WHAT POLICE REFER TO AS 'BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD' LABS ARE GIVING WAY TO BIG SETUPS

To set up what police call "a Beavis and Butthead" lab for crystal
meth production, someone could spend less than $500.

"Depending the capacity, if you are going to do a Beavis and Butthead
- -- the user lab -- where he is going to use cold medicine to extract
his ephedrine, cook it on a stove ... the majority of the equipment
to do that you are going to find in your house," says RCMP Staff Sgt.
Mike Harding, an expert on clandestine labs. "You don't need any
special equipment -- a Pyrex bowl, a pot."

And if someone goes into a pharmacy to buy the 46 boxes of Sudafed
needed to produce an ounce of meth, the store is not obligated to
call anybody, Harding said.

But so-called user labs with inexperienced addicts cooking up an
Internet recipe in their apartment are rapidly disappearing in the
Lower Mainland, police say.

They are being replaced by sophisticated, clandestine drug labs run
by organized criminals with equipment valued in the tens of thousands
of dollars.

"We are seeing condensing tubes that are probably costing them
$2,000-3,000. So to put up a lab like that you are talking at least
$10,000 or $20,000," Harding said.

"For the most part, what we are finding is that they are huge. And
that's consistent with what we are finding in terms of dump sites.
They are dumping these chemicals in huge quantities, up to five, six,
seven thousand litres of chemicals dumped overnight in some locations."

He said it is not really worth it for the users to take the risk and
cook up their own drugs given how much production is coming out of
the bigger labs.

"When the stuff is readily available and cheap, why cook your own
when you can go out and buy it without the hassles and the dangers
and the problems of trying to [get] a bunch of Sudafed."