The National Methamphetamine
Drug Conference
Keynote Luncheon Address
Thomas A. Constantine, Administrator
Drug Enforcement Administration
Often a drug or crime problem does not seize the attention of people in Washington until it has affected a city, town, village or state. This is the issue with methamphetamine. I will discuss how the DEA learned about this problem and what we are doing to address it. I will also show the value of this conference and the impact you can make on this drug problem.
DEA Administrator Tom Constantine describes enforcement efforts against drug trafficking organizations. |
A small group of chiefs of police met in San Diego in May, 1995, to discuss the drug problem, drug leadership and organizations from Colombia. At the end of the meeting, representatives from the California Narcotics Officers Association and the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement asked if they could spend extra time with us. They brought a series of reports about and indicators of the methamphetamine problem in California. They asked if we would examine the data to determine if their situation were unique, and if it were not, to develop programs at the national level.
We found the situation was not limited to California. The methamphetamine problem had moved to the Southwest and to the Midwest, where there had been a tripling of hospital room admissions for the use of methamphetamine. We looked further, and in Oklahoma City, there were 12 deaths related to methamphetamine in an 18-month period. In the next 12-month period, there were 36 deaths, a major increase for that community. I immediately recognized that the Iowa situation was as good an empirical study as one could possibly get about an emerging drug problem.
I tasked two DEA staff, Catherine Shaw and Dave Luitweiler, to organize a conference to learn about the issue. We decided this would not be a conference where the feds would dictate what the problem was and what the solution would be. Having been on the other side of a number of those events over the years, I knew such an event was an inadequate way to address the problem. I wanted input from the people who know the problem best: Law enforcement on the front line. We invited state and local law enforcement to give us their knowledge of the problem and make recommendations to address it. We were able to issue a report. We got tremendous support from Attorney General Reno and General McCaffrey, and the follow-up actions of these two conferences, here and in San Francisco, are extremely valuable.
Methamphetamine is a very dangerous and violent form of drug trafficking. Drug trafficking, in general, began with crack cocaine in 1985 and changed from a nonviolent criminal enterprise to an extremely violent one. It is no coincidence that trafficking of methamphetamine and other synthetic drugs carries the same amount of violence. Compared to crack, methamphetamine may have more potential impact on violent crime and may create more danger for law enforcement officials.
Methamphetamine trafficking and production are different from other drugs because they are dangerous from beginning to end. It is a very dangerous action when untrained people decide to manufacture a fairly sophisticated synthesis of chemicals and precursors to make a drug. These unsafe practices result in a continual series of explosions and fires that injure or kill not only the people and families involved but also law enforcement officials or firemen who respond to clandestine laboratory sites. Environmental damage is another consequence of these improper actions, and violence is a part of the process.
If you are a uniformed law enforcement officer, you are probably exposed to potentially violent situations. These can include a domestic complaint or a barroom fight, a boundary dispute or a traffic stop, but such encounters all have the potential for violence. Usually a well trained and well-equipped officer can control a tense situation before it becomes dangerously violent. However, when confronting a paranoid and delusional person, the usual tactics are often worthless. These times are, perhaps, the most frightening part of an officer's career.
In the DEA, where our focus is on trafficking of drugs and criminal activity, we have two very distinct problems with trafficking in methamphetamine in the country. The first, and by far the largest, is an organized crime problem. In a fight for organized crime control of the methamphetamine and ephedrine market in San Diego in 1993, there were 26 homicides involving a major international organized crime group out of Mexico and local street gangs in San Diego. The second are the small laboratories for individual usage. Drug trafficking has now created a tremendous organized crime system throughout the world that visits us with a vengeance. The individuals who control a great deal of this methamphetamine trafficking are much more powerful than Gigante, Gravano or Gotti.
And what makes them so powerful? These organizations have the ability to obtain wholesale, multi-ton quantities of precursor chemicals. They have access to tremendous smuggling and distribution routes. They traffic many drugs, from marijuana to black tar heroin to cocaine. It is very easy to move methamphetamines using the same people, the same group, and the same strategy.
The Amezcua brothers are the best example. The Amezcuas are the experts on the importation of ephedrine into Mexico, and they control the methamphetamine trafficking. From 1993 to early 1995, the Amezcua brothers took a trip throughout the world and bought 170 tons of ephedrine. This makes 120 tons of methamphetamine. We at DEA are continually tracking these patterns, but the drug trafficking organizations are resilient. They can also be very effective in creating a demand for new drugs where none existed previously.
The other trafficking pattern is small labs known as "mom and pop" labs. Police refer to them as "Beavis and Butt-head" labs, which gives you a sense of the individuals who are involved. In Missouri, our DEA officers, along with the state and local agencies, are almost beside themselves trying to handle the number of investigations, lab entries, lab seizures and environmental cleanups. There were 12 labs seized in 1994, 236 labs seized in 1996, and we estimate we will take down almost 500 labs in 1997.
What is our response to these two problems? First, we are improving our skill at attacking organized crime. For example, we have a joint group with the DEA, the FBI, virtually every other federal agency, and as many as 40 or 50 state or local agencies. This group has evolved into a major organized crime investigation unit we call the Southwest Border Strategy, which involves about a hundred organized crime investigations with more than 1,000 court-ordered wiretaps—400 this year alone. These wiretaps are important because they are the only way we can get into these groups. Undercover agents cannot penetrate these organizations. Informants are reluctant to cooperate because they are often foreign nationals whose families are under threat of execution if the informant cooperates with law enforcement.
An emerging problem with wiretaps, however, is with encryption systems. Director Freeh has taken a lead on this issue because this is a major technical problem, a developing modus operandi for communication systems to be encrypted. It is difficult for us to translate a jumble of numbers rather than a conversation. We now find, especially with the groups from Mexico and Colombia, continual encryption of any key conversation, and the level of encryption devices seems to grow continually. We must develop technology to counter this encryption problem.
The second action we took was to increase our investigations from 1,500 to around 2,500 per year. Our Mobile Enforcement Teams (MET) are groups of DEA officers who can move anywhere, go into a community where there is a problem with drugs and violence and help local law enforcement resolve the problem. We help make the arrest, and the police chief or local sheriff or prosecutor takes the credit for it, and we move to another community. We have done this in Nebraska; I met with a sheriff, and he was ecstatic he had received that kind of assistance.
Third, we are training state and local officials to conduct clandestine lab seizures. Unlike executing a search warrant, seizures require a very elaborate protocol that most law enforcement people do not know. DEA has trained 540 state and local officers this year, and we will train an additional 800 next year. We have tripled the numbers of trainers, and we have regionalized the training with a site in Kansas City, Missouri, and another one in San Diego. We are developing a database with the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement at the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC) to track all of the laboratory sites which, heretofore, has not been done.
Fourth is the issue of rogue chemical companies. Pseudoephedrine is becoming the precursor drug of choice for laboratories, large or small. The traffickers have taken advantage of this drug. More importantly, some companies not interested in the legitimate manufacture of the drug are now supplying the traffickers. DEA focused on one, and, in less than one month, that one has already purchased more than 90 million pseudoephedrine tablets, totaling more than 1.8 billion tablets a year. This number presumes all of us have terminal asthma, every man, women and child in the country. This is not true, of course; they use it for other purposes.
Fifth, we are developing law enforcement/business partnerships. We heard this idea from a workgroup at the San Francisco methamphetamine conference. The workgroup suggested DEA develop a program link with the legitimate drug industry that would determine where the diversion of the precursor chemicals was, and what might be done to address it. Our DEA employee in St. Louis, Dave Walkup, worked out an arrangement with Wal-Mart, a major manufacturer with a great deal of technology. With its price-scanner technology, Wal-Mart is now able to limit sales and control pseudoephedrine purchases.
Finally, DEA is making its facilities available to over 90 senior executives from industry associations, major wholesale distributors, manufacturers and retail distributors. It is our hope to form workgroups to help legitimate industry control the problem -- not to overregulate them -- and to improve our ability to pursue criminal enterprises. This is a classic example of business and law enforcement working together to solve a problem without resorting to regulatory law. We are seeing the same positive experience in California with Price-Cosco and Shucks Market.
DEA Administrator Constantine, Senator Kerrey, and Director McCaffrey greet participants at an evening reception. |
These are just a few of the initiatives and problems we face in fighting methamphetamine abuse. Allow me to conclude with this thought, based upon my 34 years of law enforcement experience: We can make this a better world. There was a generation before me in age, fading and dying, that saved America. They went through the Depression, through World War II, and made sacrifice after sacrifice. As a result of their efforts, we now have a generation that lives in a land of opportunity and opulence without threat of world war. We have an economy with low inflation that provides a job for anyone who wants to work. We can take care of our basic needs and still buy the latest products on the market. Behind this success, however, is the ugly drug problem that destroys our children and erodes our greatness.
I think it is our responsibility in this generation, like never before, to save our country from drug abuse. It may not be as dramatic as World War II and the Depression, but we have the responsibility and an opportunity to ensure methamphetamine does not become the crack cocaine of the 1990s. If we miss this opportunity, I believe we will visit upon our children and grandchildren a country unworthy of those sacrifices made by the past generation. This is a great country, and if we work hard, we can defeat this drug menace. Thank you very much.
