Speed Limit

Say you've got a personal Web site. If you're an appreciator of the cultivation, politics, and history of the marijuana plant, you might think about linking to www.4thc.com, a Canadian site that bills itself as the "complete online source for Marijuana vaporizers, pipes, bongs, waterpipes, pot culture and paraphernalia."

Think again.

If a bill passed by the United States Senate last year becomes law, it will soon be illegal to link to a page such as www.4thc.com with the "intent to facilitate or promote" its business.

Depending on a federal prosecutor's interpretation of "intent," that could even make posting this article on the Web a federal crime.

It's one of the more disturbing effects of the Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 1999. The bill, by Sen. John Ashcroft, R-Mo., is aimed at stopping the spread of crank. But it also has publishers, civil libertarians, and drug reformers arming for battle over free-speech rights.

"There's just no question there's a First Amendment issue," said Richard Boire, a California attorney and director of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics. "You're essentially getting into mind-policing."

As the title implies, the bill was designed to fight the spread of methamphetamine -- a goal so popular that liberal Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., joined with her conservative sometimes-rival, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, in writing one of the legislation's crucial sections.

Now awaiting action on a similar version in the House, the bill stiffens penalties for meth makers and includes money for busting labs and treating crank addicts. But it also tackles one of the knottier roots of the crank problem: recipies for do-it-yourself methamphetamine posted to the World Wide Web.

Such recipes are all over the Internet; some explain how to extract ephedrine from cold medicine, while others describe how to set up a basic lab. Still others exist as electronic protestors against the Ashcroft bill itself. Law enforcement officials blame the online recipies for a rise in crank labs. Drug Enforcement Administration officials busted 1,627 labs in 1998, a number that has doubled over the past decade.

In California, officials see even more action: They shut down over 2,000 labs in 1999 alone. In fact, so much meth is brewed in California that the state exports the drug to the rest of the nation. As many as one-third of all labs busted by state officials come complete with a cookbook printed off the Web.

"Part of the reason manufacture of meth has exploded in this country is the Internet," said Ron Gravitt, clandestine lab coordinator for the state's Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement. "People that did not have the formulas now have them."

The proposed law aims to combat the problem in two ways. One attacks crank kits and users' tools, expanding the current ban on advertising drugs or drug paraphenalia to include "indirect" advertising, such as linking to sites that have such ads.

Officials of Internet service providers who fail to yank violating sites within 48 hours of being warned by authorities could face up to three years in prison if the bill becomes law.

The bill's other prong -- authored by Feinstein and Hatch -- is even simpler. It bans distributing, by any means, information on manufacturing any controlled substance -- if you intend or know that the person receiving the information intends to use the information to break federal law.

Critics call that censorship, a term Feinstein's people hotly reject.

"If you have people out there that are teaching people to do it with the intent that a crime be committed, (Feinstein) doesn't think that should be protected," said David Hantman, Feinstein's chief counsel. "You can't shout fire in a crowded theater, and you shouldn't be able to teach somebody how to commit a federal crime, either."