METH-MAKERS BECOME ADDICTED TO N.C.

Manufacturers take root in the Blue Ridge Mountains, finding that the
rugged terrain offers the protection that moonshiners enjoyed.

BOONE, N.C. - Mark Shook says he's fighting a war in this mountain
town - complete with explosions, abandoned children and an enemy that
won't give up.

Shook is Watauga County's sheriff and, for the past year, he and
others have tried to beat back the spread of methamphetamine through
the hills and hollows of western North Carolina.

"Meth is choking this town," Shook said recently, moments before
taking a call about yet another raid on a possible meth lab. "We are
fighting a war - and it's going to spread. I've never seen anything
like it."

Meth is a highly addictive and potent powder "cooked" from such common
ingredients as ammonia, lithium from car batteries and pseudoephedrine
from cold tablets. After snorting, eating or injecting the drug, users
experience rushes of energy and euphoria.

"You feel like Superman," said David Mclemore, a former addict who now
counsels substance abusers here. "You can get addicted the first time.
And then it takes more and more and more to get high."

Popularized by bikers and truckers in the late 1980s, meth and its
makers have migrated eastward from California and other Western states.

They've increasingly taken root in the Blue Ridge Mountains near the
border between North Carolina and Tennessee. The latter state led the
South with more than 1,150 of the nation's roughly 8,000 meth lab
seizures last year.

Boone, a town of 13,500 that is home to Appalachian State University,
is surrounded by rugged terrain that offers meth-makers the kind of
protection it once provided to moonshiners. The open, isolated spaces
diffuse the pungent, nauseating odors that are the meth labs' giveaway.

"You can't cook when you're living on top of each other in a city,"
Shook said. Last year, 34 meth labs were seized here, and social
workers removed 17 children from homes where the chemicals saturated
the walls, furniture and carpet.

Because these so-called "meth orphans" were often covered in dangerous
toxins, doctors had to decontaminate them. Their toys, books and
clothes had to be burned.

"The kids didn't always understand why they couldn't take their Barbie
with them," social worker Chad Slagle said.

Children sometimes unwittingly caused their parents' arrest. A
first-grader told her teacher how to cook meth. An older student
included meth cooking in a "How I Spent My Summer" essay.

"We call Watauga County ground zero," said State Bureau of
Investigation Director Robin Pendergraft, who is urging North Carolina
lawmakers to increase penalties for operating meth labs.

The list of problems presented by the meth boom is long.

Meth-making, with its combustible ingredients and "cooks" who are
often strung out, comes with the ever-present possibility of explosions.

Meth-makers dump poisonous byproducts into sewage systems, streams and
fields. And their labs render houses uninhabitable and depress
surrounding property values.

With every meth-lab bust, taxpayers must spend $2,000 to $4,000 to
have hazardous materials teams and other specially trained workers
clean up the toxic mess, which includes phosphine gas, a chemical
weapons component.

The human cost is also high. Some 3,300 "meth orphans" were removed
from homes nationwide last year, authorities said.

Many have ingested meth, said John Martyny, industrial hygiene expert.
"Kids crawl on the carpet, put their fingers in their mouths. They
might as well have been taking it directly."

Martyny recently led a study of meth labs at the National Jewish
Medical and Research Center in Denver. It found that meth and its
ingredients drifted down hallways and seeped under closed doors. They
saturated walls, carpeting, sofas and ventilation ducts. Even tests on
clothing fibers and the interiors of microwave ovens came back positive.

Many of the ingredients of methamphetamine are linked to cancer,
kidney and liver damage, and respiratory failure.

What leads people to this dangerous drug? Boredom as much as anything,
said one recovering North Carolina addict, who spoke on condition of
anonymity.

"There's nothing to do here," said the woman, recalling how she
snorted meth for the first time at her kitchen table. She and her
husband lost all their savings and isolated themselves in their
mountain home.

She only recently regained custody of their three children after
satisfying a judge that she had been drug-free for a year.

Dr. Andrew Mason, a Boone forensic toxicologist, said the woman is a
rarity. Efforts to get meth users off the drug fail at a rate of 94%,
he said.

"This thing is worse than heroin. It's worse than crack. And it's
going up and down highways," said Shook, predicting its spread, like
moonshine's, to bigger cities. "That's why we're attacking it here,
now."