Each time laws make methamphetamine manufacture difficult or impossible, domestic cooks or drug cartels find ways to circumvent the laws so they can continue to provide meth addicts with the drugs they seek.

Time after time, legislators make their best attempts to curb methamphetamine abuse by trying to legislate away the problem. But time after time, the business of making and selling methamphetamine just changes shape to keep up with the changes.

This pattern started back in 2004 when domestic methamphetamine production ran rampant across the US, especially the West and Midwest. As there were no restrictions on buying pseudoephedrine-containing cold medication, meth cooks could just stock up on the precursor chemicals they needed and make meth in quantity. State by state, laws were passed to restrict the sale of cold medication like Sudafed. The number of domestic methamphetamine labs discovered began to plummet as these laws were passed.

To compensate, as described by the Department of Justice, Mexican drug traffickers began to establish Superlabs in Mexico and Central California, meth labs capable of ten pounds per short production cycle, sometimes even a hundred pounds. This compares to the few ounces most domestic meth cooks make in each batch.

The next step belonged to the Mexican government. They made it harder to get big batches of pseudoephedrine from China or other Asian countries, as reported by the New York Times in February of 2012. Mexican methamphetamine makers began to struggle with supply and resorted to using other, inferior, precursor chemicals. The meth they began shipping into the US was less satisfactory.

Which of course opened the door of opportunity for domestic meth cooks again.
They began to work out ways to adapt to the restrictions placed on cold medication purchases.

First, someone developed a more efficient method of utilizing the pseudoephedrine that could be obtained. The new production method was called “Shake and Bake” because it involved adding the toxic precursor chemicals to a two-liter soda bottle and shaking them up, then letting the chemical reaction take place in the bottle until meth was formed. The bottle was then discarded, sometimes on the roadside, leaving a toxic mess for anyone who might find it. The New York Times reported on one case in which a child found a bottle in a bag of discarded garbage, which then blew up in his face, blinding him in one eye.

Second, so they could get the cold medication they needed, meth cooks recruited their customers to form bands of traveling buyers who would make road trips to go from drugstore to drugstore, each person buying the legal limit of cold medication.

Once again, legislators detected this trend and tried to legislate the problem away. As noted by the National Meth Center, Mississippi make pseuoephedrine-containing cold medication a prescription-only product and Alabama implemented a tracking system that would detect how many packages of cold medication any individual bought, anywhere in the state. As these laws were passed, neighboring state expressed their concerns that this would force buyers in their directions. This new trend began to show up in increased cold medication sales in some nearby states.