METH EPIDEMIC RAVAGING TEXAS

Stimulant Favored By Many Working-Class Whites In Small Towns

RANGER, Texas ­ The experienced speed freaks, the ones who have been
abusing methamphetamine for a long time, look like skinny, nervous ghosts
swallowed alive in their own clothes.

They live for meth, an addictive stimulant that has become the drug of
choice for many working-class white people in Ranger, a dingy West Texas
town on Interstate 20 between Abilene and Fort Worth.

"You want it all the time," said a tired-looking young woman, who asked not
to be identified. "If you got a hundred things to do, and you can't get 'em
done sober, you can sure get 'em done high."

Law officers say a methamphetamine epidemic has swept across Texas in the
last two years. Throughout the 1990s, police tried to stamp out meth use
with new laws restricting access to the industrial chemicals needed to make it.

Now, meth manufacturing is no longer a mysterious art. In the last two
years, cheap and easy recipes have become readily available on the
Internet. Today, minor-league entrepreneurs hiding in small towns such as
Ranger can use pots and pans to make the drug in their kitchens and garages.

In 1999, local law enforcement agencies sent more than 204,000 grams of
meth to Texas Department of Public Safety laboratories for the evidentiary
analysis that prosecutors need in court. The number had already reached
204,000 grams in the first eight months of 2000, according to DPS statistics.

The human toll is horrific, drug abuse experts say.

The tired-looking young woman in Ranger, who is 28, could just as easily be
50. All of her upper teeth fell out during five years of meth abuse. At the
peak of her addiction, she carried 90 pounds on a 5-8 frame. She says she
has been clean for three years.

"I missed out on a lot of food, a lot of sleep and a lot of showers," she said.

The woman said meth addicts believe staying dirty makes them harder to
detect and extends their high. The dirt keeps the ether smell from leaking
out of the user's pores and locks the drug into the system. Ether, a
solvent, is one of several chemicals used to make meth.

Some users smoke, snort or inject the drug. Others dissolve it in coffee
and drink it. Others wrap the foul-smelling drug in toilet paper and
swallow it. One gram, about a teaspoon of the drug in powder form, sells
for $40-$75, depending on the quality and the greediness of the dealer.

"I ate a lot of toilet paper in five years," the young woman said with
rueful disdain. "You couldn't give it away to me now."

The Texas Narcotics Control Program, a division of the Texas governor's
office, funds more than two dozen regional drug task forces. Program
administrators in Austin reported that their task forces seized $13.5
million worth of meth in its most recent budget year, which ended May 30.

Seizures in the first quarter of this budget year ­ June 1 to Aug. 31 ­
amounted to $5.1 million. If the trend continues through next spring, the
annual seizures of meth will be valued at more than $20 million.

And those numbers do not include seizures by myriad other local, state and
federal law enforcement agencies in Texas.

A police chief's battle

Ranger Police Chief Tom Million, who drives a patrol car with more than
100,000 miles on it, is 25 years old. His police department consists of him
and two other officers.

Chief Million exhibits the good nature of someone who understands he is
fighting an uphill battle but likes the challenge. He is married and has a
toddler. He has had opportunities to leave Ranger, but the idea of ridding
the town of meth cookers and speed freaks appeals to him.

"I guess I'm just crazy," he said.

The evidence of meth is everywhere in Ranger, a town of 2,900, Chief
Million says. But it is not visible to the untrained eye.

Recently, Chief Million drove along Riddle Street on the outskirts of town.
He pulled off the road and walked into a muddy bar ditch to examine the
contents of a plastic garbage bag.

Inside was a meth chef's trash: empty cold pill boxes, empty cans of
engine-starting fluid and drain cleaner, empty boxes of rock salt, empty
packages of lithium batteries and stained coffee filters.

"We know who they are," he said. "It's always the same bunch. But the
problem is having the manpower to catch them. They look for any place where
there is not a high patrol rate."

The "mom and pop" meth that is so ubiquitous can be made in hours on a
pickup tailgate in the middle of a pasture, or in an abandoned shack on
Riddle Street, which has become known as a center of drug activity.

Larry Monroe, who has lived on Riddle for 23 years, said meth has
transformed his neighborhood into a drug market late at night. Rows of cars
filled with people looking for drugs roll up and down the street at all
hours, he said.

Drug addicts leave used syringes lying on the road and use abandoned houses
to cook their meth. Mr. Monroe is reluctant to say much more, however.

"They could burn me out in a heartbeat," he said, concern etched on his face.

The meth epidemic in Ranger, Chief Million said, began when too many people
learned to make the drug with over-the-counter cold pills containing
ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, a decongestant with stimulant-like qualities.

Traditional meth labs of a generation ago looked like high school chemistry
labs with glass beakers and Bunsen burners. Necessary chemicals to make a
high-quality product were hard to buy. It took days to make a batch, and
purity levels were high.

Today's mom and pop labs are highly portable.

"We've found two full labs hidden underneath hoods of trucks in a garage,"
Chief Million said.

The new-generation labs consist of household pots and pans, a hot plate,
some rubber tubes and ingredients available at discount stores, which now
have the burden of monitoring customers who attempt to buy large quantities
of any product used to make meth.

"Some stores are more cooperative than others when it comes to letting us
know when someone is attempting to buy large quantities of stuff like cold
pills," Chief Million said.

The meth cooker's goal is to convert the ephedrine to methamphetamine
through a series of chemical reactions. The most difficult chemical to
obtain is anhydrous ammonia, an agricultural fertilizer used to change the
molecular structure of the ephedrine.

Some meth cookers are more successful than others.

Kenneth Evans, a DPS chemist in Garland, sees the best and worst of the
craft. Some meth recently confiscated in the Abilene area was 76 percent pure.

But most of the homemade meth taken from drug criminals is only 0.5 percent
to 1 percent pure ­ little more than crushed-up cold pills mixed up with a
toxic drain cleaner and strips of lithium metal from batteries, he said.

"Basically, it would be like injecting lye into your arm," Mr. Evans said.
"It's surprising that some people who are very health conscious about the
food they eat have no idea what's in the illegal drugs they take."

Related crimes

District Attorney Mike Siebert estimates that alcohol and drug abuse is an
element in 70 percent of the felony cases filed in Eastland County ­
outright drug cases, spouse and child abuse, robberies and burglaries and
assaults.

Most of the cases involve low-income whites, Mr. Siebert said.

"You don't find any well-heeled dealers any more," he said. "I'm thinking
that most of them use up most of what they make."

The tired-looking young woman in Ranger said she began using meth in 1993
with her first husband. They stayed up all night getting in trouble, she said.

"Coming down after three days is when the violence happens," she said. "You
can't handle nothing."

The war on drugs in the United States has continued for more than 30 years.
Epidemics have come and gone and come again. Heroin in Plano. "Ecstasy" in
the dance clubs. Psychedelics on the college campus. Crack among urban
blacks and powdered cocaine among professional whites.

Texas Ranger David Hullum, who works out of Eastland County, said that meth
is now the No. 1 drug problem in rural Texas and that it will not be easy
to stamp out.

"No one anticipated it, and there's no way to keep up with it in a rural
community," he said. "Now, we're in a reactive state trying to keep up with
it."