The production of methamphetamine at the time was just industrializing, largely at the hands of the Amezcua brothers, who’d understood the lucrative, illegal application of the lax laws governing ephedrine imports. Once Haislip’s watered-down law passed, the Amezcuas simply bought ephedrine pills from legitimate sources, crushed them into powder, and used the powder to make meth. In addition, they began importing ephedrine powder into the port at Mazatlán, on Mexico’s Pacific coast, then driving the powder north across the border. As trade increased between Mexico and the United States, culminating in 1993 with the ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), truck traffic at ports of entry like San Ysidro, California, increased 278 percent, according to a study by UC-San Diego economics professor Joan Anderson. As a result, border security became more difficult to enforce, making it easier than ever to drive loads of ephedrine right into Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. Months after Haislip’s weakened bill passed, according to Suo, meth purity was at an all-time high throughout the West, indicating a glut in product. The spread of large amounts of the Amezcuas’ meth into Iowa and several other Midwestern states—thanks in great part to Lori Arnold of Ottumwa and to lesser extent to Jeffrey William Hayes of Oelwein—is one of what is sure to be many unreported side effects of this first, defining breakdown.
Haislip, though, was not done trying. By 1993, he was moving to close the loophole that his earlier bill had created, writing new legislation to limit imports not only of ephedrine powder but of pills, too. The law passed and seemed to produce immediate dividends: DEA, according to Suo, intercepted 170 metric tons of illegal ephedrine pills in eighteen months, reducing by a large chunk the available methamphetamine in the United States. In addition, Haislip took the unprecedented step of approaching the International Narcotics Control Board in Vienna, asking it to help DEA broker a deal with the nine factories in Germany, India, China, and the Czech Republic that produced the ephedrine. All the companies agreed. Using bills of lading to trace bulk loads of both raw ephedrine powder and finished pills that had been sent from their plants through third-party nations to Mexico, DEA was able to limit the number of countries through which ephedrine would travel to only those nations willing to keep serious records—all without significantly cutting into the profit margins of pharmaceutical companies. In just twelve months, according to Haislip, DEA blocked or seized 200 tons of ephedrine, or one sixth of the world’s annual production at that point, all of it earmarked for meth labs. Haislip’s sixteen-year-old plan of crippling the drug’s production by implementing multinational precursor controls seemed to be bearing fruit: across California, meth purity was down to an average of only 40 percent, an indication that production was slowing to a crawl.
The problem was that Haislip repeated his earlier mistake and left a loophole in the ephedrine legislation that allowed pills containing pseudoephedrine to remain unregulated, this despite the fact that DEA chemists had warned him that meth could be made from pseudoephedrine just as easily as from ephedrine. The loophole, according to Suo, was the direct result of intense lobbying, eight years after he’d derailed Haislip’s original anti-precursor bill, by Allan Rexinger, who proudly characterized his involvement to Suo by saying that he simply “pulled the plugs” on DEA. In fact, pointing traffickers to pseudoephedrine was the biggest favor that anyone could have done for the makers of meth; it set the stage for fifteen years (and counting) of arguably the worst period in American narcotic history.
From a drug chemist’s standpoint, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or pseudo, are identical; good crank can be made from both. But from a drug trafficker’s standpoint, pseudo is far superior. Ephedrine, as a licit pharmaceutical, has a strictly limited number of uses: first, as a stimulant used to bring surgery patients out from under anesthesia, and second, as a nasal decongestant. Pseudo, on the other hand, has for three decades been the dominant ingredient in cold medicine, 80 percent of which was (and remains) controlled by American companies. As such, the availability of pseudo in the world, along with its importance as a revenue source, is many orders of magnitude greater than that of ephedrine. And because pseudo is deemed the most reliable precursor for megadrugs like Sudafed, Actifed, and NyQuil, the drug lobby protecting pseudo is many times more powerful than that protecting ephedrine, which had already shown a proven ability to cripple DEA.
By 1996, the Amezcuas were in jail. In their absence, other Mexican drug-trafficking organizations, only too aware of the lucrative potential of meth, had begun to fill the Amezcuas’ shoes. Slowly, those loosely defined organizations were melding into what DEA would come to call the five major DTOs, each of which was destined to quickly become many times more powerful than the Amezcuas had ever been. The DTOs were aided by the wider opening of the border and the expanding immigrant presence in the United States engendered by NAFTA. Within the population of illegals streaming across the border to work in meatpacking plants throughout the Great Plains, in the fields of California’s Central Valley, and in the orchards and orange groves of the Southeast, there was unlimited potential for a narcotic retail and distribution force. One that, because it was nationwide, mobile, undocumented, and protean, was almost impossible to track by law enforcement. In addition, the DTOs controlled the manufacture of meth by following Amezcua’s practice of importing precursors into Mexico, thereby achieving business’s holy trinity: dominance of the entire value chain. In one fell swoop, the Mexican drug traffickers directed every aspect of what was now a major international narcotics phenomenon—in the same way that Cargill, Tyson, and ADM were taking control of the food business “from plow to plate,” as the marketing slogan went.
Within months of Haislip’s newest legislation, the nascent DTOs made the switch to pseudoephedrine combined with red phosphorus. This new Red-P, or Mexican dope, was considered to be more powerful still than the old P2P meth of Lori Arnold’s day, especially when the traffickers soaked the powdered Red-P in refrigerated trays of denatured alcohol, a process that turns the drug into the pretty, icelike shards that would come to be known throughout the world as crystal meth. This more powerful form of the drug again increased the DTOs’ range and effectiveness, for the simple reason that it was more addictive, allowing them to saturate old markets even as they opened new ones.
The move to pseudo was really the blockbuster moment in the modern history of the meth epidemic. That’s because the DTOs were able firmly to tie the fate of their illicit product to perhaps the world’s most lucrative legal drug. This, really, is the genius of the meth business. Cocaine and heroin are linked to illegal crops—coca and poppies, respectively. Meth on the other hand is linked in a one-to-one ratio with fighting the common cold. Not only was the pharmaceutical industry likely to fight harder against pseudoephedrine monitoring than it had regarding ephedrine, but the shear bulk of pseudoephedrine being produced also made it difficult to track compared with the relatively small amount of ephedrine being manufactured. Add to that that 50 percent of the world’s pseudoephedrine was (and is) manufactured in China—a nation that has been increasingly unwilling to negotiate with the United States—and Haislip’s dream of international cooperation in monitoring meth’s precursors had, after a short and unprecedented victory, fallen completely apart.