Still, Haislip wasn’t done. In 1995, he proposed a bill stipulating that any company wishing to sell more than four hundred tablets of pseudoephedrine at a time would have to get a license from DEA and would have to keep records of its sales—hardly, notes Suo, a rigorous law. But it would have at least given the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control a place to start in the inevitable task of identifying companies that diverted large amounts of pseudoephedrine to the meth trade. This time, it was not Allan Rexinger who came to the aid of the big drug companies; it was Senator Orrin Hatch, Republican of Utah, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Senator Hatch had a history of aiding the pharmaceutical industry, and had, among other things, supported legislation curbing federal regulation of dietary supplements, namely Methedrine, a form of methamphetamine illegally prescribed by the billions of pills during the 1970s and ’80s. What the Hatch camp wanted in 1995 was proof that pseudoephedrine was being used to make meth. DEA had what it thought to be incontrovertible verification: nearly a quarter of all the meth superlabs it had dismantled in the last year had already made the switch from ephedrine to pseudoephedrine. Even in labs that were still using the old method, agents had founds bills of lading for bulk orders of pseudo, a further indication that the market was in the midst of a dynamic shift. Hatch, though, didn’t consider this compelling enough, and he tabled the proposal by calling for more investigation.
Haislip was distraught. Despite help from Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the bill languished with Hatch’s committee for over a year—while the DTOs’ production of crystal meth went unhampered. It wasn’t until the spring of 1996 that Hatch and Haislip finally agreed on language that was acceptable to both the government and the pharmaceutical companies: vendors of pill-form pseudoephedrine would be subject to DEA licensing and bookkeeping unless those pills were sold in the now-ubiquitous clear-plastic containers with aluminum backing. Hatch’s logic, it seems, was that the narco-empire built around methamphetamine would crumble in the face of the tamper-proof blister pack.
The connection that Steve Suo doesn’t make explicit in the Oregonian is that the aggregation of the Mexican drug traffickers during the 1990s into five enormous DTOs mirrors the consolidation of the pharmaceutical industry in that same period. As both types of organizations grew, they increased their market share, their wealth, and their power. Warner-Lambert was subsumed by Burroughs Well-come, which was ultimately added, along with Pharmacia, to the pharma-titan Pfizer. That’s to say, over a short period in the 1990s, fewer companies shared increasing profits. In 2003, Fortune 500 rated the U.S. pharmaceutical business the third most profitable in the nation and valued the industry at $593 billion. (That was the first year since 1995 that the industry had not been rated the number-one most profitable American industry.)
A similar consolidation was occurring in the illegal drug business during the late 1990s. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the American narcotics market was split between the competing interests of the Colombians, the Mexicans, the Nigerians, the Vietnamese, and the Filipinos, among others. By 2003, 85 percent of all the illegal drugs sold in the United States—whether meth, cocaine, heroin, or marijuana—were controlled by the five DTOs, each of which controls at least one major port of entry with the United States.
The simultaneous growth of these two businesses had remarkable and tragic consequences for the modern meth trade between 1987 and 2003. Had DEA forced more oversight of the rapidly deregulating pharmaceutical industry—one that is hallmarked by its production of cold medicine—the DTOs would never have had access to the drug they needed in order to make meth. Had the DTOs not been able to make meth, it’s less likely that they would have so thoroughly monopolized the U.S. drug market.
One might ask if the drug companies should really have been made to monitor their imports simply because cold medicine happens to be made from the same drug as methamphetamine. It’s a question that lobbyists like Allan Rexinger made a career of asking. It’s also one that needn’t ever have been posed. For, beginning over a decade ago, American pharmaceutical companies could have chosen to make cold medicine from something other than pseudoephedrine.
According to Suo, in 1997 a research team at the University of North Texas began testing a new nasal decongestant in dogs and rats. The team was in the employ of Warner-Lambert, which the year before had taken over the manufacture of Sudafed and Actifed from Burroughs Wellcome and added those lines to Warner-Lambert’s highly profitable antihistamine, Benadryl. By then, Sudafed’s brand recognition was so widespread that the product, like Xerox to both photocopies and the machines that produce them, had become synonymous with the industry of cold remedies. All three nonprescription medicines—Sudafed, Actifed, and Benadryl—relied on pseudoephedrine for their manufacture. Fearful that pseudoephedrine would come under federal control, or worse, that it would be outlawed completely by legislation being pushed by Gene Haislip and DEA, Warner-Lambert had developed a new product based on a biochemical technology called mirror imaging. By Christmas of 1997, according to interviews published in the Oregonian, trials on dogs and rats at the University of North Texas showed great promise for the drug.
Mirror imaging is a process whereby a chemical’s molecular structure is reversed, moving, for example, electrons from the bottom of a certain ring to the top, and vice versa. Pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, and methamphetamine are already near mirror images of one another. To make meth from ephedrine, it is necessary to remove a single oxygen atom from the outer electron ring. Thus ephedrine and methamphetamine not only look the same under a mass spectrometer, but both dilate the alveoli in the lungs and shrink blood vessels in the nose—hence ephedrine’s use as a decongestant—while raising blood pressure and releasing adrenaline. The key difference is that meth, unlike ephedrine, prompts wide-scale releases of the neurotransmitters dopamine and epinephrine.
What the 1997 tests at the University of North Texas showed was that, at least in lab animals, mirror-image pseudoephedrine was equally as effective as regular pseudoephedrine as a decongestant. Unlike regular pseudo, however, the mirror-image version didn’t cause any side effects to the central nervous system, such as high blood pressure and a racing heart: the common “buzz” that one associates with cold medicine. Better yet for Warner-Lambert, mirror-image pseudoephedrine could only be synthesized into mirror-image methamphetamine, which, according to the Oregonian, had no stimulant effects and could not then be made into regular meth.
Had Warner-Lambert been unable in the end to develop mirror-image pseudo—or to bring it to the market—it had yet another option that would have significantly helped Haislip and DEA. Also in 1997, chemists at Warner-Lambert had begun experimenting with additives that would make it impossible to extract pseudoephedrine from Sudafed. This combination would undermine the basic building block of Nazi cold meth production, which is to pour anhydrous ammonia onto crushed-up cold pills in order to extract the pills’ pseudo. On this project, researchers at Warner-Lambert had, according to the Oregonian, been working closely with DEA. Moreover, the additives were already FDA-approved. Therefore, any drug containing them would not be considered new and would avoid the costly testing period mandated by the FDA. At the very least, manufacturing cold pills with these additives might have reduced the ever-increasing legions of small-time cooks like Roland Jarvis in states like Iowa, which at the time was seeing small-meth-lab increases of 300 percent a year.