Taking Aim at Loopholes in Drug Laws

When a convicted drug trafficker hired a Sacramento lobbyist in 1986 to influence the Legislature, lawmakers and police officials considered his move an unusually brazen subversion of their efforts to control the production of methamphetamine.

But every day, in seedy apartments, secluded rural homes and small warehouses across San Diego County, street chemists are engaged in a more subtle but no less serious cat-and-mouse game with the California Legislature.

Every time the lawmakers pass a measure intended to crimp their trade, the drug makers try to find a way around it, usually by changing chemical ingredients to invent new drugs not yet outlawed, police and federal drug agents say.

Knockout Blow Sought

Now Assemblywoman Lucy Killea, a San Diego Democrat, has authored a bill that she and some law enforcement officials say they hope will deliver a knockout blow to the drug labs. The measure, which has been approved by the Legislature and sent to Gov. George Deukmejian, would outlaw all substances with chemical structures or effects on the body similar to those of methamphetamine, a type of speed.

“This bill allows law enforcement to move ahead of street chemists who are constantly creating and selling new drugs,” Killea said.

Deukmejian is expected to sign the bill.

But some law enforcement agents worry that Killea’s latest bill will fall victim to the same ingenuity that has allowed many drug makers to stay in business despite several recent efforts by Killea and others to shut them down.

“We have that on the federal side and it hasn’t been the be-all and end-all,” Ron D’Ulisse, spokesman for the Federal Drug Administration in San Diego, said of Killea’s bill. “It’s helpful. It means we don’t have to wait two or three years for something to become against the law. But it doesn’t address the acquisition of the chemicals. That’s where the real problem is.”

Since 1986, the Legislature, prompted largely by complaints from San Diego law enforcement officials, has passed at least a half dozen bills aimed at the methamphetamine business. Among other things, the state has:

* Required sellers of certain “reportable substances” used in the production of methamphetamine to obtain permits from the state Department of Justice.

* Classified ephedrine, a key ingredient in the manufacture of methamphetamine, as a reportable substance.

* Outlawed the possession of certain combinations of ingredients used to manufacture methamphetamine.

* Outlawed the possession of more than $100,000 in cash or checks knowingly gained through illegal drug deals.

* Increased the fines on chemical distributors who repeatedly violate the state’s permit and reporting requirements.

The story of the chemical ephedrine illustrates how difficult it has been for the Legislature to get the upper hand on the drug makers. Once ephedrine was placed under regulation less than two years ago, the chemists have come up with at least six unregulated variations of that chemical, which plays an important role in the “cooking” of the ingredients used to produce the stimulants.

Those six variations of ephedrine would be outlawed by Killea’s most recent bill.

Despite the frustrations, Phil Donohue, special agent in charge of the San Diego office of the state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement, said the ongoing legislative efforts have helped local, state and federal drug agents put a dent in the drug lab business.

Supplies Harder to Get

More than anything else, he said, the regulation of ephedrine and its variations has forced the drug makers to go as far as New Jersey and the state of Washington to obtain their supplies.

“We have really curtailed the ability of these guys to go locally and buy this stuff,” Donohue said. “Even though some have chosen to go out of state, others have been put out of business.”

This year, for the first time in five years, drug agents have seized fewer drug labs than they did the previous year. D’Ulisse said 186 labs were seized in San Diego County between Oct. 1, 1986, and Sept. 30, 1987. Since then, just 96 labs have been raided in the county.

Because fewer labs have been seized, law enforcement officials believe fewer labs are operating.

“The cops are working just as hard, yet they’re catching fewer of them,” Donohue said. “There are either fewer labs or they’ve moved to other areas in other states.”

U.S. drug agents in May seized business records of Quantum Labs, a Carlsbad firm where agents found equipment used to manufacture methamphetamine. A raid of a Quantum affiliate in Salt Lake City turned up 1,800 pounds of ephedrine, D’Ulisse said.

Then, last week, federal agents seized three chemical supply plants in San Diego and Los Angeles counties, shutting down what they described as the “granddaddy” provider of chemical and equipment to more than 2,000 methamphetamine labs around the country.

The plants were run by Robert J. Miskinis, who has long been the target of federal probes into his role in the distribution of the chemicals and equipment needed to make the drugs.

It was Miskinis who in 1986 hired a veteran Sacramento lobbyist to win a six-month delay in the implementation of new state regulations on ephedrine. After Miskinis’s role in winning the delay was revealed, lawmakers rushed through legislation to move up the effective date of the new rules.

Miskinis, who was convicted of drug trafficking in Los Angeles in 1982, has not been charged with any crime in connection with the current case.

Although the two recent raids were run by federal agents using federal law, Donohue of the state Justice Department said the racketeering charges agents expect to pursue against both operations will rest in part on evidence that neither company fulfilled the state reporting requirements for the sale of regulated chemicals.

D’Ulisse said he was troubled that the raid on Miskinis’s operation, known as RJM Labs, turned up a new chemical--benzyl cyanide--that is not one of those required to be reported to the state.

“What we saw was going to be the next formula in common use in the manufacturing of methamphetamine,” he said.

He added that recent studies of inmates booked at the San Diego County Jail show no downturn in the use of methamphetamines. In a test of inmates booked at the jail one day last month, 28% tested positive for methamphetamines. In a similar screening six months ago, 23% were positive.

‘Meth Capital’

Several agents agreed that San Diego continues to deserve its reputation as the “meth capital” of the United States.

“The fraility of most of the legislation aimed at chemicals is there is always another chemical,” D’Ulisse said. “There’s always some other chemical out there that can be used.”

Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda), who has authored legislation on this issue, said cracking down on methamphetamine labs is like “trying to grab Jell-O.”

“These chemists are very smart,” Katz said. “There’s a lot of money involved. Someone is paying them a ton of money to get around the law. You can’t possibly legislate every possible variation of the chemical out of existence because some of them we haven’t even heard of.”

Several law enforcement sources interviewed for this article suggested that they see a new, strict regulation of the retail chemical industry as the only hope for closing down the methamphetamine labs.

“There needs to be a civil law regarding the licensing of these retail chemical outlets,” said David Sparks, a narcotics detective with the Escondido Police Department. “To be a barber in this state, to work on cars, to do acupuncture, you are required to have some sort of state certification. But there’s no license required for chemical retailers.”

D’Ulisse added: “They don’t even have to know the difference between battery acid and baking soda.”

Licensing Process

The narcotics investigators envision a state licensing process in which those who sell chemicals would have to show some knowledge of the industry and have a clean criminal record. Then, anyone caught selling chemicals without a license could be prosecuted without the need to tie them to the drug trade.

“It cleans up the industry,” Donohue said. “It makes it so you don’t have criminals involved in this kind of business. You’d have people who are concerned about the people they’re selling their chemicals to.”

It is not clear how the chemical industry would respond to such a proposal. Bonnie O’Meara, chief executive officer of Rho-Chem in Inglewood and a former member of the board of the National Assn. of Chemical Distributors, said she would welcome such a licensing procedure as an alternative to the cumbersome paper work that will result if more and more individual chemicals come under government regulation.

“To me it seems OK if it would be that the companies were investigated to determine that they are responsible citizens of the state and that they had no one within their company who would try to bypass the routines set up for the sale of those chemicals,” O’Meara said. “That would be workable.”

Both Katz and Killea said they would probably be willing to carry such legislation if law enforcement representatives said that licensing was the only alternative.

“The legitimate chemical dealers ought to have no problem with that,” Katz said. “If the paper trail is not working, we ought to look at a new step. You try to stay one step ahead of them but you’re not always successful.”