AS SEIZURES OF METH LABS INCREASE, KBI FINDS A GLIMMER OF HOPE

The phone rang at 1 am. Rod Page was sleeping in a hotel in Pittsburg,
Kan.; it had been a long day. He and two or three other cops were
investigating illegal methamphetamine labs throughout southeast Kansas.

On the phone was a fellow cop.

"Sir," the caller said. "We've found a couple of meth labs."

"OK," Page remembers saying. "Where are they?"

"Well... "the colleague said. "One of them is in the room next door to you
in the hotel. And the other one is above you, on the second floor."

Page grinned last week, telling the story. His boss, Kansas Bureau of
Investigation Director Larry Welch, grinned, too, but more sadly.

For five years, these two men have watched methamphetamine crime come to
dominate the KBI's work. That work used to consist of chasing all the
heroin, cocaine and marijuana coming into the state and investigating many
murder cases.

Now they do all that, and this.

But mostly this.

Welch and Page sat down last week to talk about the crime that has come to
dominate the work of the KBI.

In 1996, Welch said, law officers in Kansas seized 71 meth labs, a number
they all considered shocking at the time.

Last year, they seized 702.

And this year? One hundred twenty-four already.

"We'll easily break last year's seizure record," Welch said.

There are good and bad reasons those numbers are going up.

The bad is that there is more methamphetamine. The good is that we know it
when we see it.

Everyone, from farmers to rural sheriffs to city police chiefs, has become
much better educated about methamphetamine labs. And that education, they
said, is going to save the lives of cops, children, and some of our
neighbors who might stumble by accident into one of the incredibly toxic labs.

The criminals who manufacture illegal methamphetamine do it in abandoned
farm houses, or in the trunks of cars, or along a roadside ditch.

They mix chemicals -- red phosphorus, battery acids, cold medicines and
anhydrous ammonia, and then they dump the waste right there.

Now, Page said, when a rural sheriff sees a pile of trash in a rural ditch,
he's much more likely to look for the telltale signs: Coke bottles with
holes drilled into them, empty cans of starter fluid with holes punched in
the bottom. Empty packages of cold medicine. Beer coolers or Thermos jugs,
for holding anhydrous ammonia.

Now, Welch said many law officers in the state know more; many of them know
now, for example, that no call to a house is ever routine. You could die in
some houses just by breathing, Welch said; the fumes are that bad.

This crime has cost us more than our innocence, Welch said.

Fighting meth costs money. And there isn't nearly enough.

He has spent much of his time the past five years pleading with members of
congress and the state legislature for money.

And they've given him hundreds of thousands more dollars, for more agents
and more training programs.

And he's going to ask for more money this year because what he has still
isn't enough.

Some of his agents are getting burned out, he said.

Because of the chemicals they handle in illegal labs, all of his agents
must submit to a full medical work-up every other year -- X-rays and blood
work. The doctors are looking for cancer. No one knows yet what the
long-term effects of such chemical exposure will do to cops, he said.

He has 12 chemists who help prepare meth lab cases for court. In the past
five years, he said, their workload has increased by 140 percent.

Prosecutors all over Kansas are telling him they are either declining to
file criminal cases, or seeking plea bargains, or seeing cases dismissed
because the lab work is backlogged.

It's all dirty work, Welch said.

The one saving grace, he said, is that we now know how bad it is.

If we can't beat it, he said, we can at least know how bad it is.