The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

by Sam Quinones

In the postwar years, ephedrine was used legally as an antihistamine in the over-the-counter medicine Sudafed. The ephedrine method for meth, though, lay dormant for a long time. It was rediscovered by the underworld in the United States in the early 1980s. It democratized methamphetamine. One place this happened was in the San Diego area, largely due to a man by the name of Donald Stenger. Stenger, unlike the scattered bikers that cops by then were associating with meth, was middle class, smart, deliberate, and well organized. “He was the anomaly. He was a criminal genius, and he did a tremendous amount of research,” said Jim Clem, one of the now-retired San Diego police officers who pursued him. Up to that point, the method for cooking meth that bikers were using not only stank, but also complicated. Stenger saw that the ephedrine method was easier. All you had to do was tweak one molecule in ephedrine, and you had meth. It was just cooking, following a recipe—it didn’t really qualify as chemistry. And ephedrine was legal. Stenger had no interest in popularizing the formula, but it couldn’t be contained. By the mid-1980s, every meth lab that Clem and his colleagues busted was using ephedrine.