U.S. Chemical Companies Face Few Legal Risks, and the Cartels Bank On It

U.S. Chemical Companies Face Few Legal Risks, and the Cartels Bank On It

One November morning in 2015, a lawyer named Clark Jordan rose sheepishly from his chair to face the judge in a federal courtroom in eastern Pennsylvania. Jordan, then 51, had spent most of his adult life in corporate law, but this day was different. As a vice president of Eastman Chemical Co., he was appearing for Eastman's board of directors to enter a guilty plea in a drug case. The six-count criminal information charged that an Eastman subsidiary, Taminco U.S. Inc., had knowingly violated federal narcotics laws. Before that morning, Jordan had thought this would be “no big deal,” he later recalled. But in the solemnity of the courtroom, the gravity of the moment sank in.Taminco, which Eastman had acquired 11 months earlier for $2.8 billion, was one of the world's top producers of a chemical called monomethylamine, or MMA. Legally used to make pesticides and pharmaceuticals, it's also an essential ingredient for Mexican cartels cooking the cheapest and most potent methamphetamine ever sold on American streets. Federal drug laws contain a set of crimes for