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You aren't talking about anything new here and none of the methods you describe would keep the number of small batch meth labs anywhere close to current levels. You have to understand that the vast majority of these little labs all over the place are just producing little small amounts of meth, often mostly or only for personal consumption. For the most part, these guys are putting out in the neighborhood of two to ten grams per batch. Some gets sold. Most is probably consumed by the cook and the those helping gather the supplies.

These guys in these little labs are able to convert somewhere between 50% to 70% of the pseudoephedrine they collect into meth. So a single 24 count box of 60 mg pseudoehedrine tablets will make around three quarters to a gram of powerful meth. With ten boxes they could produce somewhere between seven to ten grams of meth.

An important thing to consider is that other substances are required to make meth. Some are easy to get in sufficient quantities to produce it, others are not. For instance, some methods require anhydrous ammonia gas which is tightly controlled and the only way most of these guys can get it is to risk stealing from farmers. That stuff isn't available everywhere by any means. Where I live, they usually use methods involving the use of iodine crystals and red phosphorus. Iodine crystals are watched pretty carefully but through additional processes can be made with iodine you buy at the store. Red phosphorous is hard to get. What most seem to be doing around here is buying cases and cases of books of matches and scraping off the strike pads which contain about 40% red phosphorous. Making a small batch of meth requires scraping the strike pads off of several thousand books of matches. It's not exactly an effortless process and for the most part what you see is a cook and several helpers out gathering the supplies necessary and helping in the process of scraping matchbook strike pads and that sort of thing for each batch they cook up. The difficulty in obtaining the necessary chemicals and refining them to the point necessary for use in cooking meth is probably why most of these guys out there cooking dope are only cooking a few grams at a time.

On the other hand, since it's not too awful difficult or expensive to cook up a couple of hundred dollars worth of meth in a day or two, a lot of people are doing it and keeping themselves and the people that help them supplied with enough dope to keep them tweaking pretty much nonstop, and this is producing a lot of addicts and contributing to a lot of problems we see locally at least. They're cooking up batch after batch of dope and the reason they are able to do this is that they are able to get the base substance, pseudoephedrine, so easily on an ongoing basis. If they weren't able to get several boxes of pills everyday they wouldn't be able to do it.

Now, you made some suggestions for how they could keep this thing going. First you suggest that they could just smuggle the pseudo in from Canada. That's what the big labs are doing already. They smuggle pseudo and other chemicals in in large quantities from places like Mexico and to some extent from Canada. But a tweaker in some place like Arkansas, Texas, or Missouri who now gets his pseudoephedrine supply from Walmart, the gas station down the street, and a couple of convenience stores and grocery stores, isn't going to have the resources or the know how to get a steady supply of pills smuggled in from Mexico or some other country. The people smuggling the stuff in from those places aren't going to want to deal with him anyway. They make their money supplying big labs. Their customers wouldn't appreciate them cutting into their business by supplying small labs all over the place, and they wouldn't do it anyway because it would dramatically increase their chances of getting caught if the had to make relatively small sales to great numbers of unstable drug addicts cooking dope in their kitchens. If any of those guys get popped, they're rolling over on their suppliers in a heartbeat if they think it might save them from going to prison for a long time.

Tweakers who cook small batches of dope could also order their pseudo on the internet. I deal with these types of people though and from what I've seen most aren't the types that have internet access. A lot of them don't have their own homes. They're sleeping on people's couches until they overstay their welcome and go crash at the next place. If they do have an apartment or a rent house somewhere most of them can't even keep their basic utilities turned on and if they ever had a computer they pawned it a long time ago to buy dope. If they don't have a steady supply of pseudo tablets in town, most of them won't be cooking any dope. And if they do order large amounts on the net on a frequent basis, odds are that's going to get them caught eventually when postal worker or law enforcement spying on the net catch on.

Extracting ephedrine from ephedra producing plants wouldn't keep these guys going either. First off, these plants do not grow wild everywhere here and the species that grow in America only contain trace amounts if any of the stuff needed to make ephedrine. If they could get some of the more potent Chinese stuff growing here, it would still be a difficult, time consuming, and expensive process to produce enough ephedrine to make meth. It wouldn't be worth the trouble. I don't know the exact process for getting ephedrine from these plants, but I do know that it requires an awful lot of plant material and chemicals to produce a small amount of ephedrine. The only place where they were doing that was in China and I'm pretty sure they've gotten out of the business there because it was so much cheaper and easier for factories to produce synthetic ephedrine products.

And if it all it takes is cooking it down in a crock pot with red phosphorus and iodine, where are they going to get all the red phosphorous? That's going to take a heck of a lot matchbook strike pad scraping to come up with enough red phosphorous to do that and cook up the batches of dope. It's just not going to be a feasible alternative for the average tweakers on the street now cooking their dope with pseudoephedrine tablets to come up with large quantities of the right kind of ephedra producing plants and produce sufficient quantities of ephedrine from them to cook their batches of dope.

You also mentioned phenylacetone. With this stuff, you don't even need pseudoephedrine. But I think you do need methylamine, which as you mentioned in a previous post is not exactly easy to get. I don't know how hard it is to get phenylacetone but without methylamine it doesn't really matter. Both are DEA list I chemicals, not exactly easy to pick up at the grocery store. These chemicals are most often used in huge P2P labs in Mexico or out west where organized crime groups somehow get access to large quantities of illegal precursors.

I don't like the government's war on drugs because of the harm I see it causing with little or no positive results to show for it. Normally I find myself disagreeing with their methods and normally I wouldn't advocate passing more laws and controlling more substances. But in this instance I think tighter controls on peudoephedrine would be a good idea. It won't stop the flow meth, but it will drastically reduce the number of little small batch labs that are constantly operating out there.

We'll still have the big labs. The government estimates that now only about 15% of the meth on the streets is coming from little kitchen meth labs. I don't know how accurate that is and I imagine it's going to vary depending on where you live, but I do know that even in a place like where I live where little meth labs are everywhere most of the stuff for sale on the streets is coming from the Mexicans who are either getting in from south of the border or out west somewhere.

There are good reasons for cutting the number of little small batch "labs" down though even if it might not have much of an effect on the overall meth supply. These things are a major nuisance. They cause an awful lot of local environmental damage which is expensive to clean up. In many instances innocent children are in the homes where this stuff is being cooked and the vapors, chemicals, and so on are contaminating these homes and causing these kids all sorts of serious health problems. These little labs are also keeping a lot of people tweaking constantly on high doses of this junk and that makes them a nuisance. I could spend forever telling you about all of the crazy things these idiots do around here when they've been up for days on end and they start getting paranoid, delusional, and hallucinating. It's not good, and without dirt cheap or free meth there wouldn't be so many in that condition.

I also think these little labs create addicts. Contrary to what you hear from some people on these threads, lots of people play around with meth and never get addicted. What happens with these little labs though is people will help family members, friends, or acquaintances (often met in jail after being picked up for some minor offense) gather the supplies and do the work necessary to cook batches of dope and they'll get free or super cheap dope out of the deal. Sooner or later most of these people who weren't already addicts are going to become addicts after doing large amounts of the stuff for an extended period of time. Then a lot of them are going to be out there causing us all kinds of problems like the other meth addicts I see going through our judicial system over and over again. Without all the little labs enabling these people to get cheap or free dope there would be as many addicts causing problems out in our community and costing us a fortune on law enforcement, judicial system, and prison costs.

I'm still convinced that putting the pseudophedrine behind the counters in pharmacies as Oklahoma has done will drastically reduce the number of small batch meth labs operating in and around our communities. The inconvenience to legitimate consumers would be minimal, and the pay off would be substantial, as we can see from the 80% reduction in meth labs in Oklahoma. It would save us a lot of money and heartache if we could reduce the number of small batch meth labs by 50% or even 25%, and results like that would be far better than anything the standard bust 'em and lock 'em up drug war as usual method could produce.