METH'S LOCAL CURSE GROWS INTO U.S. CAUSE

Pivotal Year - Fighting The Drug Becomes A Congressional Priority
Before Stalling In A Bill That Lawmakers Vow To Revisit

WASHINGTON -- The revolt began June 14.

That day, members of the congressional Methamphetamine Caucus bucked
Republican leaders who were trying to pass a key spending bill on the
House floor. Put more money into state and local anti-meth programs,
they demanded, or we'll make you.

As the amendments rolled in, it began to look as if the bipartisan
coalition of Western and Midwestern lawmakers might have the votes to prevail.

Virginia Republican Frank Wolf, as chairman of a powerful House
spending committee, was duty-bound to defend the budget against
last-minute changes. But Wolf, who shared the firebrands' desire to
do more about meth, made clear where his sympathies lay.

"Whether you win or lose on this, we will get together and see what
we can do," Wolf told the House. And, he challenged his colleagues to
go further: Take on the lobbyists who for two decades had watered
down regulations on cold medicines used to make meth.

"If you really want to do something, stand up to the drug industry,
which this Congress will not do," Wolf declared.

That moment marked a turning point. In the months that followed,
Congress united behind sweeping legislation that would target
production of the drug by controlling access to the cold medicine
that is its essential ingredient.

Lawmakers were propelled by a grassroots uprising in small towns
across the country that began in Oklahoma and Oregon and quickly
spread to dozens of state legislatures and the nation's capital. The
debate was informed by a growing realization in Washington that the
meth trade was uniquely vulnerable to disruption because it relies on
pseudoephedrine, a chemical made in a handful of factories worldwide.

In Washington, lawmakers repeatedly cited stories by The Oregonian
that documented meth traffickers' vulnerabilities and showed Mexican
drug cartels were obtaining tons of pseudoephedrine legally imported
by Mexico's pharmaceutical industry.

Along the way, key legislators in the House and Senate took up Wolf's
challenge to seek more than just money to fight meth. They drafted
legislation that riled the drug industry lobbyists, including one
bill that would place cold medicine behind the counter in every
pharmacy and convenience store.

Through much of the debate, the White House officially stood on the
sidelines. Meanwhile, two federal agencies worked behind the scenes
to scuttle parts of the congressional plan.

The story is not over. The wide-ranging meth bill that House and
Senate negotiators crafted in November stalled Dec. 16, when the
controversial legislation to which it was attached -- a renewal of
the USA Patriot Act -- died by filibuster.

Some supporters of the meth legislation fear that lobbyists and
administration officials will renew their push for loopholes. But
senior lawmakers from both chambers are on record embracing what was
once a radical notion: that control of meth ingredients is a national
priority. Backers say they intend to pass the bill as written when
Congress reconvenes next month.

Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said his visits home tipped the balance
between combating meth production and keeping pseudoephedrine readily
available to consumers -- as demanded by "pharma," Washington
shorthand for the drug industry.

Walden recalled a rugged cowboy from Eastern Oregon who approached
him in tears one day last spring and described his daughter's meth
addiction. Walden said the man told him, "I don't know that she'll
ever get better than where she is now."

"For those of us who have gotten up close and personal to it, in
meetings and discussions, you realize this problem is hollowing out
our communities," Walden said.

"After a while, you say, 'I understand what you're saying, pharma; I
understand what you're saying, retail community. I'm a business
person by background. But I have to tell you, the problem we face is
so very significant that we're going to have to endure these
inconveniences -- and so are you.' "

Murder In Oklahoma

Major legislation can almost always be traced to a galvanizing event
that sends lawmakers scrambling for solutions. In 1986, the cocaine
overdose of basketball star Len Bias spawned new federal penalties
for drug dealers. In 2001, the Enron scandal led to tougher corporate
oversight.

The national movement to curb sales of pseudoephedrine began with the
murder of Oklahoma State Trooper Nik Green by a meth cook on Dec. 26, 2003.

Four months later, Oklahoma's governor signed the "Trooper Nik Green
Act," which confined sales of pseudoephedrine products to licensed
pharmacies and required customers to sign a logbook. Drug industry
lobbyists had defeated similar proposals in Arkansas and Oregon,
arguing consumers would suffer. But this time the debate turned on
the growing threat to police officers.

"The climate in Oklahoma at the time was extremely different from
anything we'd experienced in the past," said Kevin Kraushaar, a
lobbyist for the Consumer Healthcare Products Association.

In October 2004, Oklahoma officials presented the initial results of
the new pseudoephedrine law at a conference of police and sheriffs
from 34 states: Lab seizures were down 40 percent since April, a drop
that would later hit 80 percent.

The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics was flooded with phone calls.
Everyone, it seemed, wanted to copy Oklahoma's law. Officials from a
group of about 20 states began exchanging e-mails and meeting in
person to draft their own pseudoephedrine bills. The group remained
in frequent contact throughout 2005.

"A lot of it is quarterbacking how to deal with the damned lobby,"
said Iowa's drug czar, Marvin Van Haaften, a former sheriff.

Van Haaften, who had tried before to get Iowa lawmakers to enact
stringent pseudoephedrine legislation, this time had 140 citizens
groups on his side. Members of those groups and dozens of uniformed
police officers acted as a counterweight to industry lobbyists at
public hearings.

Oregon was the first to adopt Oklahoma-style limits. By January,
dozens of other states were ready to follow. U.S. Sens. Jim Talent,
R-Mo., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., were crafting identical
legislation that would apply nationwide.

Industry groups retreated to Washington. Long opposed to federal
limits on retail sales of cold medicine, they now began to consider
supporting such limits in Congress -- if the legislation also blocked
states from acting on their own.

A New Reality

The climate was changing in Washington. Meth was no longer seen as a
purely regional issue. Members of Congress began to understand the
international dimensions of the meth trade. Police and prosecutors
added their voices to the debate for the first time. And the
interests of cold sufferers were no longer seen as paramount.

As the year began, Pfizer Inc. said it would reformulate the
best-known cold medicine on the market, Sudafed. Phenylephrine, which
cannot be converted to meth, would replace pseudoephedrine. In one
bold move, the company tore a hole in the industry's argument that
pseudoephedrine was indispensable.

Meanwhile, the battle for pseudoephedrine limits in the states had
mobilized a disciplined army of law enforcement officials. As Talent
and Feinstein crafted their federal legislation, the cops persuaded
them to match a newly approved Iowa law considered even more
stringent than Oklahoma's.

By summer, the senators were ready to unveil a bill that was as tough
as any state's, yet enjoyed the support of drug retailers because it
would replace the growing patchwork of local rules.

There was just one hitch: No matter how strong the bill drafted by
Feinstein and Talent, activists in the states refused to have their
laws overturned. Two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee,
Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., agreed.

"The point is, look, pseudoephedrine is going to go away anyway,"
Coburn said. "They're all converting to phenylephrine. So it's a
short-term problem.

"Why," he asked, "should you pre-empt, with the federal government,
something that works?"

The Judiciary Committee approved the tough Feinstein-Talent
legislation unanimously -- minus the provision that would override state laws.

Mary Ann Wagner, senior vice president of the National Association of
Chain Drug Stores, said she learned about the reversal from the
group's lobbyist while she was in Indiana.

"He was on the phone trying to do what he could," Wagner said. "But
there really wasn't any stopping it."

An International Approach

While the Senate was moving forward with controversial restrictions
on cold medicine, the House was drifting in a different direction.

House members were more sympathetic to trade groups opposed to
domestic sales restrictions. The groups noted that home meth cooks,
using retail quantities of pseudoephedrine, manufacture only
one-third of the meth sold in the United States. About two-thirds
comes from Mexican-run "superlabs" that use tons of pseudoephedrine
acquired internationally.

A 2004 investigation by The Oregonian showed that successful efforts
to choke off the supply of pseudoephedrine to drug cartels during the
1990s had produced temporary but significant meth shortages, leading
many users to quit.

Now many business groups said they would support increased scrutiny
of foreign manufacturers of bulk pseudoephedrine, U.S. import quotas
based on legitimate demand, along with tougher penalties for
traffickers and increased funding for local law enforcement.

It was an approach on which business and law enforcement could agree,
and it interested several House members.

But the international approach enjoyed little momentum until June.

On June 5, The Oregonian disclosed that drug cartels were diverting
tons of pseudoephedrine from Mexico's legitimate pharmaceutical
industry. The newspaper found that Mexico's imports had soared to
double the amount needed by consumers.

Reps. Mark Kennedy, R-Minn., and Darlene Hooley, D-Ore., began
working on legislation to compare global production of
pseudoephedrine with legitimate demand, help Mexico better track its
imports, and penalize countries that fail to control the black market
in chemicals. The provisions would soon receive near-unanimous
support on the House floor.

Then, on June 14, the floor fight on money for meth programs erupted.

"If this administration is not going to come up with a meth strategy,
then this is the way it gets done on the House floor, amendment by
amendment, in a fairly chaotic way," said Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind.,
chairman of a House subcommittee that oversees drug policy.

Each amendment drew progressively more votes from Democrats and
dozens of Republicans who bucked the authority of Wolf, the spending
committee chairman. Finally, one passed: Washington Democrat Brian
Baird's plan to divert $20 million from the Census Bureau to anti-meth efforts.

For members of the meth caucus, the votes signaled something more
significant than the dollars involved. Meth was now a hot-button
issue for a majority of House members.

Souder quickly convened a closed-door, "members-only" meeting in his
office with about 20 House lawmakers, including Wolf, who was now an
active participant.

The group pored over a loose-leaf binder showing all the House meth
bills languishing in committee. Hooley wanted to allow U.S. officials
to seek sales records from overseas pseudoephedrine factories. Souder
proposed import quotas on pseudoephedrine. Others wanted lab cleanup
measures and aid to drug-endangered children.

Members who had been toiling along independently could see they
already had the skeleton of a broad meth bill.

"We realized we had appropriators and we had chairs of committees who
could make this happen," Hooley recalled. "I started to begin to
believe that we could get something done this year."

A Rush To The End

By fall, Republican leaders were ready to put their weight behind not
only the House's novel international meth legislation, but also the
Senate's limits on the domestic sale of cold pills. Their support
followed a series of summer headlines that pushed meth further into
the national spotlight.

The National Association of Counties in July had announced that 58
percent of the 500 sheriffs surveyed by the group considered meth
their leading drug problem. Weeks later, Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales called meth "the most dangerous drug in America," words soon
echoed on the cover of Newsweek.

Erik Lieberman, a lobbyist for the National Grocers Association, said
the media coverage spurred an emotional response in Congress,
prompting legislation that would force law-abiding Americans to
"suffer through the night with congestion and coughing."

"There was just a rush to get behind anything that had 'Combat Meth'
on it, or anything with the word meth on it," Lieberman said. "The
details weren't scrutinized extremely carefully."

When the Senate approved Talent and Feinstein's pseudoephedrine bill
in September, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., was a
co-sponsor. He said a Tennessee prosecutor had told him "the single
greatest impact we could have on reducing meth abuse" would be a
nationwide pseudoephedrine law.

The legislation moved to the House, where industry groups scored
their only major victory of the year. Pseudoephedrine products could
be sold by any retailer -- not just pharmacies -- as long as they
were kept behind a counter and customers signed a log. The change
cleared the way for House negotiators to accept the Talent-Feinstein
bill in November as part of their broader package of international controls.

Frist and Blunt, now House majority leader, said they wanted it
passed by year's end.

The Bush administration appeared ambivalent. Drug Czar John Walters,
repeatedly accused by lawmakers of not speaking out loudly enough on
meth, began publicly praising the bill in December.

But quietly, the Food and Drug Administration opposed pseudoephedrine
sales restrictions, according to Marc Wheat, staff director for
Souder's drug committee. An FDA spokeswoman referred questions from
The Oregonian to the White House drug czar's office, where officials
could not be reached for comment on Friday.

The State Department separately warned that tying U.S. foreign aid to
pseudoephedrine control would backfire. In a Nov. 8 memo to
lawmakers, the agency said it considered "a voluntary approach, based
on mutual benefit, most effective in eliciting cooperation in
chemical control."

Efforts to pass a bill by year's end stalled, but Frist said last
week the Senate would take up the meth bill "very early" in the 2006 session.

Hooley said she had warned Oregon officials it would take time for
Congress to act. She is now confident it will because of what
happened this year.

"I said, 'Once some other members get hit with methamphetamine, we're
going to be able to do something, but it's going to take more than
just the West Coast people doing something about it,' " Hooley said.
"That's exactly what happened."