CALIFORNIA SCARRED BY METH COMBAT

he three children slept outside the ramshackle desert home in a broken-down
school bus. Mice fed off piles of unwashed dishes.

Sheriff's deputies, some gagging as they entered the secluded dwelling,
might never have made their discovery but for the 12-year-old whose life
they saved. The child had a bullet lodged in her head.

"The family tried to say the girl fell from a tree," remembered Sgt. Dave
Williams, who stumbled upon the huge methamphetamine laboratory this
summer. "We learned later she was actually shot by robbers who came to
steal the meth cooking in the basement."

Such are the everyday horrors in San Bernardino County, long the
methamphetamine-production capital of the United States and, along with
Mexico, the biggest exporter of meth to Iowa.

In this drug-drenched area, meth-lab catastrophes are so frequent that
stories of local "cookers" burned alive no longer surprise police and
rescue workers. Increasingly common are tales of desperate addicts storing
urine or mining toxic dirt at abandoned drug-lab sites, hoping to recycle
the drug within.

For years, 70 percent to 90 percent of the largest meth-production
operations in the United States - the so-called superlabs that help feed
meth-hungry states such as Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas - have been
discovered in California. Ground zero for most of those labs has been San
Bernardino, the nation's largest county.

"It's just been a horrible, horrible problem, an incredible drain," said
Shirley Lessiak, who works in the state's Department of Justice in nearby
Los Angeles. "It's really hard to put into words."

Lessiak and her multitude of partners in local, state and federal drug task
forces would like to believe they've dealt crippling blows in the past year
to their enemies, the Mexican drug cartels controlling 90 percent of
California meth production.

Armed with Black Hawk helicopters, infrared cameras, global positioning
systems and other state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, state and
federal drug agents seized 207 laboratories in San Bernardino County and
neighboring Riverside County last year - confiscating more meth and toxic
waste than any other area in the nation.

Agents also broke up perhaps the biggest illicit pseudoephedrine operation
in history. The ring of 36 people is accused of smuggling 40 million cold
and allergy tablets from Canada into Southern California. The amount would
have been enough to make some 3,300 pounds of meth.

Yet authorities know through intelligence that southern and central
California harbor more meth traffickers than they can track. An evolving
list of suppliers ships the highly addictive drug along interstates and
highways to established independent drug contacts in the Midwest, Southwest
and, increasingly, the East Coast.

"Once one trafficking route is discovered, a new route is identified," said
Lessiak, who works in the Department of Justice's narcotics division.
"We're sure trying, but there is no end to it in sight."

Narcotics officers say the profits from the meth seized last year in San
Bernardino and Riverside counties - estimated at $26.6 million - pale next
to the area's total drug profits. However, the sum was 15 times greater
than the annual budget of the two-county area's regional meth task force.

Highly Profitable, Highly Hazardous

State and federal narcotics agents are convinced that meth demand is
growing nationally.

"It's a homegrown drug," said Jose Martinez, an agent with the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration in Los Angeles. Border controls make it harder
to import drugs such as cocaine and heroin, so meth is growing in
popularity, he said.

San Bernardino County, a tapestry of desert, mountains, farmland and
patches of suburbia, long has been fertile territory for meth production.
Eighty percent of the county is unpopulated, making superlabs difficult to
detect.

As agents have begun to comb the swaths of desert hills, however, the most
hazardous operations have moved into cities, suburbs and rural towns -
often in poor, largely Hispanic neighborhoods.

"The drug organizations make the money so good, the family can't turn them
away," said Police Lt. Lee Hamblin, a longtime San Bernardino narcotics agent.

Most meth labs across the country produce small amounts of the drug, but
superlabs are capable of manufacturing 10 pounds or more at a time. Those
found in California often produce several tons over a few months.

In June 2000, agents discovered 400 pounds of meth - one of the largest
caches in history - a half-hour from San Bernardino in Riverside County.
The cleanup cost $60,000, a common price tag.

For every pound of manufactured drug, 7 pounds of toxic sludge is left
behind. Of roughly 2,000 lab sites found yearly in California, the average
cleanup cost is $2,450. Remediation of surrounding buildings and the
environment costs much more and can take years.

Police say Southern California has so many contaminated lab sites that
hazardous-waste cleanup is a growth industry. Homes containing longtime
superlabs must be razed.

Chemicals from large sites are so toxic, they have destroyed large trees,
contaminated streams and killed surrounding vegetation. Stories abound
among drug agents of pets and livestock who drank water runoff outside the
labs, grew sick and died.

Knowing the hazards, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department has
turned to seizing ingredients used to make meth, such as pseudoephedrine
tablets, iodine and red phosphorous. Seizures of superlabs dropped off
slightly this year in San Bernardino and Riverside - in part, agents
believe, because of their tactics.

Canada Puts Controls on Ingredients

Until this year, huge quantities of meth ingredients flowed freely into the
United States from Canada. A growing number of Middle Eastern entrepreneurs
purchased kegs of Canadian drug companies' cold and allergy tablets that
were bound for California.

But Canadian legislation this year clamped controls on ephedrine,
pseudoephedrine and other ingredients. The new law frees Canadian
authorities to investigate pharmaceutical companies suspected of selling
ingredients to illegal drug organizations.

Since January, seizures of meth tablets have dropped to about 9 million
from roughly 22 million last year, according to the DEA and Royal Canadian
Mounted Police. Three major pharmaceutical companies are under inves- tigation.

"There's always room for improvement, but this definitely has had an
impact," said Doug Culver, head of the Mounted Police's chemical diversion
program.

In California, drug organizations create whole businesses to extract
ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from cold and allergy tablets. Late last
month, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa co-sponsored national legislation
aimed at preventing cartels from purchasing large quantities of
pseudoephedrine in small blister packs intended for personal use.

Tragic Toll No Longer Shocks

Large-scale meth manufacturing has affected California's economy and
stretched law enforcement. The human toll, Hamblin and other narcotics
agents said, is frightful.

On Sept. 9, a 31-year-old Riverside County mother was found guilty of
second-degree murder and child endangerment after her infant son apparently
ingested lethal doses of methamphetamine from her breast milk.

After a 12-year-old was shot this summer in San Bernardino County, her
parents waited 12 hours to report the wound - long enough for them to mask
the smell of the meth lab beneath a false living room floor.

By then, said Williams, the county law enforcement officer, the girl was
nearly dead.

Yet, in an area inundated with meth, the story of the young girl blinded
for life by gun-toting meth bandits didn't make headlines.

"It's sad but true," he said.

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SAN BERNARDINO AND RIVERSIDE COUNTIES

Square Miles: 27,260

Labs and Dump Sites in 2002: 394

Superlabs in 2002: 22

Percentage of All Superlabs Nationally: 14 percent

Tons Produced by the Superlabs: 17.4

Value of All Finished, Uncut Meth in the Labs: $154.4 million

Arrests at Lab Sites: 685

Children Found at Lab Sites: 140

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CALIFORNIA'S METH PROBLEM*

Regular Labs: 1,290

Superlabs Discovered: 202

Annual Treatment Admissions: 47,703

Deaths: Statewide statistics were unavailable, but there were 155 in Los
Angeles, 112 in San Diego and 45 in San Francisco in 2001

Top Five Markets: Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, and a
group of central states that includes Iowa, Arkansas and Missouri

*2001 statistics, the most recent statewide data available