Opinion ID: 2973372
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Statutory and Guidelines framework

Text: Congress responded to growing concerns about a “methamphetamine epidemic in America,” United States v. Layne, 324 F.3d 464, 468 (6th Cir. 2003) (quoting H.R. Rep. 106-878, at 22 (Sept. 21, 2000)), by passing the Methamphetamine and Club Drug Anti-Proliferation Act of 2000 (the Act), Pub. L. No. 106-310, §§ 3601-3673, 114 Stat. 1101, 1227-46 (2000). Supplanting the individualized determination of how much of a controlled substance certain chemicals would yield, see United States v. Hamilton, 81 F.3d 652, 653-54 (6th Cir. 1996), the Act instructed the United States Sentencing Commission to (1) . . . review and amend its guidelines to provide for increased penalties such that those penalties corresponded to the quantity of controlled substance that could reasonably have been manufactured using the quantity of ephedrine, phenylpropanolamine, or pseudoephedrine possessed or distributed. (2) CONVERSION RATIOS. For the purposes of the amendments made by this subsection, the quantity of controlled substance that could reasonably have been manufactured shall be determined by using a table of manufacturing conversion ratios for ephedrine, phenylpropanolamine, and pseudoephedrine, which table shall be established by the Sentencing Commission based on scientific, law enforcement, and other data the Sentencing Commission considers appropriate. Pub. L. No. 106-310, § 3651(b), 114 Stat. 1238-39 (2000) (emphasis added). The Commission responded to the congressional directive by promulgating Amendment 611. In relevant part, Amendment 611 provides a new chemical-quantity table for precursor chemicals like pseudoephedrine and a conversion table for those chemicals. See U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, App. C, Amendment 611 (Nov. 1, 2003). These tables adopt a 50% conversion ratio for pseudoephedrine, such that 2 grams of the chemical is equivalent to 1 gram of methamphetamine. That ratio was inserted into the tables in § 2D1.1, cmt. n.10, which already established that 1 gram of methamphetamine is to be treated as the equivalent of 20 kilograms of marijuana for sentencing purposes. Since the enactment of Amendment 611, therefore, 1 gram of pseudoephedrine is treated as the equivalent of 10 kilograms of marijuana. No. 04-6428 United States v. Martin Page 3 In adopting the 50% conversion ratio for pseudoephedrine, the Commission relied on a report promulgated by the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control that was published on the website of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). That report “indicate[d] that the actual yield of methamphetamine from ephedrine and pseudoephedrine is typically in the range of 50 to 75 percent.” Proposed Amendments to the Sentencing Guidelines, 66 Fed. Reg. 7962, 7965 (Jan. 26, 2001) (citation omitted); see also U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, App. C, Amendment 611 (“This yield is based on information provided by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) that the typical yield of these substances for clandestine laboratories is 50 to 75 percent.”). The DEA report on which the Commission based its conversion ratio is no longer available on the DEA website and is not part of the record in the present case. A document that appears to be the report, however, remains available through another publically accessible website. See Gene Haislip, Methamphetamine Precursor Chemical Control in the 1990’s (1996), http://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/ chemistry/dojmeth3.txt (stating that “[a]ctual yield in clandestine labs is typically in the range of 50 to 75 percent”) (last visited Feb. 14, 2006). When a defendant was convicted of an offense relating to the manufacture of methamphetamine from precursor chemicals like pseudoephedrine prior to the passage of the Act in 2000, the district court would rely on expert testimony to approximate the amount of methamphetamine that could be produced from various precursor chemicals under differing laboratory conditions. Experts would testify as to how much methamphetamine the precursor chemicals would yield in a given situation, and the court would base its sentence on that yield calculation. See U.S. Sentencing Guidelines § 2D1.1, cmt. 12 (2003) (“Where there is no drug seizure or the amount seized does not reflect the scale of offense, the court shall approximate the quantity of the controlled substance.”); see also, e.g., United States v. Brannon, 7 F.3d 516, 520 (6th Cir. 1993) (upholding the district court’s estimate of the quantity of methamphetamine, which was based on the affidavits and testimony from a DEA agent and a chemist); United States v. Eschman, 227 F.3d 886, 891 (7th Cir. 2000) (rejecting the district court’s use of a one-to-one conversion rate for pseudoephedrine where expert testimony contradicted the reliability of that rate). This court required that the findings of the testifying experts be “particularized to individual laboratories,” Hamilton, 81 F.3d at 654, a practice that the uniform conversion rate imposed by the Guidelines provision rendered unnecessary.