WASHINGTON — Illegal meth labs have become scarcer and their federally funded cleanups cheaper, a new report shows.
Since 2006, when Congress passed an anti-methamphetamine measure, the number of meth-lab cleanups nationwide “has decreased significantly,” auditors found. Investigators attribute the decline to the law that made it harder to buy key chemicals used in illicit drug production.
“DEA officials attribute the decrease in cleanups … to the passage of the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, which imposed significant restrictions on the sale of pseudoephedrine to methamphetamine manufacturers,” inspector general auditors noted.
The report doesn’t indicate whether meth use in the U.S. has declined. In recent years, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime said last month, meth production “was displaced over the border to Mexico.” The amount of methamphetamine seized near the U.S.- Mexico border nearly doubled from 2007 to 2009, the annual U.N. drug report stated.
The federal Drug Enforcement Administration funded the cleanup of 11,790 methamphetamine labs in fiscal 2005. By fiscal 2008, the most recent year for which figures are available, the DEA funded the cleanup of 3,866 labs. Sixty-six were in Colorado.
Contract improvements and other revisions also cut the average cost per lab cleanup from $3,600 in fiscal 2007 to $2,200 in fiscal 2009, auditors with the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General noted approvingly.
The anti-meth law, signed by President George W. Bush in 2006, limits the amount of pseudoephedrine that can be sold, moves products containing it behind pharmacy counters and requires record-keeping.
