RURAL ILLINOIS CONFRONTS A BOOM IN METH LABS

A decade after homemade methamphetamine gained a foothold in Western states
and began spreading east, signs of its growing presence in Illinois are
worrying police and residents in counties not used to playing host to drug
outbreaks.

Known as "crank," "crystal" and "redneck crack," meth has crept from the
Ozarks region of southern Missouri over the last two years and appears to be
finding a home in rural border areas near Illinois cities like Quincy and
Carbondale.

In 1997, about 40 "labs"--some nothing more than a collection of glass and
plastic bottles and tubes stuffed in a cardboard box--were seized around the
state, Illinois State Police reported. Last year, the number easily topped
250, and that total was surpassed by this summer, authorities said.

The trend has drifted north and east from border towns toward Chicago. From
secluded homes to duck blinds to makeshift camps in forested areas, police
are finding the sometimes curious signs of what they call "Beavis and
Butt-head" labs.

Discarded toxic byproducts of meth production litter roadsides and woodlands
in some counties. Farmers struggle to keep a key ingredient in down-home
recipes --anhydrous ammonia fertilizer --from being stolen from tanks in
their cornfields.

The process of cooking meth is relatively simple, but some of the gases
given off are very unforgiving, a fact not helped by the habit of some
cookers to make the substance while under its influence.

On Oct. 2, a house burst into flames in Downstate Pana, a town of 6,000
southeast of Springfield, as its occupants allegedly cooked meth. The same
day, a police officer in Quincy was overcome by noxious fumes when a seal on
his breathing tank failed just after a raid.

A recent study of five states, including Missouri and Iowa, found almost 80
injuries reported by emergency workers who responded to calls to meth labs
from 1996 to 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention in Atlanta.

Missouri cookers began crossing the Mississippi after authorities in that
state came down hard on the meth culture. The new arrivals created a market
for meth, but Illinoisans quickly learned to produce it themselves. The drug
is cheap to make but relatively expensive in finished form at $100 a gram.

While finished meth is occasionally recovered by drug cops in the Chicago
area, production in the city and suburbs is believed to be minimal, at least
for now. A handful of home labs have turned up in the Kankakee area this
year, drug agents there said.

"In rural places, we've always gotten our drugs from the metropolitan areas.
Well, now we're giving them one," said Thomas McNamara, an administrative
officer for the drug-fighting Southern Illinois Enforcement Group based in
Carbondale.

The favorite recipe for crystal meth calls for removing ephedrine or
pseudoephedrine from store-bought cold capsules and combining it with
lithium from high-grade batteries and a number of other acids and chemicals.
The recipe, combining dangerous substances like engine starter fluid and
drain opener, yields a highly addictive stimulant that can be smoked,
snorted, injected or swallowed.

The six-hour process brings meth into the usable form of hydrochloride salt
crystals.

Meth produces a longer, more intense high than crack and can leave hard-core
users, nicknamed "tweakers" by police, awake for many days at a time. It can
cause heart failure, stroke and brain damage, and addicts have become
notorious in parts of the country for their erratic, aggressive and paranoid
behavior.

Drug officers said the profile of an Illinois cooker is a white male between
15 and 30 years old, with little education and low socioeconomic status.
While many are blue-collar castoffs, police said, children in established
farm families have become involved as well.

Many users begin cooking to support their own habit, police said, and with
the belief that they can sell meth. Word on the street in some Illinois
towns is that $100 worth of ingredients can produce $1,200 worth of crank.

"It's a drug that's cheap to make for people around here who can't afford
anything," said Dennis Ballance, who runs a corn farm near the Big Muddy
River in Union and Jackson Counties.

But though making meth may seem lucrative, McNamara said, most cookers use
most of what they make and may exchange a bit more for ingredients provided
by their circle of friends.

"It was a need-driven drug for them in the first place," said McNamara, a
native of Chicago's South Side who went to Southern Illinois University and
never left the area. "They tend to make it and use it. That's why we don't
have any rich small-batch operators."

Randy Myers, a distributor of anhydrous ammonia in the Carbondale area,
thinks of the drug in terms of lost revenue. His farm service company's
1,000-gallon torpedo-shaped tanks, which dot cornfields, are an easy target
for meth cookers.

The dangerous practice of stealing the compressed fertilizer, which jets
from opened valves at minus-44 degrees, is called "bull riding" because the
thief sits atop the tank as he tries to collect it. Myers said thieves use
containers as small as a thermos in the thefts, occasionally injuring
themselves.

And they tend not to bother resealing the tanks, letting them drain and
costing distributors hundreds of dollars at a time. This year, thieves
opened a massive storage tank and let so much of it drain it created a
breath-stealing fog.

"These people are idiots who try to get this stuff out of here," Myers said.
"It will kill you."

The job performed by Chris Mohrman and Tony Rendleman has changed
dramatically since meth invaded the Carbondale region. As officers for the
Illinois Department of Natural Resources, residents know them as game
wardens who patrol in green pickup trucks.

Now they find the hazards of hidden labs on their patrols almost daily. The
sites typically include bottles used in the mixing process that still
contain toxic residue and require the cleanup skills of a trained
lab-dismantler.

"You look at trash a lot differently now, and we're afraid because we have
so many people in here all the time," Mohrman said. "All we had to worry
about in the past was a patch of marijuana every once in a while."

Rendleman said one of his neighbors was sentenced recently to 10 years in
prison in a meth case. In a matter of weeks, the 27-year-old had gone from a
construction worker to a sunken-eyed, meth-cooking recluse who stayed in the
forest for days, Rendleman said.

"It's unbelievable what it does to people," he said. "I didn't realize it
was that addictive. It ate this guy up."

In Quincy, state police investigators are battling a meth problem that has
moved into the town of more than 40,000 on the Mississippi River. Quincy's
first encounter with the drug in 1997 literally came with a bang, police
said, when an apartment a few blocks from City Hall exploded.

In early October, police raided the home of a truck driver in town, Illinois
State Police Lt. Kenneth Yelliott said. The man's neighbors knew he would be
on the road for two weeks, Yelliott said, so they broke into his basement
and set up a lab.

In another case, Quincy police raided an apartment across the street from
their headquarters to bust a meth operation.

"We actually stopped traffic and just let the SWAT team walk across," he
said.

Tim Wooldridge, a state police investigations commander, said labs have
turned up all over town and the surrounding countryside, even in an occupied
Quincy day-care center last year. Everyone from Boy Scout leaders to in-home
care providers in parts of Quincy are being trained on what to do if they
stumble on a lab.

Wooldridge said his team is working with local retailers, who tell police
when someone approaches them to make a suspiciously large purchase of
over-the-counter drugs used to make meth, and with local residents, who are
learning to identify the telltale ammonia-and-rotten-eggs smell of a lab.

State police also have started Operation Nighthawk in the Quincy area, which
uses aircraft to spot unusual traffic near anhydrous ammonia tanks in farm
fields.

Gary Farha of the Adams County state's attorney's office said prosecutors
have had more success recently sending cookers to jail after a period of
explaining the hazards of the drug to local judges. Some initially were
skeptical, he said, noting offenders had most of the ingredients to make
meth in their own homes.

Laws in Illinois have toughened as well. The manufacture of more than 15
grams of meth is a Class X felony punishable by at least 6 years in prison.
Illinois Gov. George Ryan in August convened a 10-state summit in
Collinsville on the ballooning meth problem.

In Pana, residents reacted with little surprise when a house allegedly being
used for meth production was burned in a flash explosion. When firefighters
arrived, the home was abandoned, but one of the suspected cookers later
turned up for burn treatment in a neighboring town complaining that the
battery of a car he was working on exploded.

Customers at Mudcat Grant's tavern a few hundred feet from the house, which
was left a charred shell, said meth swept into their area over the last
year. Bar owner Jim Mikalik said he had followed the drug's emergence mostly
in the papers.

"Until now," he said, motioning in the direction of the fire. "That was
close."