NEW WAVE OF METHAMPHETAMINE USE ROLLS INTO REGION

Many Small Towns Aren't Equipped To Deal With Drug Resurgence

Gordon Jones lived for methampetamine.

If he was awake, he was high. Jones drank, smoked marijuana and
dropped LSD. But his favorite was methampetamine.

He kept the windows of his apartment covered with aluminum foil so no
one could see inside. He stored his belongings in a small cooler next
to his bed in case he had to leave in a hurry.

He watched a friend lose an arm to a bad batch of meth and scanned
the obituaries to see if any of his friends had died of overdoses.

And yet he continued to use the drug.

"It was cheaper than cocaine and the high was extremely powerful,"
said Jones, 40, adding that he's been off drugs for four years. "It
was always the drug of choice.

"If I could just barely get by, I was OK," he said. "I was going
through life planning to be dead young."

If the increasing number of methampetamine labs being discovered by
investigators is any indication, stories such as Jones' will become
more common. Methampetamine use has undergone a revival of sorts
since the mid-1990s, steadily moving east from California through the
Midwest.

In response, police in states such as Missouri and Michigan began
heavily cracking down on clandestine labs and have seen the number of
raids climb past 100 a year.

In North Carolina, the State Bureau of Investigation cleaned up and
shut down seven methamphetamine labs in 1999, 11 in 2000 and 13 in
the first six months of this year. Before 1999, the SBI responded to
perhaps two or three sites a year, a number so low that the agency
didn't bother to track the statistics.

So far this year, SBI cleanup crews have been summoned to 13 sites
throughout North Carolina, from Erwin, a textile town in Harnett
County near the Cape Fear River, to Wilkesboro in the northwestern
corner of the state. Four labs have been raided in the Triad, three
of them - including labs in Thomasville, Trinity and High Point -
within the past 10 days.

"I think it's going to be as popular as it is in the rest of the
United States," said Ken Razza, the clandestine lab unit coordinator
for the SBI.

Last Monday, Thomasville police found a small meth lab at 214 Long
St. in a low-crime neighborhood where elderly residents relax on
their front stoops in the afternoon.

Authorities believe that for the past several months, Stephen Michael
Kinney and Darlene Mangum Browning, the residents of the house, have
been "cooking" meth in their basement and selling it to area
drug-users a few grams at a time. Warrants have been issued for
Kinney and Browning, but they had not been arrested as of last night.

That raid came on the same day that a lab was shut down in nearby
Trinity; both raids came on the heels of another in High Point.
Investigators believe the three operations were linked.

"I never knew there was one in town," said Capt. Ronnie Phillips, of
the Thomasville Police Department.

Phillips remembers when crack cocaine first hit the streets of
Thomasville in 1991 after a similar migration from the West. Now most
of the drug-related arrests that local officers make are for crack
cocaine.

"It takes a number of years for any drugs in the West to get to the
East Coast. People are learning to manufacture (methamphetamine) but
it is still in the introductory phase," Phillips said.

Thomasville, like many other small towns, is not yet equipped to deal
with a resurgence of methampetamines. Most officers have only
received minimal classroom training. Many have not seen firsthand how
the drug is manufactured, and some were surprised that all the
equipment at the Long Street meth lab fit in a cardboard box.

Even in larger cities such as Winston-Salem, police departments rely
on the SBI to close down meth labs because it's one of the few
agencies with the manpower and the money.

The cost, about $15,000 to clean up the toxic materials in a single
small lab, could bankrupt some small police departments.

Still, because of the SBI's clandestine lab unit, police in North
Carolina are better equipped to deal with methampetamines than their
counterparts in neighboring states.

"We're equipped. We have the support of the agency," Razza said. "In
comparison to Georgia, Virginia and South Carolina, none of them have
this. They're working on a regional concept."

Over the years methamphetamine, a synthetic stimulant, has been in
and out of vogue. It has appealed to a wide variety of groups, and
developed a lexicon of its own.

Used by both the Allies and the Nazis in World War II to keep troops
alert, methamphetamine was popular with truck drivers and bikers in
the 1950s. In the 1960s it spread to hippies, who nicknamed it
"speed." In the 1970s and 1980s, it moved to more rural areas and was
referred to as "redneck cocaine." In its most recent resurgence in
the 1990s, methamphetamines have found a following in young, white
blue-collar workers.

Whether smoked, injected or snorted, the drug's appeal is simple,
authorities say. It produces a sense of euphoria for several hours,
increases the heart rate, blood pressure and body temperature.

It's cheap, easy to make and offers the user a longer high than cocaine.

Studies have found that methamphetamine destroys dopamine, a chemical
in the brain that helps control movement and emotions. And after
extended abuse, some addicts showed signs of early and mild
Parkinson's disease.

"Methamphetamine is one of the most dangerous drugs to the brains,"
said Susan Rook, a former anchor at CNN and a spokeswoman for Step
One, a drug treatment program in Winston-Salem. "It changes the
chemical composition of the brain. Even if you don't get hooked, or
you don't get busted ... you are doing irreparable damage to the
neuropathways to the brain."

The dangers facing users are equaled by the threat to the community,
law-enforcement officials say.

More than 20 years ago, meth labs were set up in barns and
outbuildings in rural areas, said Bob Clark, a special agent with the
SBI in charge of the Piedmont district. Sophisticated equipment and
large-scale manufacturers were the norm; large labs needed to be in
isolated areas because the chemicals used to make methampetamine
produce a strong odor.

Now, though, meth users are setting up their own labs - called
kitchen top labs and box labs - in their homes and in their cars.
Modern-day manufacturers avoid the odor problem by making smaller
batches of the drug and "cooking" them at night when neighbors are
asleep, Clark said.

Enabling the growth of these smaller labs is the accessibility of
methamphetamine ingredients and recipes available on the Internet.

The cost of the drug on the streets is comparable to crack cocaine,
but $25 worth of meth can keep a person high for about six hours,
while crack wears off in about 30 minutes, investigators say. With an
initial investment of about $350, a dealer can cook about an ounce of
meth and sell it for about $1,500.

"With these smaller operations they can walk into the hardware store,
or Home Depot, or Lowe's and walk out with what they need," Clark
said.

Across the country, investigators have also found guns and booby-trap
bombs after they entered methamphetamine labs because of the paranoia
the drug inspires.

Most meth cooks aren't well trained, Razza said. Explosions and fires
are common because of the chemicals are hazardous. For example, if
red phosphorous - an ingredient in methamphetamine that is found in
matches - is overheated, it can turn into the more dangerous white
phosphorous, which is used in military explosives.

Even more worrisome are the effects of increased availability. Some
substance-abuse counselors fear that it won't be long before
teen-agers discover methamphetamine as the follow-up to the club drug
Ecstasy, which is a cross between a hallucinogen and a stimulant.

"What you end up having is dead children walking around," Rook said.
"With meth it's quickly addictive, highly dangerous and the real
damage of the stuff is that these kids try it on a lark. When the
availability of the drug increases, you will see more and more kids
using the drug."

Though they have evidence of increasing methampetamine use,
law-enforcement officials may have a hard time keeping pace.

Police don't always realize that they've hit on a meth lab when they
search a house because they expect a chemistry lab, not simple
household products, Razza said. And fire officials can't always tell
if a house fire was caused by a meth experiment because they haven't
been trained to recognize the signs of a lab, he said.

Undercover cops are having trouble tapping into the methampetamine
network, detectives in Thomasville said.

Unlike crack cocaine, which is sold openly on the street,
methamphetamine is distributed among a circle of friends and
acquaintances. Undercover agents haven't been able to make direct
contact with distributors and are gathering most of their information
third-hand from various tips and sources.

The SBI would like to help local police departments by offering
training seminars, but the money to do so is just not available,
Razza said. Plans for increased training were drawn up two years ago,
but the need to spend state money for Hurricane Floyd relief and this
year's budget crisis have slowed things down, he said.

"If everybody knew what they were doing we would be doing 300 labs a
year," Razza said.

Later this year, the SBI plans on holding awareness classes across
the state to educate law enforcement and community leaders about
methamphetamine, Razza said.

"That way we'll deal with it before it overwhelms us," he said.