Our International Efforts: Canada and Mexico
By their very nature, synthetic drugs present special challenges. Production often takes place in industrialized nations, and because the drugs are made in laboratories and not harvested from fields, there are no crops to eradicate, as with marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. Supply reduction efforts must instead focus on limiting access to precursor chemicals, shutting down illegal labs, and breaking up the organized criminal groups that manufacture and distribute the drugs.
Disrupting the synthetic drug market requires strengthening international and domestic law enforcement mechanisms, with emphasis on flexible and rapid communications at the operational level. We must be as nimble as the traffickers who fuel the market, developing policies and methods that allow us to adapt quickly and seize every opportunity to disrupt the trade, with a particular emphasis on chemical control efforts.
Most of the methamphetamine consumed in the United States is manufactured using diverted pseudoephedrine and ephedrine. This internal production is dispersed among thousands of labs operating throughout the United States, although a relatively small number of "super labs" are responsible for most of the methamphetamine produced.
To counter the threat from methamphetamine, we and our neighbors, Mexico and Canada, must continue to tighten regulatory controls on pseudoephedrine and ephedrine, thousands of tons of which are smuggled illegally into the United States each year. Controls on other precursor chemicals, such as iodine and red phosphorus, are equally important.
In recent years, an inadequate chemical control regime has enabled individuals and firms in Canada to become major suppliers of diverted pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine producers in the United States. The imposition of a regulatory regime last January, combined with U.S.-Canadian law enforcement investigations such as Operation Northern Star, appears for the moment to have reduced the large-scale flow of pseudoephedrine from Canada into the United States. There are signs that some of this reduction has been offset by the diversion from Canada of ephedrine.
Pseudoephedrine diversion from Mexico is also a serious threat to the United States. Once the drug is diverted from legal applications, numerous drug trafficking organizations efficiently smuggle it across the Southwest Border and ship it to major methamphetamine labs in the United States, many of which are managed by Mexican traffickers. During just two months last year, authorities made seizures totaling 22 million pseudoephedrine tablets that were being shipped from Hong Kong to Mexico. In addition to the pseudoephedrine threat from Mexico, methamphetamine is produced in Mexico for onward shipment to the United States-more than a ton of methamphetamine was seized on the Southwest Border last year.
