Nick Reding (24 page)

At first he kept to the edge of the sidewalk. Then, he said, he pulled his parka hood over his head, shielding his face. He
thought about Buck and his penchant for building forts, and how a small boy convinces himself that to be unseeing is magically
equivalent to being unseen. For a block, Major walked with his hood pulled tight and his head down. Then he threw the hood
back. He was getting panicky now, and he started moving along the snow-covered lawns, nearer to the houses, drawn by the shadows
of the awnings and the frozen, screened-in porches.

Soon Major was panting beneath a tree, in the throes of what felt to him like a paralyzing, vomitous meth withdrawal—a full
three maddening years since he’d smoked his last foil. All the paranoia came crashing back on him, knocking the breath from
his lungs with a force like a wall of water. His vision tunneled, and he began sweating. His heart raced as he puked on the
frozen snow. When he was done, he started running—jumping fences and looking behind himself in utter terror in a mad dash
to make it back home to his child and his parents, driven suddenly by a desire not to escape, but to get caught. He wished
to hear the sirens that wouldn’t come. To have looked back and seen the police would have been a relief. Anything would have
been better, Major said, than the invisible force that bore down on him from behind.

EPILOGUE

HOME AGAIN

I
n June 2008, I moved to St. Louis with my wife, having lived away from my hometown for eighteen years. During the first week
I was there, the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
newspaper ran daily stories about a two-state murder rampage. First, as the killer was in the midst of his spree; then as
he was apprehended; and finally, as the details of his situation made themselves clear. The murderer’s name was Nicholas Sheley,
and he was from Rock Falls, Illinois, about eighty miles east of Oelwein. In the three hundred or so miles between Galesburg,
Illinois, and Festus, Missouri, near St. Louis, Sheley beat or bludgeoned to death eight people in five days. The whole time,
he’d been high on crank.

In addition to the Sheley story, the
Post-Dispatch
ran several pieces during my first two weeks home about meth manufacture in Jefferson County, Missouri, which is just outside
St. Louis. Jefferson County had become famous in 2005 for having the highest number of meth labs in America, as measured by
the number dismantled each year. Missouri led the nation with 2,788 labs busted in 2005, and Jeff County, as it’s called,
had an astounding 259 of them—nearly twice that of the next leading Missouri county of Jasper. Given that most police officers
with whom I spoke figure they dismantle only one in ten labs at best, that’s as many 2,600 labs at work in rural, bucolic
Jefferson County back in 2005. According to the
Post-Dispatch
, after a brief but precipitous fall in meth-lab busts during 2007, once the Combat Meth Act had passed, Jeff County was on
track by June of 2008 to have 200 labs dismantled by year’s end: a clear indication that the batchers were back.

The feeling I had while reading the stories of Jeff County and Nicholas Sheley reminded me of the feeling I had when I first
started researching for this book, in May 2005. As I drove around Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, California, Georgia,
and Alabama that summer and fall, there was a genuine sense of shock and fear in the towns I visited. People were confused
by the thought that, somehow, just down the street or on the other side of town, a drug that could be made in a sink was making
people do crazy things. Not long before I met Phil Price, the former special agent in charge of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation,
he’d had to arrest a good friend of his—forty-five years old, a father of three, and a new meth addict. Price, backed by the
SWAT team, had talked his friend of two decades out of a motel room in rural Canton, Georgia, where the man had taken his
own nine-year-old son hostage. It doesn’t take many stories like this to make people question what they know about one another
and about themselves.

The notion that the small-time crank business was back in full force was vexing to me as my wife and I settled into our new
neighborhood. It was also frightening. One of my principal motivations for wanting to write this book is that my wife, who
grew up in a small town in rural New York, is a recovering alcoholic. I have thought on a thousand occasions: What if meth
had been as easily available when she was a teenager as it is now? What if crank, instead of booze, had been her drug of choice?
It’s reasonable to suggest that I’d have never met her. Now she was pregnant with our first child. The notion that nothing
had changed—for James and Sean in Greenville, for Jeff County, for the place in which I would soon raise my family—was more
upsetting to me than it had ever been. Like the mothers and fathers I’d met in Canton and Benton and Oelwein in 2005, I wanted
to know what kind of world my child would inhabit, and how things had gotten to be this way. It was as though I was back where
I had started three years before.

According to DEA, the Combat Meth Act was supposed to have effectively killed the home-brewed crank business. According to
the nation’s drug czar, meth was dead. If we were to worry at all, it should be about the DTOs, not batchers in Jeff County.
So why had the epidemic shifted in the one way that could not have been predicted? Now that meth making had come back home,
as it were, people were once again comparing the drug to some kind of supernatural evil, just as had been common in 2005 and
2006. People were starting to panic all over again.

In order to put things in perspective, I called Tony Loya. An hour-long conversation with him not only confirmed that meth’s
genome had reassorted itself once again; it suggested something like a reversion to 1996, after Gene Haislip had finally succeeded
in passing a law monitoring the use of powdered pseudoephedrine. Meth seizures that year went down, along with purity, signaling
the first major DEA triumph over the drug’s spread. Of course, the victory was pyrrhic, once traffickers switched to the pill-form
pseudo that drug lobbyists demanded remain unmonitored. The watering down of Haislip’s 1996 law is what opened the door to
the single most destructive period of meth’s recent history, culminating nine years later, in 2005, with the highest rates
ever of both domestic and international production of the drug. Now it was becoming clear that, in the wake of the Combat
Meth Act, a new and destructive era of the meth epidemic was already under way.

Loya is five feet six and slightly built. The first time I met him, in a secure room at the Federal Building in San Diego,
he appeared behind photochromic gold-rimmed glasses and a deep tan to be in exorbitantly good health for a man of fifty-nine.
Loya had the looming and insistently charismatic presence of a Vegas entertainer. He’s been a government employee for thirty-nine
years: first with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement (BNE), then with DEA for twenty-five years, and now with
the National Methamphetamine Chemical Initiative. He is thoroughly a company man, preternaturally slow to criticize the government
or any government agency. He considers American industry “the reason we lead the world” and advocates the fiscally conservative
desire for small government and limited regulation. Recent developments, though, had truly stretched many of Loya’s convictions.

What was clear the day that I talked to Loya on the phone—nearly three years to the day after first meeting him in San Diego—is
that he in some ways has found himself playing the role of Gene Haislip. Loya was one of architects of the Combat Meth Act.
He also had unprecedented success in persuading the Mexican government to outlaw pseudoephedrine imports into the country
in 2007, thereby depleting the amount available to the DTOs. Loya is proud of his work. He is also growing weary, four decades
after going to work for a government that, as he put it, “seems ever willing to give new life to the same damn problem it
purports to solve.” He went on, “Every decade, we get a chance to put meth on the mat once and for all. And we always fail.”

According to Loya, the failure of the Combat Meth Act is, like the failure of Haislip’s 1996 law, the direct result of lobbying
related to the pharmaceutical industry. The guiding philosophy behind the Combat Meth Act was to lessen domestic crank production
by monitoring the sale of cold medicine nationwide. According to Loya, DEA gave Congress three stipulations for doing so successfully.
One, the means of monitoring would have to be federally mandated, as opposed to being left up to individual states. Two, pharmacies
would need to track cold medicine sales via computer, rather than through handwritten logs. Three, said Loya, DEA insisted
that pharmacists’ computers would need “stop-buy” language built into their monitoring programs—meaning that if a customer
who has already purchased the monthly maximum of Sudafed tries to buy more, the computer will automatically prompt the pharmacist
to disallow the sale, or “stop the buy.”

This time, it wasn’t Allan Rexinger’s Proprietary Association that objected to the key elements of a piece of antimeth legislation;
it was the National Association of Retail Chain Stores, which represents, according to Loya, the five major pharmaceutical
drug chains in the United States: Target, Wal-Mart, CVS, Walgreens, and Rite-Aid. The organization’s acronym, Loya noted sardonically
on the phone that day, is NARCS.

While the Combat Meth Act was being debated in 2006, lobbyists on behalf of NARCS argued that a “stop-buy” clause in the legislation
would make pharmacists and retail employees into policemen. Why, for example, NARCS asked, should CVS employees have to tell
a customer that he can’t buy something? Rather, NARCS said, the data should simply be made available following the sale to
local police, at which point the police could do as they saw fit. The stores would be willing to comply, but they should not
have to do so at the potentially unfair loss of sales.

The counterargument, as Tony Loya characterized it, was this: “Does refusing the sale of alcohol and tobacco to minors amount
to ‘policing’?

“Yes,” Loya went on, “it does. And the drug chains have been doing that without complaint for years. So what’s the difference
if they have to tell a few people that they can’t buy more than a certain amount of Sudafed? But the lobbyists insisted that
any attempt whatsoever at keeping track of sales is a threat to their financial health. It’s just not true.”

In the end, Congress rejected the “stop-buy” language. More important, Congress resisted DEA’s pleas that the law’s interpretation
be federally controlled. Instead, Congress decided to make the Combat Meth Act more of guideline than an actual mandate, leaving
specific interpretation to state governments. This, according to Loya, effectively laid the law bare to the powerful NARCS
lobby. Meantime, the law’s leading advocates and negotiators—Republican Congressman Mark Souder and Senator Dianne Feinstein,
Democrat of California—declared the legislation a groundbreaking blow to meth.

Loya characterized the failure of the Combat Meth Act in terms that would have been all too familiar to Larry Murphy back
in 2005. States, he said, just like towns and counties, are businesses. Poor states like Missouri, just like poor towns like
Oelwein, are loath to risk straining relations with chains like CVS and Rite-Aid. Back when Larry Murphy made the decision
to rebuild his town by rejecting businesses that weren’t good for the community, he reconciled himself to the risk that Oelwein
could become poorer still, and that he would be blamed. Oelwein gambled and won in 2005 and 2006. Missouri, faced with an
implicit threat to its already teetering economy from NARCS, chose to play it safe, refusing to adopt DEA’s “stop-buy” language
in its interpretation of the Combat Meth Act late in 2006. At the further behest of NARCS, Loya said, the state legislature
allowed pharmacies to rely on handwritten logs of cold medicine sales, thereby saving chains the need to buy new computer
programs. A year and a half later, Missouri once again has the highest per capita crank production in the United States.

“Here we are,” Loya said, “the most technologically advanced nation in history, and we have thousands of people writing hundreds
of thousands of names in notebooks. We pass a law, and then we basically tell these huge companies that they’re not responsible
for complying. It’s stunning.”

In reaction, the cottage meth industry has become more efficient than Loya ever imagined. Beavis and Butt-Head labs have become
more like midlevel operations, he said. Smurfing has become an industry in its own right. Having developed not just local
but also national distribution chains, Smurfers drive from state to state and region to region buying cold medicine and selling
it to increasingly productive and organized networks of batchers. Locally, Smurfs pay pharmacy employees to ignore the fact
they are stealing cold medicine.

“CVS or Walgreens employees,” said Loya, “make more in two minutes of pretending not to notice theft than they make in a week
of standing behind the counter. It’s a no-brainer.” As a result, Loya said, lab numbers are still down compared with their
all-time highs in 2004 and 2005, but production is way up.

What’s more, Loya’s sources indicate that cocaine seizures along the Mexican border are at a twelve-year high, noting that
the last time cocaine was so heavily consumed was in 1996, when Haislip’s law briefly depressed the DTOs’ meth market. Loya
attributes the increase in cocaine seizures this time to his own hard-fought success with getting the Mexican government to
limit pseudo imports. What Loya fears, though, is that local meth producers will keep the market alive while the DTOs, flush
with money from a booming cocaine business, will have time and capital not only to recover from a temporary setback, but to
become even stronger.

“I mean,” Loya said, “I’m stuck in a time warp. It’s twelve years ago all over again, with the Mexicans biding their time
with cocaine till they can figure out a way to get back the part of the meth business we just took away. Will they go to Canada
for pseudo, or North Korea, or Colombia? Who knows. My guess is Canada. What’s certain is they’ll go somewhere. Because the
addicts are here. The money is here. The Smurfs are keeping everyone high while the Mexicans reorganize.”

Loya noted that the DTOs will never abandon the meth business—no matter how good the cocaine market—since, with meth, the
DTOs control manufacture, distribution, and retail. Meth is a peach of a business. It’s also possibly, as Patricia Case once
noted, “the most American drug.” Coupled with the American mania for work, it’s as though meth’s ever-reassorting genome is
a part of our own. As Loya’s friend Bill Ruzzamenti, another former DEA special agent in charge, once said to me, “Meth truly
will never go away. It can’t. It’s too big a piece of what we
are
.”

While Loya waits to see what the DTOs will do next, he continues to privately negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and
the retail chains that sell their wares, in order, as he put it, “to make them see what’s at stake.” The hope is that if NARCS
will take the pressure off state legislatures, they might amend their meth laws to look more like what Loya and DEA had in
mind all along.