WORTHINGTON -- Without chocolate chips, you can't make chocolate chip cookies, and it has been said that making a batch of methamphetamine in a clandestine lab is as easy as making cookies.
If you can follow a recipe, you can make meth. But not without the right ingredients.
A methamphetamine cook can't walk into a drug store and buy 750 Sudafed tablets. As a result, small labs are becoming fewer and fewer, but that doesn't mean there is less meth out there. It just means the chocolate chips have to come from elsewhere.
Like Germany, India or China.
Laws have been put in place to try to halt the supplies, or precursors, needed to make the meth. As a result, fewer labs are being discovered in the United States. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), there were more than 17,000 clandestine meth lab incidents, including labs and dumpsites, in 2004 nationwide. By 2006, there were approximately 6,400.
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In 2005, a law was passed in Minnesota to control the sale of pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient in meth. The law is credited with significantly reducing the number of labs in Minnesota. From 160 lab incidents in 2004, the state went to 30 incidents in 2006.
Many states have adopted similar laws, but that hasn't stopped the flow of pseudoephedrine into the country from outside sources. Of the 1,300 to 1,800 metric tons produced annually in other countries, an estimated 200 tons reaches meth cooks in the United States.
There are nine large-scale overseas factories. The largest amount of the pseudoephedrine is created in Germany, with India, China and the Czech Republic not too far behind.
North American drug companies import the pseudoephedrine and ephedrine powder from the overseas factories and press that powder into pills. In Minnesota, those pills end up behind pharmacy counters and are sold, two packages at a time at the most, to anyone 18 or older.
But drug cartels historically have been able to use the U.S. and Canadian pharmaceutical industry to purchase large amounts of the pills, usually with the aid of inside help. The cartels generally head to California or bring the drug south of the border to Mexico, where it is used in "superlabs," capable of producing up to 50 pounds a day and producing about 80 percent of the meth supply in the U.S. Those superlabs are run by Mexican drug cartels, which distribute the drug across the country.
The DEA estimates a majority -- between 75-65 percent -- of the meth produced in this country is made in U.S.-based super labs or smuggled in as finished product from Mexico. Methamphetamine seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border jumped 50 percent from 2003 through 2005, from 4,030 to 6,063 pounds.
Mexico's importation of cold medicines jumped suddenly in recent years, from 92,000 tons in 2002 to 150,000 tons in 2005. Though recently imposed restrictions have cut legal imports by about half, U.S. authorities believe significant amounts are still being smuggled through corruption-ridden Mexican ports.
