In June of last year, I wrote the following with respect to the silly cold medicine-behind-the-counter laws:

But even the government’s own data suggests that these laws won’t work, and won’t significantly curb the supply of meth or its use. In some ways, they’ll likely only make the problem worse. They’ll put recreational meth users into more frequent contact with smugglers and traffickers, likely sparking increases in black market violence.

According to the DEA’s own website, most of this country’s meth comes not from garage laboratories in the Midwest, but from clandestine “superlabs” in California and Mexico. These labs smuggle pseudoephedrine in bulk from Mexico and Canada and use it to manufacture street methempamphetamine, which they then distribute across the country. Cold and allergy medicine never enters the picture. It’s almost certain that these superlabs would compensate for any small dip in the meth supply caused by limiting homemade “meth cooks’” access to pseudoephedrine.

[...]

So long as we’re getting hassled, I suppose, at least we know that our lawmakers are doing something. Never mind that what they’re doing is misdirected, ineffective and likely to create more problems than it solves.

Today, the New York Times reports:

But Mr. Van Haaften, like officials in other states with similar restrictions, is now worried about a new problem: the drop in home-cooked methamphetamine has been met by a new flood of crystal methamphetamine coming largely from Mexico.

Sometimes called ice, crystal methamphetamine is far purer, and therefore even more highly addictive, than powdered home-cooked methamphetamine, a change that health officials say has led to greater risk of overdose. And because crystal methamphetamine costs more, the police say thefts are increasing, as people who once cooked at home now have to buy it.

[...]

And although child welfare officials say they are removing fewer children from homes where parents are cooking the drug, the number of children being removed from homes where parents are using it has more than made up the difference.

“It’s killing us, this Mexican ice,” said Mr. Van Haaften, a former sheriff. “I’m not sure we can control it as well as we can the meth labs in your community.”

A methamphetamine cook could make an ounce for $50 on a stovetop or in a lab in a car; that same amount now costs $800 to $1,500 on the street, the police say.

Our burglaries have just skyrocketed,” said Jerry Furness, who represents Buchanan County, 150 miles northeast of Des Moines, on the Iowa drug task force. “The state asks how the decrease in meth labs has reduced danger to citizens, and it has, as far as potential explosions. But we’ve had a lot of burglaries where the occupants are home at the time, and that’s probably more of a risk. So it’s kind of evening out.”

Of course, we only have a meth problem in the first place because the government has made conventional speed illegal.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 10:11 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.