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 Health & Beauty | November 2005 
Mexico Limiting Access to Meth Ingredients
 Will Weissert - Associated Press
| | The precursor and main ingredient of Methamphetamine is ephedrine. This chemical is contained in many legal drugs, including bronchodilators, like Vick's Inhalant, decongestants, like Nyquil Nighttime Cold Medications, diet pills, and therapeutic agents like Dioxin. While one or two empty bottles in the trash might indicate a bad cold or sinus problem, anything beyond that is a possible clue of lab activity. |
Mexico City - The cardboard boxes were stacked neatly from floor to ceiling, many with white importation stickers still attached. Federal agents found more than 13,000 anti-flu tablets inside them and arrested a teenager arriving in a pickup with nearly 1,000 more.
Such raids have become too common to make headlines in Mexico, where secret laboratories like the one raided near Guadalajara this month turn tons of imported cold pills each year into a flood of methamphetamine.
In response, the Americas' largest producer of methamphetamine has quietly begun imposing restrictions on the importation of pseudoephedrine, the cold-pill ingredient used to make the street drug.
This year Mexico began requiring that shipments of pseudoephedrine be transported in armored vehicles equipped with GPS tracking devices and escorted by police officers to prevent hijackings or unauthorized drop-offs.
The country limited the sale of pills containing pseudoephedrine to licensed pharmacies and it required the medicine to be stocked behind the counter. It prohibited customers from buying more than three boxes of pills with pseudoephedrine and mandated prescriptions for larger doses.
The Federal Commission for the Protection from Health Risks ruled that only drug companies can import pseudoephedrine. It canceled licenses for other distributors, turning down requests this year from 43 firms seeking import permits. Officials also opened offices across Mexico to train customs inspectors on stopping people trying to sneak pseudoephedrine into the country.
As a result, Mexico is on track to import between 130 and 135 tons of pseudoephedrine this year - 40 percent less than the 21 million cold tablets weighing approximately 224 tons that it allowed to cross its borders in 2004, according to the commission.
Individual states have begun implementing similar measures in the United States, where motorcycle gangs once controlled the methamphetamine trade.
Mexican "super labs" now dominate the industry in the Americas, producing more than 50 percent of the meth going to U.S. users, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency says. Some of the remaining supply is made in clandestine labs in California also run by Mexicans, the DEA says.
To make meth, over-the-counter cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine and similar chemicals are "cooked" and mixed with common items such as rock salt, battery acid and iodine crystals in a process that also produces toxic waste.
"It has effects that are similar to cocaine, but it's cheaper, easier to produce and easier to transport," said Luis Astorga, a sociologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who studies the drug trade. "In Tijuana, Mexicali, California is right there across the border. The labs are everywhere."
Most of Mexico's pseudoephedrine is produced in India, China and Hong Kong and distributed by legitimate European companies.
In 2004, Mexico forbade firms to import shipments of pseudoephedrine weighing more than three tons, declared a moratorium on products containing more than 240 milligrams of pseudoephedrine and trained a special group of prosecutors to handle cases where suspects are accused of using imported pseudoephedrine to produce meth.
Juan Pablo Llamas, a spokesman for Mexico's pharmaceutical industry, said the new restrictions were fine - as long as they kept drugs out of the hands of meth producers and not the sick.
"They are necessary measures, but problems are possible when they restrict the public's access to common medicines, especially during the cold season," he said. "But they are taking gradual steps that so far haven't affected sales." |
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