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"Or maybe it just means the cookers have hidden themselves better. Any evidence that the street price of meth has gone up, or use gone down?"

It is highly unlikely that the cooks have hidden themselves better to the extent that 80% more than last year are getting away with it especially since Oklahoma is now spending a lot more money and effort busting these people. What's going on is that most of the labs out there were little small batch kitchen labs and these guys can't get enough pseudoephedrine to make it worth their while to cook dope anymore. I have property in Oklahoma, know a lot of lawyers and cops there, and am generally there once a month or more. I also have a lot of clients from there, and what they are doing is going into neighboring states to get their pseudo if they happen to live close to the border. The reduction would probably be greater if neighboring states had the same laws.

As for price going up and use going down, we aren't going to see a tremendous amount of that because most of the meth people are using out there is not coming from these little labs, it's coming from big labs out west and in Mexico. What I think we will see though is a little less problem use of the drug. I'm in an area where an awful lot of people are cooking dope and tons more are helping out, both by gathering supplies and helping in the cooking process which can be labor intensive especially if they are using the red phosphorous/iodine method and gathering their red phosphorous by scraping it off of matchbooks. These people are getting free dope this way and doing much more than they would be able to do if they had to pay full price for it. What I'm seeing as a public defender is that an awful lot of my clients who are getting in trouble all the time are involved with cooking dope. I truly believe that we'd see less people around here become hardcore addicts, the problem users, if so much dope cooking wasn't going on.

Let me give you one example of how cheap these guys are able to get dope. A couple of weeks ago I handled a case where my client had a deal with a guy where he'd get an eight ball (3.5 grams) of meth for every twenty boxes of pseudoehedrine tablets he brought him. The cook was using the "nazi method" with anhydrous ammonia which is not a common method around here and he was cooking up about a quarter pound per batch which is a whole lot more than most of these guys out there scraping the matchbook strike pads for red phosphorous are cooking up per batch. My client and two others were caught leaving a store where they had just purchased several boxes each of pseudoephedrine. He had told the other two he was getting two grams for twenty boxes and they were helping him in exchange for a half a gram each plus he'd smoke some of his with them.

Normally, people are paying $25 for a quarter gram, $50 or so a half gram, and an eighth of an ounce generally goes for $250 if they buy that much at one time. So however you calculate it he was getting between $250 and $350 worth of meth for twenty boxes of pills which they could get for well under $50 buying (or stealing) generic from discount stores. That's some pretty cheap dope, and my client had conned his friends such that he was actually getting two and a half grams in exchange way less than that because they were putting up most of the money to buy the tablets. They were doing this several times a week, and you know the guy putting out a quarter pound per batch had several others out there collecting pills for him who would recruit others to help them just like my client was doing because it takes a heck of a lot of pills to make a quarter pound of dope.

So think about this, we're in a small rural county with a population of less than sixty thousand and we get several cases every month involving meth labs, and you know as well as I do that they are probably only busting a small fraction of these guys. So many of my clients admit to me that they've been involved with cooking it. That's all people seem to talk about over in the jail, where to get supplies, where to cook it, how to cook it and get the best yields, and so on. It's being cooked everywhere around here and so many out there who wouldn't be able to afford to do it very often (this is a poor county) if they had to pay full price are getting it dirt cheap or even free by cooking it, or helping gathering supplies, or providing a trailor home or something out in the boonies to cook it in.

You know as well as I do that most people who use drugs go through a phase in their lives where they fool around with these things and then they grow out of it without becoming addicted and without causing anyone any real problems. I fooled around with drugs myself. I even messed with some of the hard stuff. Cocaine was a lot more popular than meth back in those days and I messed around a little with it, but I was young and I didn't have much money to blow on it. I'd wake up the next day and think of all of the useful things I could have bought with all the money I had blown the night before and it would just make me sick. I liked it, but because of the expense it could only be something for special occasions for me. If I could have gotten it dirt cheap or free I probably would have done it a lot more.

The situation is pretty much the same with meth. Most of these people are young, and most don't have any money. Meth is pretty expensive and most who mess around with it don't do tons of it both because most at least don't want to become addicts and because they could afford to do much of it anyway. But now a lot of these people are seeing that they can get meth almost for free by doing nothing more than going out and buying a few boxes of cold medicine. That's a pretty big temptation. There isn't much else to do around here and fooling around with drugs is kind of fun. I don't think anyone wants to become an addict but you know how it is when you are young and invincible. None of these people think they'll be stupid enough to get caught or week enough to become addicted, yet it happens to a percentage of these people and the more they do this stuff the greater the likelihood becomes that they'll end up with a lifelong addiction.

These guys involved with cooking it are often able to do huge amounts of dope day in and day out. That's almost a sure fire way to get hooked. Not only that, but we keep getting cases where these kids are tweaking for days on end without sleep running around paranoid thinking aliens or whatever are out trying to kill them. They totally lose it, and I see these cases all the time. A lot of the time it's sort of funny because they'll do something stupid like jump in a cop car and tell the cops Salvadorians are chasing them with laser guns or aliens are spawning everywhere just like in a video game killing everyone in sight, but sometimes the outcomes aren't so funny at all. Some of them get violent.

We'd see less of that if there wasn't so much dope cooking going on. We'd probably have close to the same number doing meth, but not so many would be doing it constantly such that they become hopeless addicts and/or crazy nuts who are a menace to society. In other words, I believe it would reduce problem use.