Only one person, it turns out: Gene Haislip, the deputy assistant administrator in DEA’s Office of Compliance and Regulatory Affairs. Haislip knew that large amounts of ephedrine, which was imported in bulk to make nasal decongestants, were being redirected to the Amezcua organization with no oversight. Ephedrine processing took place in only nine factories around the world, all of them in India, China, Germany, and Czech Republic. To Haislip, the narrow processing window posed a perfect opportunity to siphon off the meth trade; all that was required was the cooperation of those nine factories, along with the pharmaceutical companies that depended on the ephedrine made in them. What Haislip proposed in 1985, two years before Lori Arnold went into large-scale meth production, was a federal law allowing DEA to monitor all ephedrine imports into the United States.
According to a 2004 investigative article written by Steve Suo in Portland’s Oregonian newspaper, Haislip got the idea based on his earlier work on the illicit U.S. trade in Quaaludes, a legal sleeping pill widely available on the black market. The manufacture of Quaaludes depended on the synthesis of another legal drug, methaqualone, which was predominately produced in Germany, Austria, and China. What Haislip noticed was that an enormous proportion of the methaqualone from these nations was being shipped to Colombia. There, the Cali and Medellín cartels were making it into an illegal form of Quaalude, which they sold in tandem with cocaine in the same market—one as an upper, one as a downer—in the same way that meth markets today are often saturated with Oxycontin, a prescription painkiller that smooths out the impending “tweak” of a meth high. In 1982, Haislip visited the nations whose factories made methaqualone and asked for their help in monitoring its sale. Congress then banned the use of prescription Quaaludes, which were manufactured by only one American company. By 1984, according to DEA’s annual narcotics threat assessment, Quaaludes no longer constituted a significant danger to the illicit U.S. drug market. With meth, Haislip simply hoped to keep organizations like the Amezcuas’ (and to a lesser extent, people like Lori Arnold) from legally procuring ephedrine without hurting the production and sale of cold medicine of licit companies like Warner-Lambert, the makers of Sudafed. Haislip’s idea took the form of language inserted into the Controlled Substances Act, which would be debated by Congress in the fall of 1986.
What’s important to understand is that, despite the fact that Haislip’s job was to write legislation, DEA is not a political entity. According to the cliché, one of which most DEA agents seem proud, the administration occupies a place that is all but outside the law. While FBI agents stereo typically tail potential bad guys in their sedans, and CIA agents listen to phone conversations, DEA agents are supposedly assassinating major narco-figures in the world’s more inhospitable environments. Whether or not this is a fantasy is unclear. What it suggests is an institutional frustration regarding the governmental process: it’s easier to shoot people in other places than to write legislation here, which must then be tailored to the concerns of members of Congress and the lobbyists who influence them.
DEA’s proposals are subject to long, withering debates and years of compromise. And that is where the administration, if not actually a political entity, is a highly politicized one. Back in 1986, even as Nancy Reagan gave her famous “just say no” speech, Haislip had to bow to pressure from Democrats and Republicans alike not to raise the ire of pharmaceutical lobbyists, whose job, in part, is to comb through legislative bills looking for anything that could potentially upset their clients’ sales. That’s how Haislip’s bill, according to the Oregonian article, came to the attention of Allan Rexinger, who was in the employ of a trade group called the Proprietary Association on behalf of Warner-Lambert. Rexinger didn’t like what he saw.
For several weeks during 1986, according to Rexinger, he worked to change the language of Haislip’s bill in a way that would exempt Warner-Lambert from the potential bane of federal importation oversight. When DEA and Haislip continued to resist his pleas, said Rexinger, he had no choice but to get the White House involved by making a phone call to, as he proudly told Suo in 2004, “the highest levels of the United States government.”
By the time Attorney General Edwin Meese III presented Haislip’s bill to Congress in April 1987, five years had passed since Haislip had initially imagined nipping meth production in the bud. Meantime, the Amezcua cartel had spread throughout California and the Desert West, and had linked up with Lori Arnold’s Stock-dall Organization in Iowa, which by now was well on its way to producing its own industrially manufactured P2P meth. The language in Haislip’s bill proposing oversight of ephedrine had been drastically altered as well, allowing for the drug to be imported in pill form with no federal regulations whatsoever. All that meth manufacturers had to do in order to continue making the drug would be legally to buy pill-form ephedrine in bulk and crush it into powder—a small, added inconvenience. What Haislip had imagined as an early answer to a still-embryonic drug threat instead became both a mandate and a road map for meth’s expansion.
In 1987, the year that Cargill cut wages at its Ottumwa meatpacking plant from $18 an hour to $5.60 with no benefits, Lori Arnold sold a pound of pure, uncut crank for $32,000. This meant that with the very first ten pounds produced at her superlab, she had paid off the $100,000 initial investment in equipment and chemicals and had cleared a profit of nearly a quarter of a million dollars, or over a century’s worth of median wages for an Ottumwa adult that year. Meanwhile, she was still buying ten pure pounds at a time of Mexican Mafia dope from California, at $10,000 a pound, which she then sold for three times the price, again making nearly a quarter of a million dollars every time one of her runners returned from the West Coast.
Where crank’s personality converges with its mathematics is this: No one with whom I spoke, and this includes varsity-level addicts like Roland Jarvis, can physically handle snorting, smoking, or shooting 98 percent pure methamphetamine. So while Lori only sold her product uncut, each pound, once it was distributed, equated to three or four pounds of ingestible crank, and probably more, given that each dealer along the line was likely to continue cutting it—with bleach, laundry detergent, or baking soda. Seen that way, Lori’s lab wasn’t producing ten pounds every forty-eight hours; it was producing the eventual equivalent of thirty to forty pounds. (By that stretch, the biggest labs in the Central Valley of California today would be producing the so-called street equivalent of up to five hundred pounds a day, while an Indonesian megalab would make five thousand pounds of saleable meth each week.) In one month alone during Lori’s prime, that’s somewhere on the order of a quarter ton of meth being distributed in the relatively underpopulated environs of the central Midwest. Add to that the dozen or so big loads she was getting from California each month, and it’s easy to see how Lori was, by her own admission, involved in one manner or another with “thousands of people” and making “hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly.” When pushed for an answer, Lori admits that she has no idea how much she made, in pounds or dollars.
When Lori first got into meth, a gram would last her an entire weekend. By 1991, Lori was snorting up to three grams a day. She remembers not sleeping for weeks at a time. She wore, she says, a lot of hats. Multiple-business owner, mother, drug baron: Without the meth, she could never have done it all. She was, she says, one of the main employers in Ottumwa, and a benevolent one, at that. She donated plenty of money to the local police and to the county sheriff. She planned to open a day care center and video game arcade next to the Wild Side, so local kids would have somewhere to go while their parents were in the bar. Together, Lori and meth were an antidote to the small-town sense of isolation, the collective sense of depression and low morale that had settled on Ottumwa since most farms went belly-up, the railroad closed, and the boys at the meatpacking plant lost their jobs.