DRUG PROBLEM WORSE, BASED ON NEW DATA

Day breaks in Bessemer, and an unmarked van rumbles over railroad tracks.
It turns down a street filled with grand but aging homes and parks behind a
rundown frame house, the worst in the neighborhood.

Eight heavily armed men and women dressed in black, with armored vests and
helmets, pile out. They smash through the home's rear door, shouting,
"Sheriff's department! Search warrant!"

In the war on drugs, it's another skirmish, something that is occurring far
more often in Alabama. For the first time, the state Department of Forensic
Sciences crime lab is counting drug cases statewide, and it's getting a
total that is nearly double what was previously calculated.

Now we know 30,891 drug cases were filed in Alabama in fiscal 2006, said
Gary Wallace, chief of drug chemistry at the crime lab.

That's one case for every 150 Alabama residents. It represents more
defendants than the entire population of Bessemer, and at that rate in
three years the number of people arrested could fill Bryant-Denny Stadium.

Alabama, like the rest of America, has an escalating and costly drug
problem. The FBI estimates that adult drug arrests tripled from 1970 to
2005. More than 1.5 million of these arrests occur annually in the U.S. The
cost of illicit drug use in 2002 was $181 billion, with $107 billion of
that associated with crimes such as murder and robbery, according to the
National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Timely information:

Wallace said new software is enabling officials to calculate the total
number and types of drug cases the crime lab handles. It is providing a
real-time look at the flow of illegal drugs seized by police in Alabama
and, indirectly, is giving officials a pretty good idea of the number of
arrests.

For years the most authoritative data on drug arrests came from the Alabama
Criminal Information Justice Center's Uniform Crime Reporting Program. But
it is an incomplete source of information.

For instance, the crime lab statistics reveal that the number of drug
arrests made every year in Alabama may be much higher than counts taken by
the Uniform Crime Reporting Program. While the crime lab analyzed evidence
in almost 31,000 drug cases in fiscal 2006, the Uniform Crime Reporting
Program counted 17,365 drug arrests for calendar year 2006, according to
its annual report.

Carol Roberts, a public information expert for the Uniform Crime Reporting
Program, said some police agencies in the state, including the state
Department of Public Safety, the state troopers, fail to report their drug
arrest numbers. Thus, data are incomplete, she said.

Wallace said the total number of cases handled by the crime lab nonetheless
provides a fairly accurate indication of just how many drug arrests are
made in Alabama. The lab handles drug cases from all police agencies in
Alabama, he said. Everybody sends in their evidence because quantitative
and chemical analyses are necessary for criminal prosecution.

So the crime lab is able to accurately count criminal drug cases, which are
now pouring into the lab at a rate of 2,800 a month, or about 90 a day,
Wallace said.

Many cases involve more than one drug, so the number of cases is lower than
the number of seizures - 36,969 for the past fiscal year. Boiled down, that
means an illegal drug of some sort is seized on average every 15 minutes in
Alabama, around the clock.

A typical raid:

The drug operation in Bessemer early one Wednesday morning provided a look
at what kinds of charges are typically filed, and what types of drugs are
most often seized.

Minutes after deputies crashed through the back door, a bleary-eyed,
shirtless man was brought out in handcuffs. "Usually when you do this early
in the morning you catch them in bed," said Lt. Paul Hogan, head of the
Jefferson County Sheriff's Department narcotics division.

Deputies confiscated a 12-gauge shotgun, and two police dogs sniffed out
what appeared to be small amounts of crack cocaine and marijuana. The
38-year-old resident of the home was arrested and charged with possession
of a controlled substance.

The overwhelming majority of drug arrests nationwide and statewide are for
possession, as opposed to trafficking.

Marijuana was the top illicit drug confiscated last fiscal year in Alabama.
According to the crime lab, authorities seized about 2,500 pounds of
marijuana in 15,409 cases. That's half the state's caseload for drug
violations.

Cocaine was the other suspected drug seized in the Bessemer raid. It is the
No. 2 drug on the crime lab's list of cases. There were 10,954 seizures
last fiscal year involving about 240 pounds of cocaine, either as powder or
crack.

Prescription drugs:

The drug lab statistics also reveal that police and medical examiners are
facing an increasingly complex problem with prescription drugs.

"We see a little bit of everything," Wallace said.

The crime lab analyzed about two dozen types of prescription drugs and
about a dozen street drugs. The most commonly seized prescription drug was
hydrocodone, the narcotic ingredient in Lortab.

"Lortabs have taken over as the pharmaceutical drug of choice," Wallace
said. "Valium led that for a while, but Lortab has taken over."

Wallace said prescription drugs have a tendency to morph into a variety of
forms. For example, a class of tranquilizers known as benzodiazepines came
onto the pharmaceutical market in 1960, first as Librium and then Valium.

There are now dozens of benzodiazepines, all with slightly different
tranquilizing effects and all with the potential for addiction and
overdose. Five different benzodiazepines were seized by authorities in
Alabama during fiscal 2006, according to data from the crime lab.

Wallace said most trends revealed by the statistics aren't surprising.
Officials generally know what's being seized because they handle the
arrests and paperwork. They also know many types of illegal drugs come and go.

LSD has come and gone several times since the 1960s. It's now gone, with
only five seizures of that hallucinogen in fiscal 2006.

But the main drug of choice stays the same, easily topping the number of
seizures by police. "The majority is marijuana," Wallace said. "That's
pretty standard every year."

Long days and nights:

One of the deputies participating in the Bessemer raid said it is much
easier to zero in on street drugs than prescription drugs. That's because
people who abuse prescription drugs usually make their purchases through
medical channels. They may shop around for several doctors, or find an
unethical doctor willing to write prescriptions for a price, making those
kinds of crimes tough to uncover.

Still, Hogan's team of narcotics deputies stays busy, sometimes putting in
long days and nights. The deputies started work at 5 a.m. the day of the
Bessemer raid, and planned to conduct another operation later that day, and
then again at 7 p.m.

"I don't think we're ever going to stomp out drugs totally," Hogan said.