OFFICIALS: METH IS THE NEXT DRUG TO FIGHT As city officials and health care advocates increase their efforts to prevent OxyContin and heroin abuse in Gloucester, they are also wary of a drug that has slowly moved toward the East Coast: methamphetamine. "It really is coming, and we are not going to be exempt from this at all," Jack Vondras, the city's director of public health, said of the drug, commonly known as meth. During a discussion Tuesday of an opiate-use report completed by the Healthy Gloucester Collaborative, questions from city health officials turned toward meth, which has devastated parts of the Midwest. Getting prepared Meth, or ice, is a highly addictive stimulant that can be either snorted, injected, orally ingested or smoked. It can be manufactured in labs using cold medicine containing the drug pseudoephedrine and products available at any hardware or convenience store. In a response to the growing problem, cold pills containing pseudoephedrine have been pulled from store shelves in pharmacies across the country and are now only available from a pharmacist. "We went around to every drug store and every supermarket with a list of articles (used to make meth)," said Kenneth Sucharski, a Manchester police detective and head of the Cape Ann Drug Task Force. "We went into one hardware store and the owner said, 'I sell every one of those.'" Sucharski said within one to two years police are expecting meth to become just as big of a problem as heroin or OxyContin present on Cape Ann. "It makes heroin look like Christmas candy," Sucharski said. "It's the ultimate destroyer." With Gloucester detective Sean Connors, Sucharski said he attended special training conducted by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency designed to alert local police forces to the dangers of meth and its hazardous manufacturing process. The materials cooked up to produce the drug are highly toxic and will contaminate the ground the lab sits on. The last major arrests on Cape Ann occured on Taylor Street in Gloucester two years ago, when police and Drug Enforcement Administration agents found an operational meth lab inside a married couple's locked duplex. It was estimated that it would take $30,000 to clean up the waste left behind. When a lab is located, a special DEA task force - Clandestine Lab Enforcement Team - is brought in because local and state police do not have the safety equipment needed to pull off a raid. The agents don special suits with portable oxygen tanks to protect them from the deadly gases produced by the chemicals. "It's so volatile and so explosive that the automatic weapons have a flash suppressor on the end of the weapons," Sucharski said. "I can't tell you what it smells like because there's nothing else that it smells like." Prevalent in Midwest In rural communities across the Midwest and West Coast, meth labs have sapped local resources. Harsher laws have done little to prevent mothers - more than 50 percent of meth users are believed to be women - from cooking chemicals and exposing their children to the harmful vapors. According to the state of Illinois Web site, from May 16, 2005 to Oct. 31, 2005, police found more than 109 children lived in meth lab environments. "When it hits, it hits so hard and so fast that no matter how well you're prepared, you're playing catch-up," said Master Sgt. Bruce Liebe of the Illinois State Police. "It's like trying to jump onto a moving train." He said troopers assigned to a special meth response team have seized about 1,000 labs per year for the last three years and are now required to undergo hazardous waste operative training during their time in the academy. But in 1997, when he said the drug first began to trickle into cities and towns across the state, no one knew the effects of the chemicals found in the labs. One trooper in southern Illinois had to retire after only five years of service because the chemicals had so severely impacted his lung capacity, he said. But for now on Cape Ann, heroin and other opiates are causing the most damage. Carol Yenawine, site director of Health Education Services on Washington Street, said that at a state-wide meeting of methadone clinic directors last month, nearly all reported an increase in the number of young people in their early 20s coming in for treatment for heroin and other opiate addictions. HES is serving 150 clients with a waiting list of more than 30, she said.
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