Oregon Public Broadcasting

It's been four years since Oregon changed its laws to make pseudopehedrine a prescription drug.

April Baer reports now on Oregon’s struggle to get the jump on meth abuse, and how progress toward that goal is measured.

Oregon became the talk of the West Coast for making pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient for illegal meth, a prescription drug.

And yet you don’t have to go far to hear about how meth is still very much in circulation.

Todd Eno:  “I’m Todd Eno. I know a few friends of mine that are into it. I do once in a while.”

Eno spent last Sunday morning at a North Portland grocery store, feeding bottles and cans into the recycling machine for some change.

He’s beyond skinny, emaciated, really, his long blue  jacket hanging on him like a scarecrow’s coat. 

He says he definitely noticed changes between the meth that’s on the street now, and what was sold when pseudoephedrine was easy to get.

Todd Eno “It’s a lot different. MSM is what they’re using.”

Eno’s talking about Methylsulfonylmethane -- one of several alternative meth ingredients you can still get over the counter.

Todd Eno: “You go in there and buy that for a couple of bucks, spend two or three dollars and you can smoke all you want.”

But he says, it’s not as strong as what was on the market before.

But while some  Oregonians are still using meth,  there are big changes  in how meth is manufactured and distributed in the state.

A Marion County officer assigned to a DEA Task Force agreed to talk to me about this. We’ll call him "Jeff," just in case he needs to go undercover again. He used to stake out drug stores  and supermarkets to chase meth cooks.

Jeff:   “Five or six years ago, we could sit out in and wait for the guys to show up, follow them right to the lab. It was that simple.”

Jeff and his colleagues have made some progress during the pseudoephedrine crackdown. 

Arrests for meth production, trafficking, and possession trended down between 2006 - the year pseudo became a prescription - and last year.

Even officers who were skeptical about the change admit they’ve seen a shift. They’re relieved to find fewer biohazards on crime scenes.

At the same time, Jeff says the days of swooping in on meth cooks coming home from the drug store are long gone.

Jeff:  “We obviously can’t do that anymore. We deal with informants, people that are charged with crimes that want to talk.  We continue to run with troopers on the highway running interdictions, stuff like that.  Working narcotics is the darker side of the business sometimes.”

And getting darker. Jeff says one thing the pseudoephedrine law also changed: when Oregon’s mom & pop shops started to shut down,  and drug trafficking organizations solidified their hold on the meth trade.

John Deits  “We’re looking at an entirely different target group."

John Deits is the Assistant U.S. Attorney for Oregon who oversees drug prosecutions. A significant supply of meth rolls south into Oregon from Canada, but Deits spends most of his time and energy these days on the supply flowing north from superlabs in Northern California and Mexico.

It’s a vastly different problem than locally-based "Do It Yourself" meth producers. There are language barriers to deal with, an increasingly well-armed adversary, plus the limits of geography.

John Deits: “The leadership of these orgs is not always in our jurisdiction. In order to go after leadership, we have to change the methods of investigation and prosecution.”

Prosecutors are dealing more than ever before with colleagues in California, and places even farther south. They rely  more than ever before on electronic surveillance, mostly in the form of wiretaps.

Walt Beglau  “I can tell you one thing, it’s very tedious work."

Walt Beglau is District Attorney in Marion County, sited right on the main artery for drug running, the I-5 corridor.

Walt Beglau “ There’s a lot of watching. The goal is to disrupt them. It’s really not about how many of them you actually catch and prosecute under the law. It’s can you take their business organization either down, or disrupt that organization, and stop the flow of narcotics into the community.”

It’s tough to pin down how this part of the work is going.

State records show drug convictions dropping dramatically  since the war on meth geared up, and the pseudoephedrine ban was enacted: Prosecutors  won 8516 drug convictions in 2005 compared to about 5800 last year – that’s about a 38 percent drop.

But that may not reflect cases in which prosecutors made plea deals to get testimony, or situations in which perpetrators were convicted out of state.

It makes for a frustratingly opaque picture of  how effective anti-meth laws have been.

Bill Piper is National Affairs Director for the Drug Policy Alliance Network. Oregon was the first state to make pseudoephedrine a prescription drug.

The U.S. Congress later passed restrictions on the drug, but left regulatory enforcement methods up to the states, and Oregon's law is still considered one of the toughest in the nation.

But Piper says Oregon was definitely out front in restricting access to pseudoephedrine. But he says it’s clear meth hasn’t disappeared as a driver of addiction and property crime.

Bill Piper   “Meth labs are down, but most of what you call meth labs weren’t 'labs'. A lot of law enforcement in a lot of states, if they went to a house and someone was making meth in the kitchen sink - most cases that was for persona use – there was a tendency to call that a lab largely because they had to prove they were busting up these labs to get more money. That’s  not at all a criticism of law enforcement, it’s more a criticism of the funding streams, which kind of distorted incentives."

Piper says  it’s a little too soon for policymakers to say whether the the pseudoephedrine law helped or hurt. There are officers around the state who say the law really cut down local meth production, which caused a slew of environmental and social problems.

But others say it’s eliminated some homegrown competition for large drug trafficking organizations. There’s general agreement these groups are regaining the influence they had before the "Mop & Pop" meth labs set up shop in Oregon.

Rob Bovett, for one, is not looking back. The District Attorney for Lincoln County is one of the state’s most vocal advocates on meth interdiction, and chaired the now defunct Meth Task Force.

Rob Bovett   “What I promised the Oregon legislature is a dramatic reduction in meth labs, not in meth.  That was really just one piece of our overall strategy to get handle on the meth epidemic.

Bovett says the policy changes that were made in 2005 were  important. He only wishes the flow of meth ingredients could have been similarly choked off in California and Mexico.

He’s made trips to Sacramento this year, trying to convince California to follow Oregon’s lead.