CRIME LAB GETS NEEDED FUNDING

When Macon County sheriff's deputies charged Robert Charles Sanders
with trafficking in methamphetamine in June, the Franklin resident
already had a list of pending charges stretching back to last year.

But Sanders, 26, would not be sentenced to prison until Oct. 3.

The reason his case and many other drug cases have languished for
more than a year on the court docket, Sheriff Robert Holland says, is simple.

"You may know it's meth, or you may know it's marijuana or cocaine or
whatever," Holland said, "but it has to be scientifically proven that it is."

Testing drug samples from crime scenes across Western North Carolina
is the responsibility of six chemists at a lab in Skyland. Every time
they break off a piece of methamphetamine or cocaine for their
machines to analyze, these State Bureau of Investigation agents also
chip away at a backlog of 3,500 cases.

But Special Agent in Charge Joseph Reavis says relief is in sight for
his crew of chemists, thanks to new employees, new space for them to
work and new equipment.

A federal grant of $168,000, awarded in September to fight North
Carolina's growing meth problem, will buy two new machines for the
lab, according to Attorney General Roy Cooper's office. The money
also will buy one machine for the SBI's only other lab in Raleigh,
which also faces a backlog. Together the two labs have a $7.4 million
annual budget.

The General Assembly last year approved doubling the western lab's
staff of chemists to 10. And the lab is nearly doubling in size, too,
with an expansion expected to finish around the end of this year.

An eight-month backlog has accumulated there, Reavis said, even
though a single chemist often can dispose of one case in less than an hour.

Between 9 and 11 on one morning in late September, Robert Briner
logged the results of three finished tests in his black notebook.

First up for Briner was a substance from Gaston County, one of 30
western counties the lab serves. The chemist crumbled a bit of the
drug into a coin-sized hole in a tray. He squeezed a drop or two of a
chemical into the tray, turning it an orange color close to the hue
of the polo shirt Briner wore under his white lab coat.

Orange could mean meth. But he needed two positive tests to be sure,
and an infrared scan found the drug too impure to give an accurate result.

So Briner dropped a piece into a gas chromatograph, the same kind of
machine that the federal grant will buy. The device shattered the
sample and analyzed the pattern it made, bringing up a graph that
zigged and zagged across a screen. It was a close match to the
typical shatter pattern for meth.

One case down, more than 3,500 pending.

Meth production has surged in Western North Carolina, with 322 meth
labs discovered in 2004 and 270 this year as of Wednesday. Just nine
were found in 1999.

When a meth lab is found, an SBI chemist sealed in a hazardous
materials suit is on the scene to collect evidence. When suspects go
to trial, a chemist sometimes testifies.

But chemists' most important role in the fight against meth is to
test the drugs. The attorney general was pleased that U.S. Sen.
Elizabeth Dole's office helped obtain more equipment to do that, even
if the federal money was less than the $2.3 million his office said
he asked for.

"The quicker we can analyze these cases, the faster we can bring
these criminals to justice," Cooper said. "These meth labs endanger
our community and our families, and it's important we put a stop to them."