A Madness Called Meth: Chapter Eleven

CONGRESS AND THE PILL MAKERS

To Regulate Or Not To Regulate...

"All of us should be aware of one danger," the drugmaker warned Congress.
"In the emotional atmosphere which surrounds drugs today, there will
undoubtedly be pressure from some for hastily conceived action which could
produce more harm than good. The Congress and the administration must be
careful not to let the pendulum swing too far."

The year was 1962. The drugmaker: Eugene N. Beesley, president of
pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly Co. The issue: how far the federal
government should go to protect Americans from drugs.

Addicts, it seems, aren't the only ones with drug habits. During the past
70 years, Congress and corporations have fallen into habitual patterns when
it comes to the amphetamine family, swinging alternately between the need
for public safety and the demands of free enterprise.

Like many other drugs now feared and stigmatized, methamphetamine began as
a scientist's triumph. Now associated with toothless speed freaks and
Mexican mafioso, meth had its money-making start in esteemed U.S.
corporations. Its abuse, moreover, continues to molt beyond the ability of
lawmakers to erect defenses.

Amphetamines first were marketed in the United States by the Smith Kline &
French Co. (now Smith Kline Beecham) in 1932 in the form of an inhaler
called Benzedrine. It proved a boom product, and during the next 15 years,
nearly 40 uses for amphetamine were found.

"A feeling of exhilaration and sense of well-being was a consistent effect,
and patients volunteered that there had been a definite increase in mental
activity and efficiency," raved the American Medical Association's Council
on Pharmacy and Chemistry in 1937.

But if doctors were discovering the potency of amphetamines, so were
assorted hipsters, low-lifes, students and the curious. They learned they
could remove the Benzedrine-soaked strips of paper inside the inhalers and
get high. Each inhaler, by one study, contained the equivalent of 56
amphetamine tablets. By 1949, the problem was great enough the company
withdrew the inhaler before the Food and Drug Administration required it.

Two years later, the first congressional amphetamine regulatory measure,
sponsored by Minnesota Sen. Hubert Humphrey, limited the use of
barbiturates (downers) and amphetamines (uppers) to prescription.

In 1955, a House subcommittee held 14 days of hearings on amphetamine and
barbiturate abuse. Then, as now, horror stories inflamed lawmakers.
California Superior Court Judge Twain Michelsen warned Congress in November
1955 that amphetamines were part of the larger Red Menace:

"We know . . . that Communist China has an avowed purpose to destroy
certain Western countries through the use of narcotics," Michelsen warned a
House subcommittee. "Now we have the Communist narcotic invasion that is
addressing itself to American and other Western civilizations. . . . I
think we are right at the front door of Communist China's effort to despoil
this country and other Western countries."

Michelsen's warnings notwithstanding, top federal health officials during
the 1950s considered amphetamines relatively benign.

"Amphetamine is a stimulant drug," Dr. Halsey Hunt, the nation's assistant
surgeon general, told the House Ways and Means Committee in 1955, "and as
far as I know, it is not addicting in the true sense of the word."

To this, the chief narcotics consultant to the National Institute on Mental
Health, Dr. Kenneth Chapman, added: "Amphetamine does not cause
physiological dependence." He noted, moreover, that amphetamines had
socially beneficial uses. For instance, Chapman recalled, "amphetamine
drugs were used in wartime to permit pilots to get enough mental
stimulation to get home after they had been through a series of bombing ."

In fact, doctors were so unalarmed by amphetamine use that at one point in
the 1960s, federal officials estimated that some 8 billion legally
manufactured amphetamine and barbiturate tablets were in circulation in the
United States.

"The theme that pops out most is that physicians were the major agents for
overuse of amphetamines," says Dr. Lester Grinspoon, a professor of
psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "Just a couple of decades ago, this
was being prescribed by the ton load . . . physicians really believed it
was like a panacea and that there was no downside."

As the problems caused by meth and other amphetamines became more obvious,
the House Ways and Means Committee began recommending tighter controls. It
took several years, however, for Congress to act. And when it did,
loopholes abounded.

Though Smith Kline & French had voluntarily stopped selling its Benzedrine
inhaler in 1949, other companies continued selling over-the-counter
inhalers that included amphetamines. The Food and Drug Administration in
1959 issued rules banning amphetamines from inhalers -- but the FDA
permitted methamphetamine to remain in inhaler use.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy's administration urged legislation that
would require new drug testing procedures, warning labels, manufacturing
safety and tighter control of stimulants.

But the politically powerful American Medical Association, like the
pharmaceutical companies, warned lawmakers not to let "emotions" guide
their legislating.

"We do not believe that the necessity for, or appropriateness of,
additional federal legislation has been adequately demonstrated at this
time," the AMA advised Congress. More study, the AMA said, should be
undertaken. The doctors won the fight.

"There was some initial resistance because I don't really think the
pharmaceutical industry or chemical manufacturers really saw the magnitude
of the problem, and they saw this as just restrictions on their commerce,"
says Bill Ruzzamenti, a Drug Enforcement Administration special agent based
in Fresno.

An example of that resistance came in the mid-1960s, when the Food and Drug
Administration tried to survey legal amphetamine-producing companies.

"Unfortunately," then-FDA Commissioner George Larrick lamented to a House
committee in 1965, "our survey of production figures was incomplete because
records kept by several basic manufacturers were grossly inadequate and
also because two of the nation's largest pharmaceutical companies declined
. . . to provide the information requested."

By the late 1960s, however, the growth of a "speed freak" culture was
catching lawmakers' eyes. Congress began imposing more restrictions on
legal, prescribed amphetamines.

And according to some estimates, up to half of the legal production was
being diverted to the illegal market.

Congress acted in 1970 with the Controlled Substances Act. Pharmaceutical
companies had resisted parts of the law, warning that overly strict
regulations simply would increase the amount of illegal production.
Lawmakers, nonetheless, required new registration and accounting procedures
for some substances, including amphetamines.

The perennial tension between aggressive regulation and corporate interest
ignited again in August 1996 when the Drug Enforcement Administration
imposed tough new rules regulating over-the-counter sales of allergy and
cold drugs. The DEA -- chasing, as always, after the latest innovation of
illegal meth producers -- wanted to make it much harder for meth cooks to
buy "precursor" chemicals, the key ingredients in meth making.

The rules required retail drugstores to monitor and report on sales of the
over-the-counter medicines containing pseudoephedrine. Any sale of more
than 48 grams had to be reported -- and retail clerks who failed to do so
could face a $25,000 fine and possible jail time.

Drug companies howled.

"This kind of regulatory approach is simply unworkable in today's retail
marketplace," John Scheels, government affairs director for the drugstore
chain Eckerd Corp., told a House panel in 1996. "That would ultimately
cause us greatly increased costs, as it would to our customers."

Drug companies urged Congress to scrap the rules and establish a "safe
harbor" so cough and cold medicines could be sold in so-called blister
packs without prompting paperwork requirements. Blister packs (individual
pills have to be popped out one at a time) are believed to be less prone to
mass abuse than bottled pills because it takes thousands of pills to make
meth and cooks can simply slice the bottoms off bottles and dump them into
the batch en masse.

Pharmaceutical companies speak loudly on Capitol Hill. The top 10 companies
and pharmaceutical trade associations spent $40 million lobbying Congress
in 1998, according to reports by the Center for Responsive Politics; the
industry's political action committees contributed an additional $5.1
million to federal candidates during the same year.

Congress heard the corporate concerns. In an unusual step, as part of the
1996 Comprehensive Methamphetamine Control Act, lawmakers overturned the
DEA rules. Congress established a "safe harbor" to allow easier sale of
drugs such as Sudafed and Actifed in blister packs.

"Make no mistake about it," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican who
chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, "without the blister-pack provision,
many legitimate distributors of over-the-counter products would likely
choose not to offer ."

Hatch received more than $250,000 from health and pharmaceutical company
interests between 1995 and 1998, according to records compiled by the
Center for Responsive Politics. Next to lawyers, the health and
pharmaceutical companies were the biggest contributors to his campaigns.

At the last minute, Congress also dropped plans to pile on mandatory
minimum sentences as part of the 1996 meth law.

"There is no evidence that such penalties will have any impact on reducing
drug use," said Rep. Robert Scott, a Harvard-educated Virginia Democrat who
sits on the House Judiciary Committee. "All of the studies I've seen show
that mandatory minimum sentences are the least effective means of reducing
crime. But they're an effective means of getting a politician re-elected."

Instead, the law ordered the U.S. Sentencing Commission to review the
wisdom of increasing meth-related prison sentences. The law, chasing after
the new problem of mail-order chemical sales, also imposed reporting
requirements for companies selling meth chemicals through the mail.

But the 1996 law was barely in place before lawmakers tried to stiffen it.
Indeed, a constant ratcheting up of sentences has been one persistent theme
of the federal meth response.

In 1986, there were no mandatory minimum sentences for meth offenses. Two
years later, though, Congress set five- and 10-year minimum sentences. Ten
grams of meth would trigger a five-year sentence. By 1998, Congress went
tougher still: It would take only 5 grams to trigger a five-year sentence
and 50 grams to impose 10 years.

The public appeal of such efforts was exemplified in the name senators
initially gave their current bill: the "Determined and Full Engagement
Against the Threat of Methamphetamine" bill. Spelled out, this was supposed
to read the "DEFEAT Meth" bill.

The new measures have been championed by Western lawmakers such as
Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California because of the drug's deep
roots in the West. But as the problem has spread to the Midwest, lawmakers
there have mobilized.

This latest anti-meth effort resorts to both old and new tactics. Stiffer
mandatory minimum sentences are included, continuing the trend. But a new
twist worries civil libertarians.

The original bill sought controls on what people talked about. For the
first time, legislation would have made it illegal to communicate, "by any
means," information pertaining to the manufacture of a controlled drug --
if the person either has the intent of breaking anti-drug laws or knows
that the person receiving the information "intends to use the teaching,
demonstration or information" for illegal purposes.

The measure was in response to the proliferation of Internet sites that
provide meth-making information. "Posting" or "linking to" these sites
would have been made illegal.

One version of the new meth bill has been folded into otherwise unrelated
bankruptcy reform legislation. It orders the U.S. Sentencing Commission to
stiffen meth-dealing penalties. It also allows funds seized from suspected
criminals to be used to help clean up meth labs and orders the DEA to
provide meth-related training to state officials. Some lawmakers also want
to make it easier for meth-hunting police to search property without
immediately notifying the property owner.

House and Senate negotiators haven't resolved their differences over this
bill, and its fate is uncertain. In late July, a House committee removed
the provisions restricting the posting of drug-making information on the
Web from one version of the legislation, but proponents vowed to get it
back in.

What is all but certain is that the meth wars will not end with the passage
of new laws. If history is any judge, lawmakers will continue closing
loopholes while lawbreakers will look for ways to stay ahead.

"It's like a balloon," says U.S. Attorney Paul Seave, whose
Sacramento-based Eastern District covers 34 counties and the heart of
California's meth industry. "You squeeze the balloon in one place, and it
bulges somewhere else. You squeeze it at the bulge, and it bulges in a new
place."

Chapter 12, http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1507/a05.html