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On Precursor Restriction
Laws In The U.S.
“The imported meth is so readily available that it’s not cost effective to make your own. In that sense, the law has been successful. But the war on meth imports is only beginning."
Georgia Law Enforcement
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In July of 2006, the Australian Federal Police were involved in a major drug bust on a shampoo factory in northern Malaysia.
Authorities were shocked at just how easy it is to manufacture the ice, or crystal form of meth.
In terms of "output," the factory had the capacity to produce over 132 pounds of crystal meth per day.
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"You're beginning to see that our drug business has not gone down - it's continuing to increase. We're beginning to see more weight -- larger amounts of narcotics being seized."
Dist. Atty. John Champion describing DeSoto County, Mississippi
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The top five exporters of pseudoephedrine to the United States in 2005 were the United Kingdom, Mexico, South Africa, Switzerland and Belgium
U.S. Department of State
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April 16th, 2008
Trooper Ritch Reynolds, who works as the Meth Suppression Trooper at the ISP Terre Haute Post, in Indiana says meth labs are up in 2008 so far. "I know I'm probably 20 labs higher than I was last year," Reynolds said.
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(Page 2 of 8 in this section) It Starts With The Plant The Active Ingredients Of Methamphetamine To "begin at the beginning" as far as the production of methamphetamine goes, you have to go all the way back to the precursor chemicals and where they come from and that starts with the Ephedra plant pictured below. Ephedra (also referred to as Ma Huang) is a plant material that contains numerous alkaloids, two of which are called l-ephedrine as well as d-pseudoephedrine. "Ephedrine" and "pseudoephedrine" are basically the active ingredients in the Ephedra plant, much like THC is the active ingredient in the marijuana plant. Marijuana is the plant, THC is the naturally occurring and active component or ingredient within the plant.
In the simplest terms, the "fight or flight" response are all the immediate changes the human system goes through when it's exposed to a major "stressor." This is what causes your heart to pump more blood, sweat to form on your body, your senses to become sharper, etc. So anytime you're faced with anything stressful - from a life and death situation, to having to stand up in front of two hundred people and give a speech, basically some level of the "fight or flight response" is at work and it's preparing you to either meet the challenge, or run like hell from it. As we said, both ephedrine and pseudoephedrine occur naturally in certain ephedra plant species, but the majority of pseudoephedrine produced for commercial use is derived from a process of yeast fermentation of dextrose in the presence of benzaldehyde. (There's a piece of information you'll use every day!) The vast majority of pseudoephedrine is produced by commercial pharmaceutical manufacturers in India, China and increasingly, other countries as well. Since 2004, natural Ephedra has been made illegal to sell in the U.S., much to the dismay of herbalists and homeopathic practitioners. In Canada, while the government suggests that pharmacies keep their cough, cold and flu medications behind the counter, no such restrictions exist for "health" products and natural supplements. The sale of natural health products containing ephedrine in some health food stores, gyms and elsewhere is virtually unregulated. Health Canada has already licensed at least nine ephedrine or pseudoephedrine remedies as natural-health products, in doses ranging from 8 mg. to 60 mg. The bottom-line is that 98% of the meth in Canada and the U.S. is either made domestically in bulk, or imported. Precursor restrictions at the retail level are effective only for reducing the number of mom and pop labs, and lately, hardly even that. We're not minimizing the importance of that, but you do have to look at it in context. Ephedra To Ephedrine & Pseudoephedrine We could bore you to tears by describing the whole chemical process of how you go from the plant (Ephedra) to the synthetic chemical methamphetamine in a commercial operation, but we won't do that because we find hard core science and chemistry as dry and dull as most people do. Suffice to say that actually manufacturing the synthetic precursor chemicals is conducted by a handful of countries throughout the world. So if it really was possible to get all the "meth precursor chemical producing countries" to stop completely, or at least strictly control what they produced, it's not like you'd be needing the cooperation of hundreds of countries. As we said, there are only a handful. But what you must realize is this: There have been several times when the U.S. Congress could have slapped huge restrictions on the availability of meth precursor chemicals and didn't. And that's because as usual, the pharmaceutical lobbyists fought it BIG TIME, because it would have cost their clients BILLIONS of dollars. And at the end of the day, it's usually all about money.. From Ephedrine & Pseudoephedrine To Meth Most (but not all) large commercial meth-making operations get their ephedrine or pseudoephedrine in bulk. This is not the case with the smaller "mom and pop" labs. The small labs generally rely on getting large amounts of cold medicines that contain the pseudoephedrine they need. The idea when you make methamphetamine on a small scale from retail precursor sources is to get the pseudoephedrine out of it's container or tablet as cleanly as possible. That means you have to "clean it" or remove the binding agents that hold it together and the conversion factor is never 100% when it's done by an amateur, or non-chemist. Actual conversion rates are more along the lines of 50 to 70% maximum, no matter what meth making method you use. For the small meth lab, they have to take pseudoephedrine pills and break them down and it takes about a thousand tablets to make one ounce of "semi-clean" meth. So ideally, the chemicals used to make high quality meth are not actually in the meth itself, they are used to create reactions and processes that will create and subsequently extract and isolate the active ingredients. And when you don't do it properly, if you skip a step, or rush it, there are usually tell-tale signs in the end product. For example, here are the different colors or "tinges" on meth that indicate a mistake or omission in the manufacturing process:
* Notice for the brown colored meth, we said that a "tableting" agent was still present. Tons of web sites use the word TABLATING agent. There is no such word, they're just copying text from each other without really knowing the meaning of what they're copying. A tableting agent is a binder.
On the next page, among other things, we'll examine how superlabs are structured and the impact this has not only on supply and demand, but on law enforcement as well. (1) Previous Page<<< >>>Next Page (3)
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