METH USE MAY BE ON RISE IN MIAMI VALLEY

Home-Brew Labs Represent Serious Problem, Police Say

Richard S. Wells had a penchant for cooking.

In July 1998, the 40-year-old Greenville resident toiled in his basement
over an aluminum pot next to eight cans of starter fluid, a container of
denatured alcohol and crushed ephedrine capsules in a jar labeled "flour"
while his ex-wife and son slept upstairs.

Then his house blew up.

"The guy was cooking meth in his basement, and it exploded," Darke County
Sheriff's Sgt. Mark Whittaker recalled last week. Wells received burns to
25 percent of his body and caused $10,000 in property damage while
producing 81 1/2 grams of methamphetamine for personal use. A water-heater
pilot light sparked some flammable ether to cause the fire, police reports
said.

The case - in which Wells received four years in prison for the illegal
manufacture of drugs - marked the county's first meth lab bust and proved
to be a harbinger of meth-lab propagation throughout southwest Ohio.

"It's going to be a trend," Whittaker said, "and it's just getting started."

Since the Wells case, law-enforcement agents regionwide have noted an
increase in makeshift labs that illegally manufacture methamphetamine - a
psychostimulant that produces large amounts of transmitter chemical
discharges in the brain that in some ways mimic an adrenaline rush.
Authorities have reported 20 meth lab busts so far this year in nine Miami
Valley counties, up from nine meth lab busts in 2000.

The drug is also highly addictive, said Dr. Harvey A. Siegal, a medical
sociologist and director of the Center for Interventions, Treatment and
Addictions Research at Wright State University.

"Sometimes within several dosages, you'll find yourself wanting more and
more," Siegal said. "With heavier doses could come hallucinations, paranoid
feelings and profound rises in blood pressure and pulse that could lead to
a stroke or . . . organ system failures."

Though the number of meth-lab busts have been modest - most Miami Valley
counties have reported between one and six this year, when most had none in
2000 - a crime-lab technician familiar with meth labs "told us they're like
rats," said former Greenville police Detective Steve Watern, who handled
the Wells investigation.

"Going by the old adage, . . . if you've got one that you found, you've got
500 you don't know about," said Watern, pastor at Beech Grove Church of the
Brethren in Hollansburg and an auxiliary police officer in Arcanum.

Meth production has risen to become a nationwide problem, according to the
Drug Enforcement Agency. In states such as California, Arkansas and Iowa,
problems arising from meth use and addiction have increased "significantly"
since the early 1990s, DEA administrator Thomas A. Constantine told
Congressional leaders in 1997, citing deaths and slayings related to meth
trafficking by organized cartels.

The drug has yet to permeate the local drug culture in southwest Ohio,
Siegal said.

"It's something that certainly has the potential of building up
significantly, but for the moment it hasn't happened," he said. "So far,
the busts that we've seen have been these relatively small local labs
(that) are unlikely to be able to really develop a market for it. . . .
There's no indication that this is a massive drug problem - yet."

But some drug agents disagree.

"It is a problem right now, in our opinion," said Sgt. Steve Arrasmith of
the Warren County Drug Task Force. "We're dealing with this every day. With
the danger that our uniformed guys and the community's in, this has been a
problem for us."

Arrasmith, who is DEA-certified in handling meth labs, teaches others in
Warren County to recognize the signs of meth labs including strong chemical
odors, frequent late-night activity and blocked-up windows.

"We're trying to prepare for what we feel is coming this way," Arrasmith said.

The meth trend has moved "west to east" and is just beginning to enter
Ohio, said an undercover agent with Montgomery County's Combined Area
Narcotics Enforcement task force.

"We're seeing it everywhere," he said. "They'll even go to short-term
apartments and motels where they're not staying very long, . . . using
bathtubs and stuff to do the cooking."

But aside from "mom-and-pop" meth labs with limited distribution networks,
it's signs such as a California-to-Dayton meth trafficking operation,
revealed through court documents last week, that speak to a growing threat
of methamphetamines in Ohio, Siegal said.

"Once large amounts of pre-made stuff start showing up, then all bets are
off," he said.

"People are aware of how easy it is to get products" to make meth, another
undercover CANE task force agent said. "They want an easy way to get high,
and that's where the hazards take place. Especially with vehicles, if you
get into a car accident or hit a heavy bump, you can get an explosion."

Authorities have busted several mobile meth labs in southwest Ohio,
including busts this year in Butler Twp. and Beavercreek.

"The primary dangers are the chemicals involved, and that the people using
them aren't 100 percent knowledgable about the dangers," Whittaker of Darke
County said.

Recipes for cooking meth, often handed down or obtained on the Internet,
call for procurer substances that may include fertilizer and
over-the-counter cold tablets, agents said. The recipes speak to the
inexperience of the would-be meth makers, with one Internet site advising,
"Please don't smoke in the same room when you do this" and "It's a good
idea to do this when you're not (high)."

"We're not dealing with scientists here, we're dealing with people who got
a recipe and it's trial-and-error," Whittaker said.

The makeshift labs also pose risks for neighbors and law-enforcement
agents. "It can be extremely dangerous when the chemicals come together,"
said John Burke, director of the Warren County Drug Task Force. "There's a
lot of potential for fire and explosion" and health hazards from breathing
toxic fumes, he said.

Law-enforcement agencies received more ammunition to battle meth labs in a
new Ohio law, signed by Gov. Bob Taft in May.

The law makes manufacturing meth in public or near a school or child a
first-degree felony; makes having chemicals with the intent to make the
drug a third-degree felony; adds meth-making equipment to the state's list
of "drug paraphernalia" and lets communities charge people convicted of
running meth labs for cleanup fees that can total as much as $100,000.

"The new law is extremely helpful because it gives us probable cause to
investigate further when we learn of people purchasing a combination of the
components needed to produce meth," Arrasmith said.

"A year ago, if one of our deputies stopped someone with five cans of
starting fluid and five boxes of Sudafed, they probably would not have
given it a second thought," Arrasmith said. "Now, however, they know that
those items, in that quantity and combination, might not mean the person
cashed in on a sale somewhere, but rather may be providing supplies for a
meth lab."

The solution to combating meth's popularity will come in "understanding
that if we can diminish demand, that's going to be more powerful than
enforcement," said Siegal of Wright State University.

"Where we really have to put our money and resources and interest is in
prevention," Siegal said. "The long-term solution is to turn (people) off
(meth) as much as we can."

Meantime, as agencies continue to identify more meth lab operations,
drug-rehab facilities say they are also preparing to see more addicts who
are "physically wasted" from meth use.

"It takes sometimes one, two, three years for enough of (an increasingly
popular) drug to be around to see people having significant problems," said
David C. Long, executive director of Nova House, a chemical-dependency
counseling and recovery center in Dayton.

Nova House counselors "have seen a very slight increase in methamphetamine
users, mainly among our younger set," Long said. "Evidently this trend
started a couple years ago. . . . If authorities are saying there's more
labs coming online, in the future we'll probably see more (users)."

Staff Writer Mary Lolli of Cox News Service contributed to this report.