I'm reading in the Oregonian on 10-04-04 that the plague of meth users who are in turn generating a plague of car thieves, identity theives and child abusers has been aided and abetted by a wholly legal effort by pharma to kill efforts to trace and stop the sale of the precursor drugs used in the manufacture of factory size batches of meth. The movement of those precursor drugs was stopped at one point by legislation introduced to control the spread of the epiphedrin and pseudophedrin from producers to the criminal cartels which run meth production on a wholesale basis.

Drug company lobbyists objected to the added burden which would have been placed on the legal drug manufacturers to document the distribution of their product and to the stricitures which would have been placed on over-the-counter purchase of products containing epihedrine and pseudophedrine. Members of both parties in the government and both houses of the legislature in Washington DC yeilded to the legal, though not legitimate, wishes of pharma to safeguard profits made by drug manufacturers. The Drug Enforcement Administration then watered down proposed legislation and eviserated what has in the past been effective control of the means of production and distribution of illegal drugs at the source of the production of raw materials.

The forces which came together in Washington DC to derail a promising plan to stop the meth epidemic were a perfect storm of self-interest which ignored any concern for anything else. The greater good of our civil society was abandoned.

When powerful lobbyists, weak-kneed politicians and ineffectual regualtors combine to allow the disaster of methamphetamine addiction to play out on neighborhood streets it has to be called what it is, corruption.

Did you think that corruption only occurs when a cash-stuffed envelope is passed from one grubby hand to another in some back room?

No. Corruption happens when politicians who know what watering down a potentialy effective law will do to the ability to enforce that law choose to vote to anyway because they are hoping to salvage their big campaign donation from pharma.

Corruption happens when the unholy diety of any and all drug profit must be protected at the cost of the safety of whole communities.

Corruption comes when those who are entrusted with the enormous task of creating an effective set of regualtions to help law enforcement and medicine get at the crushing societal burden of drug addiction don't speak truth to power in the hearings in which the weak-kneed legislators and the amoral lobbyists collude to ignore the evidence of illegitimate use of legal precursors to create a death dealing and community destroying product.

Call it what it is. Corruption