The crackdown on pseudo-ephedrine has been a success, but not an unqualified one. Meth remains as accessible as ever on the street, although the environmental and social damage from meth labs has certainly decreased. Meth is now primarily run by Mexican organized crime. They cook it up in superlabs in Mexico.

I don't mean to belittle the importance of local law enforcement, but the truth is that we've rarely had much luck interdicting a substantial quantity of meth. The price remains relatively stable, which is the ultimate measure of success or failure for drug interdiction. I tend to agree with Mac that the most productive expenditure of funds on the state level is on mandatory rehab for offenders. A shocking number of drug offenders are triaged as "not meeting treatment priorities" and thus do not receive (nor apparently seek) any treatment.

Drug courts are good, but have very limited capacity. Essentially, they mostly get folks for whom they are the last stop before prison, rather than the first offenders they should be taking. Frankly, a guy who's on his third bust should be going to prison, not drug court. He's the guy who's had the chances and blown them. The first timers are the ones we can still realistically save.

The interesting issue is where the precursors come from before they go into Mexico. The Mexican labs aren't making this stuff from locally available materials - they're cooking it from pharmaceutical precursors. Germany, India, and China apparently send these precursors far in excess of the local demand in Mexico. In Oregon, we can focus on organized crime, but the real payoff would be on the federal level, if we threatened to start hitting the supplier companies with tariffs if they do not stop overexporting to Mexico.

Rep. Macpherson,

Thanks for your post. You were my Rep. when I lived in SW PDX (I'm now in NE) and I was very pleased with your work and fully support your candidacy.

If I can make one suggestion, could you discuss the possibility of stopping the metal trafficking that is a scourge in Oregon (and throughout the country) that feeds directly into meth habits? By "metal trafficking," I mean scrap metal, including copper wires, statues, etc. that are stolen by thieves and then sold to scrap metal dealers for instant cash. It's a huge problem, as many schools, farms, and other properties have been severely affected by having parts of their property destroyed, often at replacement costs of thousands of dollars, so that thieves can make off with as little as hundreds or tens of dollars of scrap metal.

A simple solution that I've seen elsewhere, or at least heard of, is to institute a waiting period of 15 or 30 days from when scrap metal can be redeemed. Disallowing cash transactions and requiring photo ID (and appropriate auditing, etc.) would be big obstacles for thieves to overcome. Perhaps also placing stricter requirements on what can be scrapped, i.e. documentation for sources of copper wiring, etc.

Thanks for addressing this.

I have two questions:

1. How can the Oregon Attorney General get the entire country to adopt Oregon’s policies for pseudo-ephedrine? What will Macpherson do if he cannot make Congress and the President adopt his plan?

2. Does he have a plan for meth that keeps people from ending up in the criminal justice system? Frankly, he misses the point with drug courts. Drug courts are important and need to be funded, but a major problem is that people cannot get treatment until they have become involved in the system. What we need is treatment options for people before they are arrested and placed in the system. However, a lack of funding from the state and local government (and little chance of Bush helping out) makes treatment almost unattainable for the poor.

There were some efforts in the 2007 session to deal with the metal problem. HB 3026 prohibits scrap metal dealers from accepting metal without maintaining a record of who sold them the scrap.

While Macpherson makes a point to focus on prevention and the behind-the-counter programs, it is essential to focus on treatment and high-level enforcement in Oregon, because the supply will still exist, regardless of how difficult it seems to procure the ingredients that comprise Meth.

John Kroger has repeatedly pointed out that Oregon is second to last in the United States for the funding of treatment programs for 18-25 year olds and 45th in the nation in terms of accessibility for these treatment programs. This is abysmal and needs immediate revamping. The demand for Meth needs to be stopped through treatment, education, and high-level enforcement, not just by attempting to end the supply.

Kroger's treatment plan will focus on proven strategies like better education in schools and treatment for young adults, for parents, and for every inmate in prison who needs it. This multi-pronged approach is the only way to curb the demand for Meth and ending the demand is the key to ending Oregon's Meth crisis. For every dollar invested in treatment, the state will save nearly six dollars by precipitously dropping the overall crime and incarceration rates. Locking people up did not work to halt the Crack cocaine epidemic and it will not curb Meth's deleterious effects in our state.

I don't think we will solve the meth problem unless there is a way to sever all conections some of our citizens (and non-citizens) have with Mexico.

Macpherson writes about supplying the Oregon State Police with more financing, yet this is only a small piece of the puzzle. John Kroger's focus will be to work with the legislature and with treatment experts, police chiefs, district attorneys, and sheriffs to craft a new drug treatment and prevention program for Oregon. Kroger will provide enforcement agencies with more investigative support and use the district attorney’s assistance program to help convict big dealers and send them to prison. The solution is not to lock up addicts, because this only hurts their lives and leads to more violence and addiction issues in the future.

These enforcement officials will trust Kroger’s treatment plan, because as a former federal prosecutor, he has experience at working with high-level enforcement officials to stop dangerous criminals. Kroger will reorganize and rebuild the Attorney General’s organized crime section and get that unit focused on investigating and prosecuting the drug cartels. Kroger promises to sit down with enforcement officials when he becomes Attorney General and listen to their concerns, while reassuring them that ending the Meth epidemic is one of his top priorities.

The key to solving the Meth epidemic is to focus on both supply and demand. Over the counter policies can only do so much, because if the demand is not curtailed, the suppliers will find a way to get their product to addicts. Kroger’s plan is to focus on treatment and education, which will diminish the demand side of the problem. Supplying enforcement agencies with more investigative ability and promising cooperation from the Attorney General’s office can halt the supply. Kroger is the only candidate with a realistic and comprehensive plan to end the scourge of the Meth epidemic.

Cudos. Keep up the great work on the meth problem, the approach seems reasonable given the economics involved. At some point, individuals must be accountable for their addictions, and suffer the consequences. Government cannot, nor should it, be expected to expend untold sums on treatment. Drug courts using a holistic approach are of great benefit to reduce the impact, and focussed treatment should be administered in prison. Resources for parents and educational programs help provide tools for prevention. Beyond these efforts comes individual responsibility. Bottom line, until the addict steps up, there is no hope for salvation.

I agree with the comments that Oregon's meth problem can only be solved by focusing on treatment and then cracking down on out of state traffickers. I do not know if Macpherson is the best candidate for A.G. I have checked out his stance and Kroger's and I feel that as a former federal prosecutor, Kroger will actually be able to get results in the state. Kroger seems to have a more comprehensive approach to this problem, and I do think it is an epidemic in this state. Macpherson may be a fine legislator, but I do not think he is deserving of being Oregon's next Attorney General. Kroger can actually provide much needed results.

Who is the media consultant powering Mac's campaign? Just wondering...

Two years ago, Kulo, Mac, Kro, and a lot of mainly white, upper-middle class, pols explicitly advanced a values proposition in which the high social cost of transforming the meth problem into an "organized crime" crisis was less than that of far wiser solutions to a homegrown problem. They did so because as Blue Oregon commentators demonstate, Oregon is a relatively homogeneous state, and that distorted value proposition therefore played well politically regardless of party affiilation.

Now he and Kroger, vague and meaningless mumblings about treatment and prevention notwithstanding, are both actually running on a traditional contemporary Republican tactic of fundamentally playing the fear card that we have to fight and thereby escalate the "drug war". Of course, they are also hooking into nativism against brown-skinned criminals, which will pull in a few more critical votes, albeit in that polite, elistist, liberal way of their political base, Anybody know where these two stand on things like RealID, no knock search-warrants, "relaxed" search-and-seizure, and increased cooperation with militarized federal drug enforcement --- of course just because, wink, wink, they will be going after "those people" who diminish your quality-of-life?

It was Republicans starting with Nixon, with a lot of help from the kind of venal Democrats one finds in the NW, who created the whole framing of "drug war" purely for domestical political purposes. So it's fitting that these two empty politicians have in truth made this the key issue in their campaign for an office that has been increasingly politicized by the legislature through bipartisan effort over the last decade.

It is really disgusting that all we care to demand in Oregon are three really unworthy candidates like Mannix, Macpherson, and Kroger for A.G.

Just FYI, Claritin itself cannot be used as a precursor for meth. It doesn't contain pseudo-ephedrine. Its active ingredient is loratadine. Claritin-D does contain pseudo-ephedrine along with loratadine, but it's now apparently behind the counter. Some of the reformulations contain phenylphrine, which has the same effect as pseuo-ephedrine, but cannot easily be used to make meth. Some people complain that phenylphrine doesn't work as well, but the evidence suggests that it does.

Pat Ryan brings up a good point. This issue isn't either or. Early intervention in the form of meaningful education is one such approach. It isn't the ONLY approach. For some really interesting approaches check out the Southern Oregon Meth Project.

Unfortunately, treatment is not effective. The revidivism rate of math addicts is northward of 90%. Education, in step with mandatory life sentances for trafickers would be a good next step. Of course, contol of the borders would be a good step as well.

The war on drugs approach that reflects so well small-minded American puritanism dooms our attempts to deal with extremely dangerous but seductive drugs like meth. It is very difficult to make young people understand how nasty the stuff is when they hear the same level of condemnation of every illegal drug. If they have already smoked a few doobies and made it to school the next day, why should they take warnings about meth seriously?

GAO looked into the allegation that phenylephrine is less effective than pseudoephedrine. Here's the link... http://oversight.house.gov/documents/20060922172818-85162.pdf

That being said, drug interactions will vary with an individual, so I certainly wouldn't make a claim about any particular individual's reactions. The evidence just seems to be that overall there's not much difference.

The public policy decision was really that the convenience of certain individuals did not override the very real public safety concerns with pseudo. You can still get pseudo, after all, you just have to have a prescription (or go over the border, I guess).