LINE UP TO STOP A DRUG SCOURGE

American students of math and science supposedly are falling behind their
counterparts in other industrialized nations. But apparently there still
are plenty of capable amateur chemists out there. And they are the reason
it's going to get harder for victims of the common cold to get relief.

It takes but a few moments on Google to turn up step-by-step instructions
describing how to turn over-the-counter cold pills such as Sudafed into
methamphetamine. For example, one -- which claims to be the "Birch" or
"Nazi" method -- starts out this way:

* Crush tablets finely in blender. * Soak in bucket with 3 volumes (to the
solid) of acetone, preferably anhydrous acetone, for six hours. * Vacuum
filter, wash solid with extra acetone, filter through, collect solid and
dry at 50 degrees C or low heat in a griller on a Pyrex dish. * Discard
acetone.

And it goes on from there. I'm not chemist enough (by a long shot) to say
whether the recipe is genuine. But officials who know about such things say
the process is fairly easy. That's why it's such a problem.

Meth "cooks" use a menu of chemicals, but ephedrine and especially
pseudoephedrine are the key. Underground chemists working in meth labs turn
them into methamphetamine, a powder that can be further processed into
crystal methamphetamine. That's "a powerful and highly addictive synthetic
stimulant," according to the National Drug Intelligence Center. It's a
growing threat in Florida, the NDIC says. But meth has been an epidemic for
years on the Pacific coast.

Because of some persistent drug-busters, it has become increasingly
difficult for criminals running meth labs to buy pseudoephedrine in bulk.
So they taught themselves how to extract it from cold medicines. Now, as
The Washington Post and other news media reported last week, drugstores and
chains such as Wal-Mart are phasing in restrictions on the sale of cold
treatments. Technically, they'll remain over-the-counter, but customers
won't be able just to fill up the shopping cart. They'll have to ask for
the remedies and, in many cases, produce identification and sign a log.

Compared with other inconveniences caused by drug abuse, that's not so bad.
Addicts desperate for money rob houses and steal cars. Drug traffic blights
neighborhoods and spawns violence that doesn't discriminate between
criminals and the innocent. Abuse of legal drugs, particularly alcohol,
bleeds over to society at large. Drunken drivers kill thousands each year,
and alcohol can escalate family disagreements into domestic violence.

Those effects are so ubiquitous that they no longer seem strange. Having to
sign a log and show ID just to unplug a stuffy nose still is.

But if the cold-medicine problem seems new, it really isn't. Last year, The
Oregonian newspaper in Portland ran a series by reporter Steve Suo that
described the meth epidemic and two decades of attempts to restrict access
to ephedrine and pseudoephedrine. If law-enforcement types realized as far
back as 1986 that illegal drug manufacturers were fond of ephedrine and
pseudoephedrine, why is there still a problem? The Oregonian series
provides one part of the answer:

Drug industry lobbyists.

After the Drug Enforcement Administration had success battling the illegal
Quaalude trade by restricting access to the chemicals necessary to make the
drug, officials at the agency realized that they could use the same
strategy to battle lots of illegal drugs, including cocaine and
methamphetamine. But pharmaceutical industry lobbyists exploited all their
contacts, including their pull with the White House, to stop law
enforcement from placing any restrictions on the key chemicals in cold
medicines. The lack of restrictions scuttled any financial incentives to
replace the chemicals with versions harder for the meth cooks to distill.

Now that a crisis -- which means untold suffering and expense -- has forced
action, drug companies stand to lose millions in sales. A problem that
could have been solved decades ago wasn't. There are lessons for government
today, if some political chemist just could distill them.