Congress Moved Cold Medicine Behind the Pharmacy Counter in 2005 to Shut Down Meth Labs. It Worked, and Four Years Later Meth Was the Cheapest and Purest It Had Been Since the Law Passed.
The Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act became law in 2005. It addressed a real and specific problem: methamphetamine was being manufactured in domestic kitchens, garages, and motel rooms, in quantities that made small-scale production a genuine public safety issue, out of pseudoephedrine bought from the cold and flu aisle.
The remedy was to move the cold and flu aisle. Pseudoephedrine went behind the pharmacy counter. Buying it now requires photographic identification, a signature in a logbook, and compliance with limits on how much may be purchased in a day and in a month. The transaction is recorded. This applies to every person in the United States who has a blocked nose.
The Law Worked as Designed
On its own terms, the statute succeeded. The domestic small-lab economy it targeted collapsed within a few years. Seizures of clandestine laboratories peaked in the mid-2000s and fell away as the precursor supply that sustained them was closed off. If the objective was to stop Americans cooking methamphetamine out of boxes of Sudafed, the objective was achieved.
The market for methamphetamine was not part of the objective. It continued to exist.
The Vacuum and What Filled It
Domestic producers were forced out. Mexican cartels, which faced no comparable constraint on precursor chemicals and enjoyed considerable economies of scale, moved into the space. Denied easy access to pseudoephedrine themselves, they revived an older and largely abandoned synthesis route based on phenyl-2-propanone, which requires none of it.
The P2P method is not a workaround of inferior quality. It is industrially scalable in a way that the pseudoephedrine route never was, and it can be run in large facilities from chemicals that are not sold in pharmacies. The chemistry did not need pseudoephedrine. It only needed someone with a reason to stop using it.
What Happened to the Price
In 2005, the year the law passed, methamphetamine in the Midwest reached around $12,000 a pound. By the end of 2009 the price per gram had fallen to its lowest point since the statute took effect, roughly $110.87, and purity had risen to its highest, about 72.9 percent.
Those two figures moving in that direction at the same time describe a supply that has become more abundant, not less. The law removed the amateurs and left the professionals, and the professionals were better at it. Today the P2P product accounts for the overwhelming majority of methamphetamine seized in the United States.
The Part That Remains
The logbook remains. The identification requirement remains. The purchase limits remain, applied uniformly to a population of roughly 340 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom are attempting to breathe through their nose.
Nothing about this is unusual. It is the standard architecture of a control placed on a widely used product because of a narrow misuse: the cost is small per person, invisible in aggregate, and permanent, while the benefit is measured against a problem that relocated. Pseudoephedrine is now among the more closely tracked substances an ordinary person can buy without a prescription, and the drug the tracking was built to prevent is cheaper, purer, and more plentiful than it was in 2005.
The one group whose access to pseudoephedrine was successfully and durably restricted is people with colds.
Filed from public reporting:
- U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Diversion Control Division — "CMEA (The Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005)"
- U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — "Preventing the Retail Diversion of Pseudoephedrine"
- U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration — "Methamphetamine Seizures Continue to Climb in the Midwest"
- Carnevale Associates — "The Current Status of the Methamphetamine Epidemic"
- U.S. Pharmacist — "Pseudoephedrine: Stricter Controls in the Future?"
- PharmChek — "The Rise of Super Meth: The Destructive Effects of P2P Methamphetamine"
- Wikipedia — "Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005"
