STOPPING METH

The White House strategy to fight methamphetamine is
promising, but it requires money and political will

The new national report on strategies to fight synthetic
drugs is 75 pages of dry reading. It's not chilling like the
handwritten journal that lays out the apparent plan to kidnap and
murder Portland lawyer Douglas A. Swanson, whose body was found tied
to a tree in the Mount Hood National Forest. It's not captivating like
the story of the "Blond Bandit," Denise Ruth Bender, the former
secretary recently sentenced to prison for holding up eight
Portland-area banks during a 25-day crime spree earlier this year.
It's not as strange as last week's tale of an 18-year-old Portland man
rescued from a chimney, covered with soot and screaming obscenities,
after he was stuck there while trying to hide from police. Yet the new
drug strategy, the brutal murder, the "Blond Bandit" and the paranoid
man in the chimney are all fundamentally about the same thing:
methamphetamine.

Meth lies at the heart of all these stories; in fact, it is the source
or the cause of much of the crime and human misery in Oregon,
Washington and other Western states. This new report by the office of
White House drug czar John Walters and Attorney General John Ashcroft
must be required reading for federal and state policymakers.

The sweeping plan's basic strategy is to stop the meth trade by
choking off supplies of the drug's ingredients. That's the right
approach, as The Oregonian demonstrated in its recent five-part series
on meth, "Unnecessary Epidemic." Yet the newspaper series, reported
and written by Steve Suo, also made clear that half-measures won't
stop meth trafficking. As the White House plan warns, "The regulatory
system is meaningful only so far as it is enforced." So far it hasn't
been. The United States has continually left the door to this country
open just a crack, and meth chemicals have kept pouring in. The
"history . . . is a continuing cycle of government action and
trafficker reaction," the report notes.

The failures of the war on meth are painfully obvious on the streets
of Portland and in big cities and small towns across the country. The
drug's purity -- one way to measure its availability -- has doubled
since 1999. Meth-related emergency room visits rose 69 percent from
1999 to 2002. Meth is found in the bloodstream of more than one in
five people arrested in the Portland area.

Those numbers show that what the federal government and some states,
including Oregon, are now doing to fight meth isn't nearly enough. Yet
this is not just another hopeless drug battle. The Oregonian series
and the new White House report both describe compelling evidence that
strategies to curtail the black market in meth chemicals can be
effective. Meth cannot be made without either ephedrine or
pseudoephedrine, the principal chemical ingredients in popular cold
medicines such as Sudafed. The new White House plan includes the most
thorough strategies yet to monitor and control these chemicals.

One key change would include new restrictions on legal imports of bulk
ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. Under the plan, the government would
estimate legitimate U.S. demand for cough and cold medicines made from
the chemicals, and cap imports at that level. The plan also urges much
tighter monitoring of the flow of chemicals from manufacturers in
India, China, Germany and the Czech Republic.

The plan includes a long list of other proposed actions to control
meth chemicals, including seeking greater cooperation with Mexico and
Canada. It's a promising list of goals, yet for now the broad plan to
crack down on meth is mostly just words on paper.

It will succeed only if the Bush administration, Congress and the
states now put the necessary money and political will behind this new
war on meth.