After 20 years of trying to combat methamphetamine production by restricting the chemicals used to create it, there are encouraging signs that the strategy has reduced the drug's use.

The number of domestic labs has decreased dramatically since the days consumers could buy unlimited amounts of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, crucial ingredients in methamphetamine, and the latest report on local adult and juvenile arrestees from 2006 found that people in custody said meth was harder to find and more expense.

However, methamphetamine producers have always bounced back from coordinated efforts to restrict the drug's precursors. At least one man with intimate knowledge of methamphetamine production thinks they will once again find a way around the restrictions against pseudoephedrine and ephedrine.

Responding to questions from the North County Times through e-mail from his home in Green Bay, Wis., Steve Preisler wrote that he doubts any legislation will completely eliminate methamphetamine because it can be created with ephedrine extracted from the plant ma huang. A Japanese chemist first extracted it in 1885.

"I used to be able to find tea bags of this herbal Chinese medicine for sale on the Internet," he wrote. "I can no longer find them by Googling 'ma huang,' but the plant and related species will easily grow wild virtually anywhere west of the Mississippi, and the seeds are available online by looking for ephedra seeds."

Preisler is the author of the underground best-seller "Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture," which he published in 1981 under his nom de plume "Uncle Fester."

"The plant takes a couple of years to grow to harvestable size, but since it is a perennial, it offers yearly harvests once established in the wild," he wrote about ma huang. "This is the alternative source I have been including in update sheets with my books for almost a year now. I think soon the entire West will have these little pine bushes growing."

Preisler also doesn't think much of the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which has placed Sudafed and other pseudoephedrine products behind the counter.

"The only effect of the Sudafed and ephedrine pill restrictions has been to hand a virtual monopoly for meth-cooking over to the Mexican Mafia," he wrote. "They don't buy pills a few at a time and extract them. They buy in bulk drums."

He also wrote that meth-makers may revert to making the drug with P2P, the chemical they used before switching to ephedrine around 1980, or just switch from meth and instead make amphetamine with the amino acid phenylalanine. Preisler wrote that there is no easy way of reducing the amino acid, but is confident that chemists will find a way, as they always have.

"I am sure clandestine research is actively addressing this problem," he wrote.