Trafficking replaces home meth labs in Iowa

In the seven months since Iowa passed its law restricting cold
medicines used to make methamphetamine, busts of homemade meth labs
have dropped from 120 a month to just 20.

But the state's drug policy director, Marvin Van Haaften, like
officials in other states that have passed similar restrictions, is
now worried about a new problem: The drop in home-cooked meth has
been met by a new flood of crystal methamphetamine coming largely from Mexico.

Sometimes called ice, crystal methamphetamine is far purer, and
therefore even more highly addictive, than powdered home-cooked meth,
a shift that treatment providers say has led to greater risk of
overdose. And because crystal methamphetamine costs more, police say
thefts are increasing, as people who once cooked meth at home now
have to buy it.

The University of Iowa Burn Center, which in 2004 spent $2.8 million
treating people whose skin had been scorched off by the toxic
chemicals used to make meth at home, says it now sees hardly any such
cases. Treatment centers, on the other hand, say they are treating
just as many or more meth addicts.

As Congress prepares to restrict the sale of pseudoephedrine, the
cold medicine ingredient that is used to make methamphetamine,
officials in Iowa and in other states caution that the laws fall far
short of a solution to the epidemic of meth abuse.

Federal drug agents tend to describe ice as methamphetamine that is
at least 90 percent pure. Officials in Iowa say much of their crystal
methamphetamine is less pure -- "dirty ice," they call it. But either
is far more potent than homemade powdered meth; a "good cook" yields
a drug that is about 42 percent pure, but around 25 percent is more
common. And in the four months after Iowa's law took effect, average
purity went from 47 percent to 80 percent.