you know, it
came up,
it was 3.4 metric tons of
ephedrine destined
for Mexico City that had landed
in Dallas en route.
Up until this point in time,
the DEA,
by its own admission, did not
even really have a clue
that the Amezcua 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 from 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
and say, "Knock it off."
NARRATOR: With the
cooperation of companies
like Krebs, the DEA put an end
to the Amezcua brothers' Indian
connection.
Soon, the superlabs in
California's central valley
began running out of ephedrine,
and the purity of the 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.
When we filmed back in 2005, 20
women were living here
along with their young children.
Don't get impatient with
yourself.
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 use."
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.
NARRATOR: 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.
In early 1996, meth purity was
the lowest it had been in years.
The 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.
The 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 meth, the two
chemicals are interchangeable.
And the meth cooks 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.
NARRATOR: With superlab 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 founded the meth
caucus five years ago,
people from the affected states,
my cofounders, we knew about it.
But as we talked to other people
back here in D.C.,
they'd say, "Methamphetamine? I
don't know what it is."
Or, "Pseudoephedrine?
How does that relate to
methamphetamine?"
They literally did not know.
Back home it was tearing
families and lives apart.
Here in Congress, it was as if
there was no problem at all.
NARRATOR: Congress' attitude
made controlling pseudoephedrine
difficult.
In 1996, when Gene Haislip
pushed through
a regulation requiring a license
to sell 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 traffickers a year
to adjust.
And that's just what they did.
NARRATOR: 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 superlabs.
The DEA effort to track down the
bogus companies
was halting and underfunded.
But by the time the agency 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're having success,
you're going to see a fall in
deaths and injuries.
And we saw that line dropping to
the floor so beautifully.
NARRATOR: Once again, the
meth cooks in the central valley
began to grow desperate.
Then, Bob Pennal noticed
something very unusual.
Now we start finding these 60
milligram thousand-count
white bottles with no markings
on them.
And you'd always have markings
on them.
You always have lot numbers.
You always had some type of
identifier.
But now we had nothing except on
the bottom,
and there was some writing in
French.
We're finding them everywhere.
NARRATOR: It was two years
before the DEA discovered
that the mystery pills were
being smuggled
into the country from Quebec.
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.
And they went to one store and
bought three,
went to another store and bought
three.
Seeing blister packs everywhere.
Because they're sitting in the
car,
they're punching the pills out
of the blister packs,
they're putting them in the
freezer bags,
and they're turning them over to
chemical brokers.
NARRATOR: Smurfing, an act of
desperation for the superlabs,
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 similar to
what Haislip 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 Robins 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.
And 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.
And 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
versus those people
who are using it for illicit
means.
I struggle with how they can
sleep at night
having accomplished what they
need to accomplish
to protect profits over the
health, welfare,
and safety of our community,
in particular drug-endangered
children.
NARRATOR: Rob Bovett 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%
of the pseudoephedrine that was
going into
those convenience stores was
being diverted
to make methamphetamine.
And the pharmaceutical companies
were getting paid
for those products whether
they're being diverted or not.
It doesn't matter.
They're still making they're
money.
There's been a lot made about
how much profit was made
because of 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, okay--
that these smurfers do by 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 that
we've made any additional money
versus that product we had to
actually replace because people
had stolen it illegally.
NARRATOR: Finally, in 2004,
Oklahoma passed a law
moving pseudoephedrine behind
the counter.
Then Oregon followed suit.
And some national chains took
the same step voluntarily.
But the Mexican drug cartels had
by then found
a far better source of
pseudoephedrine close to home.
In 2004, Mexican pharmaceutical
companies legally imported
224 tons of pseudoephedrine--
twice as much as they were using
to make cold medicine.
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 could 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 as you
want."
The cartels cooked the extra 100
tons of pseudoephedrine
into meth, then smuggled it like
other drugs across the border
into the U.S.
As a result, the meth on
American streets
was suddenly as pure as it had
ever been.
That is what we're seeing
coming from Mexico--
really good crystal.
That amount of meth that we
just got,
if we had got that two or three
years ago,
we would've 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.
NARRATOR: For the Mexican
drug cartels,
making meth in Mexico had an
added bonus:
they could use their traditional
smuggling routes
to bring meth to a huge new
market,
the eastern United States.
The first to be affected were
small towns
throughout the Southeast, which
suddenly found themselves
in the midst of a meth crime
wave.
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 because 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.
NARRATOR: At the urging of
its meth caucus,
Congress in 2006 passed the
Combat Meth Act,
which mandated that
pseudoephedrine be
put behind the counter
nationwide
and that buyers register at the
store counter.
Obviously, those of us who
have had colds,
we know how inconvenient it is
and how unpleasant it is.
But if somebody's 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.
NARRATOR: In addition, the
United States government,
motivated in part by Steve Suo's
reporting,
convinced countries around the
world to limit their imports
of pseudoephedrine to just the
amount they needed to make
cold medicine.
Now, five years later,
the positive impact of that
action is clear,
especially in Mexico.
The Mexican government
recognized it had a huge problem
on its hands, and they began
estimating how much
pseudoephedrine they actually
needed for cold medicine.
And they determined it was very,
very little--
so little that they decided to
just ban
the importation altogether.
That had a dramatic impact on
the ability of the cartels
to get their pseudoephedrine.
They really, really struggled.
NARRATOR: With the Mexican
cartels unable to get
their hands on pseudoephedrine,
the potency of the meth being
smuggled into the U.S.
has plunged dramatically.
The cartels suddenly found
themselves on the ropes.
And you find them turning to
rather desperate measures,
turning to the old biker method
of making methamphetamine.
And that has continued on
through today to the point
where 70% of the meth that is
seized by the federal government
these days is actually the old
biker meth--
B.L. methamphetamine,
half as potent as the old
crystal meth
that was on the street just five
years ago.
And that's good news for people
who care about
rates of addiction because the
people who experience
weaker meth are likely to use
far less of it,
and potentially not become
addicted.
NARRATOR: But just as they
always have before,
the meth cooks have found a new
way to get pseudoephedrine.
Today, former cook Robert Lucier
is clean
after spending time in jail.
But not long ago, he was running
a gang of super-smurfers.
Other people go inside and
purchase these items for you
in small quantities, and you
just take them around
to all these different stores
and you just buy one or two
boxes, you know.
And you have four, five people,
and you just go from town to
town,
loading up the trunk with boxes
of pills.
NARRATOR: Meth cooks like
Lucier
then use the shake and bake
method
to turn the pseudoephedrine
acquired from super-smurfing
into extraordinarily pure meth.
I didn't get my good from
doing the drug itself.
I got my good from making the
best monster I could build.
It wouldn't be long before the
word got out:
"Oh, I know where to get the
bomb," you know?
And pretty soon, it was gone.
NARRATOR: For nearly 30
years,
the United States has been
caught in a cycle
of new laws followed by new
strategies
by the cooks to get around them.
But in Oregon, some of those who
experienced the worst
of the epidemic say they've
finally found the cure:
to make pseudoephedrine a
prescription drug.
Essentially we've been
putting Band-Aids
on the situation for three
decades now.
And we got tired of putting
Band-Aids on the situation
and watching the smurfers and
the meth cooks get around it.
So we just simply decided to
return pseudoephedrine
to a prescription drug, which is
what it was before 1976,
and we ended the problem.
We've essentially had a double
whammy here in Oregon.
The Mexican drug trafficking
organization meth is weak
and our cooks and smurfers can't
make their own.
NARRATOR: In 2004, before the
change in the law,
sheriff's deputies uncovered 64
meth labs
in Multnomah County, Oregon.
In 2010, after the change, they
found one.
To deputy Bret King, who showed
us these faces of meth
years ago, what matters most is
the number of lives saved.
Five years ago,
I looked into how many
methamphetamine-related arrests
we had coming into the jail, and
I saw that about 27%
of the arrests were due to
methamphetamine
or directly related to
methamphetamine.
Today, we're down to about 4.6%,
and I can attribute 100% of that
to the legislation around
pseudoephedrine.
The incidence of identification
theft has dramatically dropped.
Crime overall across the board
is down.
To the other states who are
considering addressing
methamphetamine in the same way
Oregon has, I would ask them,
"What's the holdup?"
NARRATOR: But with other
states now considering
adopting Oregon's approach,
the pharmaceutical industry is
spending millions of dollars
lobbying against it.
They favor an improved system of
tracking purchases.
Thank you, Chairwoman
Feinstein.
NARRATOR: In 2010, Linda
Suydam,
the president of a
pharmaceutical industry
trade group, testified to
Congress.
Our goal is to stop illegal
pseudoephedrine sales
while maintaining the over the
counter access
for legitimate customers.
Maintaining access to
nonprescription pseudoephedrine
is important because for many
consumers,
it is the ingredient that works
best for them.
A prescription mandate would be
more expensive for consumers.
NARRATOR: The industry's
fight against regulation
emphasizes the cost to
consumers.
But, for proponents of the
Oregon model,
the costs of inaction are
greater.
The truth is, the Oregon
solution works.
And for states that are
struggling with that issue,
as many are, just to do the next
Band-Aid is no solution at all.
You know, real solutions are
required
because lives and families are
at stake.
The stakes couldn't be higher.
NARRATOR: No one knows better
what those stakes are
than those who have been
addicted to meth.
I can look back and see the
total devastation
of all that I created,
and the lives affected, the
houses that I destroyed.
There's no coming back from that
kind of...
you know, you can't fix that.
And as long as you're caught up
in it, it's like a whirlpool.
Once you get caught in the
current,
you just go round and round and
round,
and pretty soon it just takes
you under.
And you've got to come through
the other side.
But the insanity has got to stop
somewhere
in order for those things to
take place.
Frontline continues online.
Watch "The Meth Epidemic" again.
More on how meth works on the
brain.
It gets most of its effect
via dopamine.
Answers to frequently asked
questions about methamphetamine.
Read the Oregonian's
award-winning series on meth,
and there's much more on
Frontline's website.
Watch more than 100 full
programs;
explore interactive timelines;
and follow Frontline
For more on this and other
Frontline programs,
Police officers, 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 take just a little
piece of you,
it takes all of you, and
everything good in your life.
NARRATOR: Methamphetamine--
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.
The 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.
NARRATOR: Tonight, Frontline,
in association with
the Oregonian looks again
at the meth epidemic
to investigate a potential new
cure
and the battle raging over it.
The truth is that the Oregon
solution works.
And for states that are
struggling with that issue,
the stakes couldn't be higher.
(siren wailing)
Yep, that's meth.
And your hypodermic needle that
about punctured my arm
fell out from your hat.
He's dealing.
How many bags do we have?
Four baggies.
You have the right to remain
silent.
Anything you say can and will be
used against you
in a court of law.
NARRATOR: This is the story
of an epidemic
that has swept across America--
an epidemic of methamphetamine
abuse.
It begins in Oregon,
one of the places hit hardest by
the epidemic.
104, 104. Stop right here.
NARRATOR: When we filmed here
in 2005,
this trailer park in Portland
was a favorite place
for addicts to crash after days
of speeding on meth.
Can I step in and talk to
you?
It gives you a euphoric rush.
It's like your whole body
tingles all over the place,
and it's a good feeling-- a
happy, giddy...
but then when you come down off
of it,
then they start pulling...
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 all up.
It's that bad.
NARRATOR: In 2006, inspired
in part by the reporting
aired in this Frontline,
Congress mandated
that cold medicines containing
pseudoephedrine,
the key ingredient in meth,
only be sold from behind the
pharmacy counter.
As a result, most states limited
consumers
to just three boxes per
purchase.
But now, meth cooks are using a
new recipe
that requires as little as one
box of cold medicine.
They call the recipe "shake and
bake."
To shake and bake, you can
buy any of the ingredients
anywhere, anywhere.
You can get the pseudoephedrine
at any cold medicine
that has that ingredient in the
pill.
You add water and you add lye,
to that, to make it hot.
And you'll add your solvent,
whether it be mineral spirits,
ether, Coleman fuel.
And then you'll shake it up real
good.
And boom, you have dope.
NARRATOR: But former meth
cook Robert Lucier
says shake and bake comes with
new dangers.
The whole thing is dangerous.
There's nothing about it that's
not dangerous.
If your container can't handle
it, it will explode,
just like a small hydrogen bomb.
It will blow a hole right
from... right through the floor,
right through the ceiling,
and then it will just smoke
everything out,
turn everything black in a room.
You're mixing things that are
never designed
to be put together-- strong
acids and bases,
drain cleaners, engine starters,
things like that,
that were never supposed to be
put into the same bottle.
So it's incredibly dangerous to
do.
But when you're strung out on
meth,
you're willing to do a lot of
crazy things.
NARRATOR: The 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.
Deputy Bret King's job was to
book them.
It sucks to be in jail,
doesn't it?
No, it sucks to be out in the
streets.
Yeah. What sort of changes do
you notice
have taken place with you
because of your meth use?
It was like everyone... the
whole world changed on me.
Everybody, all my friends,
everything.
Remember in Invasion of the Body
Snatchers,
you know, where they lay the
pods out?
And since I started doing meth
it was like everybody's not the
same people anymore.
Are they doing meth too?
Is that what you're talking
about?
Yeah.
NARRATOR: Shocked at the
effect of meth on 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.
One of the faces that really
stood out to me
was Theresa Baxter.
She came in and she was quite
visibly intoxicated
by methamphetamine.
She looked horrible.
She looked 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
100 times.
And I can look over a ten, 15,
20-year period
and see how they've
deteriorated,
how they've changed.
Some were quite attractive when
they...
when they began to come to jail.
Young people who were... who
were full of the health and,
and had everything going for
them.
Intelligent, you know, probably
very skilled
at what they did or good
students or good athletes.
And now they're a shell of what
they once were.
NARRATOR: At the Portland
newspaper the Oregonian,
reporters also began to focus on
the impact of meth
on the people of Oregon.
It's huge.
It affects not merely the users
but it's the leading cause of
property crime.
It's the 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.
NARRATOR: In 2002, the
Oregonian's editors
decided to go after the story
behind the story--
how and why did the meth
epidemic get so out of control?
Reporter Steve Suo was assigned
to the investigation.
We gathered about a million
different types of records--
possession arrests, emergency
room admissions,
identity theft arrests.
And all of them really pointed
in the same direction.
NARRATOR: Suo transformed his
data into maps.
The darker a state'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, the 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.
NARRATOR: Portland cop Travis
Fields spends his days
on the lookout for meth addicts,
because they commit 85% of the
property crime in the state.
You can see a meth user from
a mile away
once you've been working around
meth addicts for eight years.
Just like they can see the
police,
there's an aura that's around
us,
they have this aura around them.
I have a warrant, turn around.
Now who... who are you? You
are?
I'm a police officer.
I know but how did you guys
know I was on the bus?
This 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.
I have shoplifting, burglary,
motor vehicle theft,
aggravated assault with a knife,
burglary, burglary.
NARRATOR: This garage sale is
part of the 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 an
ultra-stimulant,
from just one smoke off the
pipe,
one puff off the pipe, you can
stay high for a day.
So you can break into somebody's
house and transfer that property
like to a place like this in
hours.
You're here and then you're
gone.
My name is Jim Lawrence.
I'm a detective with east
precinct,
Portland police bureau.
You 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.
Is this yours?
That's mine. That's cool.
My son'll be happy his bed's
back.
A bunch of it's mine.
I was in the midst of moving,
so I was over there with people
with trucks to load up my stuff,
and it was gone.
I mean, my refrigerator was
gone.
My dining room table was gone.
My china cabinet was gone.
They just backed up one day and
they did this in, like,
a ten-hour stretch.
That's about the time I was gone
from the house.
All the way down on the
ground!
Stay down! Stay down!
Police officers! Search warrant!
NARRATOR: But property owners
are not the hardest-hit victims
of the meth epidemic.
That role belongs to the
children and spouses
of meth addicts.
You want to get a restraining
order.
It's not because you don't love
him,
but he needs to stay away for a
while.
Thomas' conduct is going to make
it
so you don't even get to have
your kids anymore.
NARRATOR: In 2005, 50% of the
children in foster care
in Oregon were there because of
meth.
Many of them were sent to see
pediatrician Carole Chervanek.
A nine-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,
he taught me how to cook it."
And she described in absolute
detail the cooking process
of methamphetamine from the
beginning to the end.
She described how woozy she felt
when the cooking was going on.
She described that her dad took
her finger and stuck it in this,
"the stuff at the end and made
me 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 house
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.
NARRATOR: With families and
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 Suo 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 Suo
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 Suo compared 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.
Suo became obsessed with
figuring out why.
It's a lot like Richard
Dreyfus
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 any aliens out of
it,
but I got some pretty
interesting answers.
NARRATOR: The answers lay in
the very chemistry of the brain
of a meth addict.
Suo learned about the
neuroscience of meth
from Dr. Richard Rawson of UCLA.
It has most of its effect via
dopamine.
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
what this represents.
However, in terms of dopamine
release,
the mother of them all is
methamphetamine.
You get an increase from this
base level to about 1,250 units.
It produces a tremendous release
of dopamine.
The brain isn't designed to
produce this kind of a release.
This really doesn't occur
from any normally occuring
rewarding activity.
That's one of the reasons why
people,
when they take methamphetamine,
they report having this euphoric
experience
that's 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.
NARRATOR: What researchers
have discovered
is that meth creates its rush of
euphoria
by altering the part of an
addict's brain
that generates dopamine.
They experience it as an
inability
to experience pleasure.
Everything feels kind of gray
and hopeless,
and nothing feels good.
And so in their mind,
the only way to feel better is
to take more methamphetamine.
And hence you have relapse and
people going back to using.
It's a wonder any meth users
ever get better.
NARRATOR: The research
showing that meth
might be the most addictive drug
there is suggested to Steve Suo
that one of the few things that
might explain
the eerily consistent rise and
fall
in the number of addicts was if
the meth itself were changing.
For instance, what if the purity
of the meth
on the nation's streets had been
rising and falling?
To find out if he was onto
something,
Suo gathered data on the purity
of the meth
seized by the government in
various states over the years.
Remarkably, the purity of the
meth sold on American streets
formed the pattern of the
mountains.
It was really exciting.
I mean it was a perfect match.
And you just don't often see
that in data.
These things were lining up on
my screen,
and suddenly I had an
explanation.
NARRATOR: Suo's
groundbreaking discovery
was that it was the change in
the purity of the meth
that addicts were using that had
caused the rise and fall
in 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.
(Steppenwolf's "Born to be Wild"
plays)
With music heralding the birth
of a wild new counterculture,
a generation began experimenting
with drugs.
And amphetamine, or speed,
became a favorite of truckers,
bikers and college students.
But in the '80s, a new kind of
super-charged speed
came on the scene--
d-methamphetamine,
better known as crystal meth.
From a chemical perspective,
methamphetamine is amphetamine
with a methyl group,
if you're interested in the
science of it.
But it's pretty much like a high
octane gasoline
versus a low octane gasoline.
Methamphetamine, of course, is
the high octane version.
NARRATOR: 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
is you get inflammation in the
sinuses.
What ephedrine does is basically
shrink those blood vessels,
there's less tissue swelling,
and since your sinuses are a
very small space,
that shrinkage of the tissue
actually enables people
to breath 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, a, relieve symptoms
and, b, maybe feel a little
extra zip.
Similar effects to what you see
with methamphetamine,
but taken to the nth degree with
methamphetamine.
NARRATOR: 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.
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 Gene Haislip,
and in 1986 he was the number
three man at the DEA.
He had this entirely unique
idea for controlling drugs,
which was to go after the
chemical components
that go into illegal drugs.
This was a radical departure
from anything
the DEA had done before.
NARRATOR: Haislip's strategy
for beating the meth cooks
was inspired by his recent
victory over another drug--
Quaaludes.
A lot of people have
forgotten
about the Quaalude problem, but
it was a very big problem.
One time it was as big as the
heroin or cocaine problem.
And people wonder why it's gone
away.
Well, it's gone away because we
beat them.
NARRATOR: In the early '80s,
Haislip discovered that
Quaaludes were made
from a powder so chemically
sophisticated
that the Columbian cartels
selling Quaaludes
couldn't make it themselves,
but had to buy it from legally
operated factories.
And so Haislip traveled around
the world,
convincing the government of
every country with a factory
that made the chemical in
Quaaludes to shut it down.
Well, it took some time,
but in the end the Colombians
could no longer
get their drug powder.
They didn't know what to do.
They gave it up.
We eliminated the problem.
We beat them.
NARRATOR: Just like
Quaaludes,
the key ingredients in meth are
so chemically sophisticated
they can only be made by a few
large manufacturers.
And so Haislip was confident
that with a new
chemical control law for
ammunition,
he could regulate those
chemicals and beat meth.
I realized that with
methamphetamine,
we could turn this chemical
control law
into a rifle approach to the
problem,
not just a 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.
NARRATOR: In 1986, at
Haislip's urging,
Republican senator Bob Dole
introduced a bill
to require distributors of
ephedrine and pseudoephedrine
to check the identities of their
customers,
and to make their sales records
available to the DEA.
But the bill immediately ran
into trouble,
for while nobody had been making
much money
selling prescription Quaaludes,
the pharmaceutical industry was
making billions of dollars
selling cold medicine over the
counter.
To industry executives like Alan
Rexinger,
Haislip 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 like 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 product.
So they are always a little bit
concerned about what DEA does
in a situation like this,
and sometimes more than a little
bit.
And they know who to talk to and
who to go to in Washington.
They're highly skilled, very
well organized,
and very well funded, and they
can be quite formidable.
Our response was, "Whoa,
whoa, whoa.
"Hold it a minute, 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 effect
your industry?
Wouldn't make any difference if
you were
from the dill pickle industry
or the over the counter medicine
industry.
You would naturally do what you
have to do.
Quite frankly, we appealed to a
higher authority.
Suddenly, Haislip 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.
It was a room full of people,
including many of those
lobbyists,
I think, 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 was the kind of
presentation I made.
NARRATOR: But the meeting did
not end well for Haislip.
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.
Haislip 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 agreed to that, I have to tell
you.
We got our law,
but we got it without something
later we'd discover
that we critically needed.
NARRATOR: Beating meth was
not going to be as easy
as Gene Haislip 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 an industrial
project, and it was a factory.
NARRATOR: Bob Pennal was in
charge
of the Fresno meth task force.
One of his jobs was to check out
remote locations
in California's central valley
to see if they might be home to
meth superlabs.
On this day, he spots an
abandoned barn
with a mobile home beside it, an
ideal location for a lab,
and he decides to take a closer
look.
Using night vision goggles and
infrared spotlights,
Pennal and his agents plan to
sneak up undetected to the barn
and see if there's any sign that
it's being used to cook meth.
We're just going to be going
in basically to take a look
at this place.
We want to see what kind of
smells we get.
We're going to use the IR
spotlight,
so Bruce will get in closer and
we'll take a look around.
NARRATOR: Stealth is
essential to Pennal,
because superlab cooks can slip
into an abandoned barn,
whip up a batch of meth in under
48 hours, and then vanish.
And if they suspect that Pennal
has his eye
on one of their favorite sites,
they'll use a different barn
for their next cook.
We're going to straight down
that way right here.
NARRATOR: To counter the
strategy of the meth cooks,
Pennal and his men secretly
plant hidden cameras
at prime sites like this one.
Bruce, let's kneel down.
NARRATOR: In the 1990s,
Pennal's cameras captured this
superlab cook on film.
The containers are full of
ephedrine
being cooked into meth.
A superlab will turn around
and manufacture
anywhere from ten to a hundred
pounds in one cook cycle.
A hundred pound cook, you're up
into like...
$4 million dollars is going to
be made off
that cook that you're doing.
NARRATOR: Beginning in 1989,
four out of every five hits of
meth consumed in the U.S.
were cooked in superlabs 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 we're basically the Medellin.
The way cocaine in Colombia was
the Medellin cartel,
now we were basically the
suppliers
for everyone in the United
States out of California.
NARRATOR: The drug kingpins
who turned meth
into big business were the
Amezcua brothers of Mexico.
But no supermarket in the world
could sell the Amezcuas
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 2005, in this warehouse
alone,
there was enough raw material to
make ten million hits of meth.
Krebs was just one of nine
factories
that manufactured almost all
of the world's ephedrine and
pseudoephedrine.
Methamphetamine, unlike most
other hard drugs out there,
is uniquely susceptible to
supply side intervention
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 gotta make this stuff.
NARRATOR: But while the U.S.
government
was spending billions trying to
control heroin
and cocaine, meth was such a low
priority
that no one was bothering to
monitor who was shopping
at the nine factories that make
the key ingredients in meth.
We at Krebs Biochemicals
would have been
much, much happier if only there
had been some guidance
given by the DEA or the proper
authorities
in the American states about,
"These are the legitimate users,
"you are okay if you have any
business dealings
with these guys."
Guidance in that fashion could
have certainly helped us
at Krebs Biochemicals in being
perhaps better citizens.
We do not know how much of our
material landed
into the illegitimate hands.
That could certainly have been
prevented.
NARRATOR: During one 18-month
period in the early 1990s,
the Amezcua brothers purchased
170 tons of ephedrine
from the nine factories and
shipped it
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 rate
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
meth use 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, a plane landed
in Dallas, Texas,
a Lufthansa flight.
Customs officer went aboard just
to see
what the cargo was and
discovered that there were
120 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 a sample and he
called the DEA,
and, next thing you know, it
came up,
it was 3.4 metric tons of
ephedrine destined
for Mexico City that had landed
in Dallas en route.
Up until this point in time,
the DEA,
by its own admission, did not
even really have a clue
that the Amezcua 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 from 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
and say, "Knock it off."
NARRATOR: With the
cooperation of companies
like Krebs, the DEA put an end
to the Amezcua brothers' Indian
connection.
Soon, the superlabs in
California's central valley
began running out of ephedrine,
and the purity of the 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.
When we filmed back in 2005, 20
women were living here
along with their young children.
Don't get impatient with
yourself.
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 use."
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.
NARRATOR: 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.
In early 1996, meth purity was
the lowest it had been in years.
The 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.
The 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 meth, the two
chemicals are interchangeable.
And the meth cooks 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.
NARRATOR: With superlab 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 founded the meth
caucus five years ago,
people from the affected states,
my cofounders, we knew about it.
But as we talked to other people
back here in D.C.,
they'd say, "Methamphetamine? I
don't know what it is."
Or, "Pseudoephedrine?
How does that relate to
methamphetamine?"
They literally did not know.
Back home it was tearing
families and lives apart.
Here in Congress, it was as if
there was no problem at all.
NARRATOR: Congress' attitude
made controlling pseudoephedrine
difficult.
In 1996, when Gene Haislip
pushed through
a regulation requiring a license
to sell 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 traffickers a year
to adjust.
And that's just what they did.
NARRATOR: 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 superlabs.
The DEA effort to track down the
bogus companies
was halting and underfunded.
But by the time the agency 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're having success,
you're going to see a fall in
deaths and injuries.
And we saw that line dropping to
the floor so beautifully.
NARRATOR: Once again, the
meth cooks in the central valley
began to grow desperate.
Then, Bob Pennal noticed
something very unusual.
Now we start finding these 60
milligram thousand-count
white bottles with no markings
on them.
And you'd always have markings
on them.
You always have lot numbers.
You always had some type of
identifier.
But now we had nothing except on
the bottom,
and there was some writing in
French.
We're finding them everywhere.
NARRATOR: It was two years
before the DEA discovered
that the mystery pills were
being smuggled
into the country from Quebec.
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.
And they went to one store and
bought three,
went to another store and bought
three.
Seeing blister packs everywhere.
Because they're sitting in the
car,
they're punching the pills out
of the blister packs,
they're putting them in the
freezer bags,
and they're turning them over to
chemical brokers.
NARRATOR: Smurfing, an act of
desperation for the superlabs,
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 similar to
what Haislip 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 Robins 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.
And 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.
And 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
versus those people
who are using it for illicit
means.
I struggle with how they can
sleep at night
having accomplished what they
need to accomplish
to protect profits over the
health, welfare,
and safety of our community,
in particular drug-endangered
children.
NARRATOR: Rob Bovett 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%
of the pseudoephedrine that was
going into
those convenience stores was
being diverted
to make methamphetamine.
And the pharmaceutical companies
were getting paid
for those products whether
they're being diverted or not.
It doesn't matter.
They're still making they're
money.
There's been a lot made about
how much profit was made
because of 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, okay--
that these smurfers do by 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 that
we've made any additional money
versus that product we had to
actually replace because people
had stolen it illegally.
NARRATOR: Finally, in 2004,
Oklahoma passed a law
moving pseudoephedrine behind
the counter.
Then Oregon followed suit.
And some national chains took
the same step voluntarily.
But the Mexican drug cartels had
by then found
a far better source of
pseudoephedrine close to home.
In 2004, Mexican pharmaceutical
companies legally imported
224 tons of pseudoephedrine--
twice as much as they were using
to make cold medicine.
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 could 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 as you
want."
The cartels cooked the extra 100
tons of pseudoephedrine
into meth, then smuggled it like
other drugs across the border
into the U.S.
As a result, the meth on
American streets
was suddenly as pure as it had
ever been.
That is what we're seeing
coming from Mexico--
really good crystal.
That amount of meth that we
just got,
if we had got that two or three
years ago,
we would've 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.
NARRATOR: For the Mexican
drug cartels,
making meth in Mexico had an
added bonus:
they could use their traditional
smuggling routes
to bring meth to a huge new
market,
the eastern United States.
The first to be affected were
small towns
throughout the Southeast, which
suddenly found themselves
in the midst of a meth crime
wave.
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 because 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.
NARRATOR: At the urging of
its meth caucus,
Congress in 2006 passed the
Combat Meth Act,
which mandated that
pseudoephedrine be
put behind the counter
nationwide
and that buyers register at the
store counter.
Obviously, those of us who
have had colds,
we know how inconvenient it is
and how unpleasant it is.
But if somebody's 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.
NARRATOR: In addition, the
United States government,
motivated in part by Steve Suo's
reporting,
convinced countries around the
world to limit their imports
of pseudoephedrine to just the
amount they needed to make
cold medicine.
Now, five years later,
the positive impact of that
action is clear,
especially in Mexico.
The Mexican government
recognized it had a huge problem
on its hands, and they began
estimating how much
pseudoephedrine they actually
needed for cold medicine.
And they determined it was very,
very little--
so little that they decided to
just ban
the importation altogether.
That had a dramatic impact on
the ability of the cartels
to get their pseudoephedrine.
They really, really struggled.
NARRATOR: With the Mexican
cartels unable to get
their hands on pseudoephedrine,
the potency of the meth being
smuggled into the U.S.
has plunged dramatically.
The cartels suddenly found
themselves on the ropes.
And you find them turning to
rather desperate measures,
turning to the old biker method
of making methamphetamine.
And that has continued on
through today to the point
where 70% of the meth that is
seized by the federal government
these days is actually the old
biker meth--
B.L. methamphetamine,
half as potent as the old
crystal meth
that was on the street just five
years ago.
And that's good news for people
who care about
rates of addiction because the
people who experience
weaker meth are likely to use
far less of it,
and potentially not become
addicted.
NARRATOR: But just as they
always have before,
the meth cooks have found a new
way to get pseudoephedrine.
Today, former cook Robert Lucier
is clean
after spending time in jail.
But not long ago, he was running
a gang of super-smurfers.
Other people go inside and
purchase these items for you
in small quantities, and you
just take them around
to all these different stores
and you just buy one or two
boxes, you know.
And you have four, five people,
and you just go from town to
town,
loading up the trunk with boxes
of pills.
NARRATOR: Meth cooks like
Lucier
then use the shake and bake
method
to turn the pseudoephedrine
acquired from super-smurfing
into extraordinarily pure meth.
I didn't get my good from
doing the drug itself.
I got my good from making the
best monster I could build.
It wouldn't be long before the
word got out:
"Oh, I know where to get the
bomb," you know?
And pretty soon, it was gone.
NARRATOR: For nearly 30
years,
the United States has been
caught in a cycle
of new laws followed by new
strategies
by the cooks to get around them.
But in Oregon, some of those who
experienced the worst
of the epidemic say they've
finally found the cure:
to make pseudoephedrine a
prescription drug.
Essentially we've been
putting Band-Aids
on the situation for three
decades now.
And we got tired of putting
Band-Aids on the situation
and watching the smurfers and
the meth cooks get around it.
So we just simply decided to
return pseudoephedrine
to a prescription drug, which is
what it was before 1976,
and we ended the problem.
We've essentially had a double
whammy here in Oregon.
The Mexican drug trafficking
organization meth is weak
and our cooks and smurfers can't
make their own.
NARRATOR: In 2004, before the
change in the law,
sheriff's deputies uncovered 64
meth labs
in Multnomah County, Oregon.
In 2010, after the change, they
found one.
To deputy Bret King, who showed
us these faces of meth
years ago, what matters most is
the number of lives saved.
Five years ago,
I looked into how many
methamphetamine-related arrests
we had coming into the jail, and
I saw that about 27%
of the arrests were due to
methamphetamine
or directly related to
methamphetamine.
Today, we're down to about 4.6%,
and I can attribute 100% of that
to the legislation around
pseudoephedrine.
The incidence of identification
theft has dramatically dropped.
Crime overall across the board
is down.
To the other states who are
considering addressing
methamphetamine in the same way
Oregon has, I would ask them,
"What's the holdup?"
NARRATOR: But with other
states now considering
adopting Oregon's approach,
the pharmaceutical industry is
spending millions of dollars
lobbying against it.
They favor an improved system of
tracking purchases.
Thank you, Chairwoman
Feinstein.
NARRATOR: In 2010, Linda
Suydam,
the president of a
pharmaceutical industry
trade group, testified to
Congress.
Our goal is to stop illegal
pseudoephedrine sales
while maintaining the over the
counter access
for legitimate customers.
Maintaining access to
nonprescription pseudoephedrine
is important because for many
consumers,
it is the ingredient that works
best for them.
A prescription mandate would be
more expensive for consumers.
NARRATOR: The industry's
fight against regulation
emphasizes the cost to
consumers.
But, for proponents of the
Oregon model,
the costs of inaction are
greater.
The truth is, the Oregon
solution works.
And for states that are
struggling with that issue,
as many are, just to do the next
Band-Aid is no solution at all.
You know, real solutions are
required
because lives and families are
at stake.
The stakes couldn't be higher.
NARRATOR: No one knows better
what those stakes are
than those who have been
addicted to meth.
I can look back and see the
total devastation
of all that I created,
and the lives affected, the
houses that I destroyed.
There's no coming back from that
kind of...
you know, you can't fix that.
And as long as you're caught up
in it, it's like a whirlpool.
Once you get caught in the
current,
you just go round and round and
round,
and pretty soon it just takes
you under.
And you've got to come through
the other side.
But the insanity has got to stop
somewhere
in order for those things to
take place.
Frontline continues online.
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More on how meth works on the
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It gets most of its effect
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Answers to frequently asked
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