There was another way to make methamphetamine. But the sample that arrived on Bozenko’s desk that day in 2006 was not made from ephedrine, which was growing harder to come by as both the U.S. Ephedrine was the active ingredient in the over-the-counter decongestant Sudafed, and a long boom in meth supply followed. In the early 1980s, the ephedrine method for making meth was rediscovered by the American criminal world. During World War II, it was marketed in Japan as hiropon, a word that combines the Japanese terms for “fatigue” and “fly away.” Hiropon was given to Japanese soldiers to increase alertness. A Japanese researcher had first altered the ephedrine molecule to synthesize crystal methamphetamine in 1919. All of the stuff Bozenko analyzed was made from ephedrine, a natural substance commonly found in decongestants and derived from the ephedra plant, which was used for millennia as a stimulant and an anti-asthmatic. Large quantities of it were coming up out of Mexico, where traffickers had industrialized production, and into the American Southwest.

Meth was the drug that Bozenko analyzed most in the early years of his job. He saw the world through the protective goggles of a hazmat suit, sifting through the remains of illegal labs in three dozen countries. His first foreign assignment was at a lab that had made the stimulant MDMA in Jakarta, Indonesia. In time, Bozenko began traveling abroad to clandestine labs after they’d been seized. He analyzed what they produced and worked out how they did it. Bozenko’s job was to understand the thinking of black-market chemists, samples of whose work were regularly plopped on his desk. “Chemist by day, chemist by night,” his Twitter bio once read.īozenko had joined the DEA seven years earlier, just as the global underworld was veering toward synthetic drugs and away from their plant-based cousins.

Bozenko, a garrulous man with a wide smile, worked in the DEA lab during the day and taught chemistry at a local university in the evenings. The field seems to breed folks whose every waking minute is spent puzzling over chemical reactions. Organic chemistry can be endlessly manipulated, with compounds that, like Lego bricks, can be used to build almost anything. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

Crackbacks of cut meth