DEA TEACHES METH-COOKING 101

DEA Holds Awareness Class to Show Citizens How Easy It Is to Make the
Drug.

Cooking methamphetamine takes only a few hours and requires simple
household ingredients, like striker plates from matchbooks, the guts
of lithium batteries, drain cleaner.

"It's pretty gross," said Matt Leland, who works in career services at
the University of Northern Colorado and who recently helped cook the
drug in a lab. "If someone was truly interested in manufacturing meth,
it would not be that hard."

The Drug Enforcement Administration invited Leland and other citizens
- - such as software engineers, a teacher, a pastor and a school
principal - to make methamphetamine last week in a lab at Metropolitan
State College of Denver.

"At first, I thought, 'Man, I cannot believe they showed us how to do
it.' But you can find the recipe on the Internet," Leland said. "It
just goes to show anybody who really wants to do it probably could."

The class was held as part of the DEA's first Citizens Academy in
order to give the public a close-up view of what the agency does to
keep drugs off the street.

Although meth remains a significant problem across the U.S., the
number of clandestine labs has dropped because some of the ingredients
are harder to obtain.

Pseudoephedrine tablets, such as Sudafed, are now generally behind
pharmacy counters and not readily available for purchase in massive
amounts. The tablets are boiled down by drug cooks to extract
meth-making chemicals.

"There are parties where cooks have free beer and drugs and people sit
around tearing striker plates and removing tablets from their foil
packs," said Paul Eyerly, a DEA chemist.

But Eyerly says that chemists and DEA agents are not called out to
meth labs as much as they were in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Last year, 102 labs were discovered in Colorado, down from an
eight-year high of 425 labs in 2002, according to DEA statistics.

Roger Ely, another DEA chemist, said agents still need to stay on top
of the problem, testing recipes they find on the Internet and learning
the many ways the drugs can be made so they can testify against
manufacturers in court.

"The crooks are always coming up with new technologies even though the
chemistry stays the same," Ely said.

Jeff Sweetin, the DEA's special agent in charge of the Rocky Mountain
region, says methamphetamine is now largely a smuggling issue. Most of
the product comes from Mexican cartels that manufacture the drugs in
"superlabs" where cooks are capable of quickly making pound after
pound, he said.

Sweetin said Mexican authorities are trying to stop the manufacturing
of meth in their country by implementing the restrictions on
ingredients that exist in the U.S.

"They are a full partner in our meth issues right now," Sweetin
said.

Lisa Tennyson, a financial crimes investigator who attended the class,
said she was affected most by photographs the DEA showed her. One was
of a man who had cut out his own intestines while under the influence
of meth and another of a man whose skin was peeling off from burns he
got making the drug.

"When you think about what they are putting into their body, ... you
would not go and buy that stuff and drink it," she said. "I mean,
would you buy drain cleaner and take a sip of it?"