METH PRODUCTION REACHES 'EPIDEMIC' LEVEL ON COAST SPECIAL REPORT

LOS ANGELES - They stormed in after midnight, kicking down doors of
homes and businesses around this county's desert fringe. More than
100 federal agents and local detectives took part in the raids, and
by the time the sun came up they had nabbed yet another gang of
suspected methamphetamine traffickers.

The raids this week culminated an 18-month investigation dubbed
"Operation Silent Thunder" that led to the arrest of nearly 300
people on drug or weapons charges. Hundreds of firearms and
explosives have been seized. More than a dozen large makeshift
laboratories for manufacturing methamphetamine have been closed and
quantities of the drug worth more than $2 million worth of the drug -
usually sold on the street in small cheap quantities amounts of
powder or rock - have been confiscated.

Law enforcement authorities acknowledge that the results are another
sign of just how pervasive and sophisticated the illicit
methamphetamine trade has become in many parts of the state. Once
casually run, mostly by outlaw biker gangs, methamphetamine
production is now a tightly managed big business, concentrated in
California's hills and deserts and its vast, rural Central Valley.

So much methamphetamine is produced in California that federal
officials now consider the state a "source nation" for the highly
addictive drug, which is also known as speed, ice or crystal. Meth
labs are flourishing more than ever in other western states such as
Arizona, Nevada and Washington.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration statistics, about
2,700 meth labs were discovered in California in 1999. The state with
the second-highest total, Washington, had about 600. Arizona had
nearly 400.

After this week's raids, authorities said they were confident that
they had crushed the last remnants of an elaborate criminal
enterprise. But they said there would be many more to contend with.

"We think we've put a huge dent in this organization," Lt. Ron
Shreeves of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said after
the raids. "But is someone else going to fill its shoes? Absolutely.
There's too much money involved."

Federal narcotics officials say that use of the drug across the
country has doubled in the past seven years. Much of the market, they
say, is controlled by criminal groups based in Mexico that use
California migrant workers to cook and transport the drug from shacks
and trailers in the desert or barns in the farm fields of the state's
agricultural midsection.

As the operations have become more organized - some meth labs operate
every day, authorities say - production of the drug has greatly
increased.

Ron Gravitt, the clandestine laboratory coordinator for the
California Department of Justice, calls the state's methamphetamine
problem "an epidemic." Law enforcement agencies in California are
shutting down more than 2,000 meth labs each year, he said. And in
some parts of the state, the tally has doubled or tripled over the
past decade.

"Right now, we're just inundated with meth," Gravitt said.

California will spend $30 million this year to crack down on the
methamphetamine trade, but just finding meth labs, some of which
produce 50 pounds of the drug a week, is often difficult because of
their remote locations because they are remote.

Jose Martinez, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration
DEA's office in Los Angeles, said that those sparsely populated areas
are ideal places for drug organizations to set up operations.
"Because it's wide open space, a person can go out there and cook and
it's not easy to detect," he said.

When law enforcement agents make a bust, they usually catch only
front-line workers in the trade who know little about the larger
criminal operation for which they work. Those workers, and the labs,
are often quickly replaced.

Officials say the proliferation of meth labs is also creating serious
environmental problems. The state is spending millions of dollars to
clean up the toxic chemical waste dumped in water or spilled on soil
during or after the often-crude manufacture of the drug.

The raids this week followed months of undercover investigation and
targeted methamphetamine trafficking in the Antelope Valley on the
eastern end of Los Angeles County, a high desert region that long has
been a hub of the meth trade.

At a news conference this week, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca
said the suspects are members of a drug ring that distributed
methamphetamine primarily in the West. He also said the organization
is linked to Mexican drug traffickers and white supremacist groups in
Southern California.

Agents seized a half-million dollars in cash and more than 100
high-powered weapons in the early morning raids, which took place at
nearly two dozen homes and small businesses in the area. The arsenal
included assault rifles with bayonets and a grenade launcher.

Authorities said that some suspects had tattoos of Nazi swastikas
insignias and belong to a local gang called the "Untouchables."

"They were stockpiling a huge cache of weapons along with drugs,"
Shreeves said. "This was a sophisticated organization."

He said that investigators believe that nearly all of those arrested
this week belonged to one of six drug distribution "cells" that are
part of a large methamphetamine trafficking group. The other five
cells, he said, also have been dismantled by the undercover operation.

"We think this was the last and most dangerous one," Shreeves said.

To avoid capture, some members of the alleged drug ring installed
video surveillance equipment outside of their homes, spoke in code on
telephones, and stayed in constant contact with each other about
police activity in their neighborhood, authorities said.

"We knew we had to go after them all at once," Shreeves said. Most of
the methamphetamine seized in the raids was pure, he said, and would
have been quite addictive had it been sold on the street.

bybio Special correspondent Jeff Adler contributed to this report.