http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/meth-pseudoephedrine-big-pharma-lobby
THE FIRST TIME she saw her mother passed out on the living room floor, Amanda thought she was dead. There were muddy tracks on the carpet and the room looked like it had been ransacked. Mary wouldn't wake up. When she finally came to, she insisted nothing was wrong. But as the weeks passed, her 15-year-old daughter's sense of foreboding grew. Amanda's parents stopped sleeping and eating. Her once heavy mother turned gaunt and her father, Barry, stopped going to work.
She was embarrassed to go into town with him; he was covered in open sores. A musty stink gripped their increasingly chaotic trailer. The driveway filled up with cars as strangers came to the house and partied all night.Her parents' repeated assurances failed to assuage Amanda's mounting worry. She would later tell her mother it felt "like I saw an airplane coming in toward our house in slow motion and it was crashing." Finally, she went sleuthing online.The empty packages of cold medicine, the canisters of Coleman fuel, the smell, her parents' strange behavior all pointed to one thing. They were meth cooks. Amanda (last name withheld to protect her privacy) told her grandparents, who lived next door. Eventually, they called police.Within minutes, agents burst into the trailer. They slammed Barry up against the wall, put a gun to his head, and hauled him and Mary off in handcuffs. It would be two and a half years before Amanda and her 10-year-old sister, Chrissie, would see their father again.The year was 2005, and what happened to Amanda's family was the result of a revolution in methamphetamine production that was just beginning to make its way into Kentucky. Meth users called it the "shake- and-bake" or "one-pot" method, and its key feature was to greatly simplify the way meth is synthesized from pseudoephedrine, a decongestant found in cold and allergy medicines like Claritin D and Sudafed.
with a drug problem that comes from out of country they waste millions on a fruitless effort, but when it comes from big pharma it's a corporation and there is nothing to be done, big business gets the ride and the people most affected by their careless and apparently un or underregulated "
business" go to jail and rehabs that are only interested in the bed count.
business" go to jail and rehabs that are only interested in the bed count.
Shake and bake did two things. It took a toxic and volatile process that had once been the province of people with Breaking Bad-style knowledge of chemistry and put it in the bedrooms and kitchens of meth users in rural America. It also produced the most potent methamphetamine anywhere.If anyone wondered what would happen if heroin or cocaine addicts suddenly discovered how to make their own supply with a handful of cheap ingredients readily available over the counter, methamphetamine's recent history provides an answer. Since 2007, the number of clandestine meth sites discovered by police has increased 63 percent nationwide. In Kentucky, the number of labs has more than tripled. The Bluegrass State regularly joins its neighbors Missouri, Tennessee, and Indiana as the top four states for annual meth lab discoveries.As law enforcement agencies scramble to clean up and dispose of toxic labs, prosecute cooks, and find foster homes for their children, they are waging two battles: one against destitute, strung-out addicts, the other against some of the world's wealthiest and most politically connected drug manufacturers. In the past several years, lawmakers in 25 states have sought to make pseudoephedrine—the one irreplaceable ingredient in a shake-and-bake lab—a prescription drug. In all but two—Oregon and Mississippi—they have failed as the industry, which sells an estimated $605 million worth of pseudoephedrine-based drugs a year, has deployed all-star lobbying teams and campaign-trail tactics such as robocalls and advertising blitzes.
money and those addicted to it have no conscious when it comes to getting more is it a curse that what they bring to those they addict comes back and addicts them as a by product just not as devastating as the former? this has been around the streets for years gov't especially CIA proliferated Black neighborhoods with crack cocaine of course they denied it but is it that far fetched given the things we know now about our duplicitus gov't in those days of Reagan ans such?
