RGJ coverage of meth
Sunday’s Reno Gazette-Journal included a sweeping overview of how methamphetamine is impacting our community.
In addition to relating a series of heart-breaking stories about how meth can destroy lives and families, the paper provides some analysis on the local drug trade and concludes:
The “mom-and-pop” meth lab seems to be going the way of all mom-and-pop operations of the past: the gas station, the hardware store and the grocery.
According to local law enforcement, whereas meth cooks once learned the recipe from family members or sold it for more drugs, Mexican-based drug-trafficking organizations now rule the meth trade in Nevada, producing pounds of high-quality crystal methamphetamine in superlabs in California and Mexico and slipping the drug across the border.
“Firefighters stand watch as a single-wide mobile home in the Mark Twain subdivision of Storey County burns up in 2002. Authorities had discovered a meth lab in the mobile home and decided to torch it rather than clean it up because of contamination.” Caption and photo credit: RGJ and Lisa Tolda.
This is, unfortunately, misleading.
At the recent Methamphetamine Summit, legal counsel to Oregon’s Narcotics Enforcement Agency Rob Bovett cautioned Nevada policy makers that local labs, and their impacts to our environment and the children who live in the midst of their toxicity, could be on the rebound.
Methamphetamine is unique among illegal narcotics in that restricting the supply of its key ingredient, cold medicine pseudoephedrine, can wipe out the drug. Rob’s concern is that increasing regulation on the international supply in response to the scurge could have the unintended consequence of increasing the number of local meth labs to supply addicts with the drug.
It is still far too easy for a meth cook to retrieve pseudoephedrine from stores. Even with limits on the number of packages that can be purchased and the requirement that an id be showed, cooks can still “smurf” their materials- going from store to store until they’ve secured the mass quantity needed for meth production.
Similar to states like Oregon and Nevada, we need to do more to deny pseudoephedrine from the criminals that cook meth that ends up in the hands of our children and families. The Legislature needs to act this next session to accomplish this.
View my previous posts on the methamphetamine problem.
June 29th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
Meth is even more frightening due to the fact that it enhances sexual longevity, leading to an increase in HIV and other STD transmission. The largest population of new HIV and STD infections are between the ages of 18 and 24, due largely to the methamphetamine epidemic.