MOONSHINE COUNTRY OVERRUN BY METH

Drug Labs Turn Out A New Home-Brew In Hills Of North Alabama And East
Tennessee.

Scottsboro, Ala. --- At first he did it just for the runaway train boost
that methamphetamine gave him --- the way he could take a half- dozen
household projects that had languished for months and complete them in a
days-long rush, like the time he finished fertilizing his lawn at 2 a.m.
and then, still wired, fertilized his neighbor's lawn, too.

But Barry Kennamer became increasingly addicted to meth and started to cook
his own. The process was no more complicated than a high school chemistry
project.

"I'll never forget the day I learned to cook --- it was one of the most
exciting times of my life," said Kennamer, 43, seated inside the Jackson
County Jail in Scottsboro, arrested on charges of meth possession and
manufacture. "I had power. I was going to get filthy rich."

That's when Kennamer --- firefighter, husband, father --- joined a swelling
underground of home-brew addicts that has turned a swath of picturesque
mountain counties, from northeast Alabama up through Tennessee, into the
South's most virulent Meth Belt. With their jerry- built labs and woodsy
remove, meth cooks here have updated --- with tragic results --- the
moonshiners' make-it-yourself ethos of getting high.

They've affected almost every aspect of local life. Social services are
swamped, budgets strained and jails jammed --- in one county, nearly nine
of every 10 inmates are held on meth charges.

In some counties, more than 60 percent of children placed in foster care
come from parents busted for operating home labs, with kids as young as 8
able to recite portions of meth recipes.

"It's the moonshine of our generation --- times 50," said U.S. Rep. Zach
Wamp, who represents much of East Tennessee. "It's deadly, dangerous and
wreaks havoc on families. You don't have to be highly educated to make it
you can pick up all the ingredients --- and it preys on a rural culture."

There were two meth lab busts in Tennessee in 1996. In 2002, there were
about 500, the majority around the Cumberland Plateau. In Alabama's Jackson
County, with a mostly rural population of 53,000, there was one bust in
1998. Last year, there were nearly 90.

"We trip over meth labs here," said Chuck Phillips, chief investigator for
the Jackson County Sheriff's Department.

Phillips has uncovered portable labs in car trunks after traffic accidents
and walked store aisles strewn with empty cold pill boxes --- ephedrine in
cold remedies is a key meth ingredient. He has driven back roads once
littered with beer cans and burger wrappers that now are trashed with
Coleman fuel containers and plastic bottles discarded by roving meth cooks.

Even country stores have cashed in on the explosion. Some pile their
shelves with everyday legal items that cooks buy in bulk.

"It's like a meth lab display," said Phillips, whose department recently
received a $222,000 federal grant solely for methamphetamine enforcement.
"It's gotten out of hand."

An invasion of cooks

Meth is a superstimulant concocted from a banal assortment of products:
cold pill ephedrine, phosphorus from matchbooks, coffee filters, lye.

Recipes are easily available on the Internet, as well as in "Secrets of
Methamphetamine Manufacture," the meth heads' bible, written by a Wisconsin
chemist with the pen name Uncle Fester.

But easy as it is to assemble the ingredients and read a recipe, making
meth is still a toxic, highly explosive undertaking. A cook's chances of
not blowing himself up are greatly enhanced by a tutor skilled in the
drug's manufacture.

Before the late '90s, indigenous drug production consisted mostly of
backwoods marijuana-growing. Few producers in the area had experience with
making meth.

Then a handful of veteran meth cooks from California, where the drug has
been entrenched for decades, arrived in southeast Tennessee, jump- starting
the region's current meth-making wave, law enforcement officials say.

The outsider cooks exploited a region rife with characteristics common to
meth use --- white, rural, economically depressed --- and offered what
essentially were private cooking lessons. In return, say Drug Enforcement
Administration agents who eventually arrested them, they were paid in cash,
guns, even a pickup truck.

The impact grew exponentially: They'd each teach a half-dozen cooks, who'd
teach a half-dozen more, who'd teach a half-dozen more. This growing
network moved up and down the Cumberland Plateau area, crossing from
Tennessee into northeast Alabama and back.

In the federal trial in which one California cook was convicted, the
prosecutor referred to him in closing arguments as "the Johnny Appleseed of
meth."

Said David Shelton, DEA agent in Chattanooga: "It was like a biblical
who-begat-who tree. The process is so simple, and the ingredients so easy
to obtain, it just mushroomed."

The epidemic that has resulted differs from that in many other parts of the
country, drug enforcement officials say.

California and the desert Southwest have a proliferation of large labs that
distribute nationally. Areas such as northwest Georgia, with its swelling
immigrant population, are flooded with meth imported from Mexico and
Southern California.

But the woods around the Cumberland Plateau are mostly dotted with
unsophisticated mom and pop operators --- called "Beavis & Butt-head"
makers by some drug agents --- who make enough just for their own use and
to sell to a relatively small circle for money to buy more ingredients.

Many have some signature procedure that distinguishes their product from
other cooks'. Loyalty to a particular meth maker is called "getting hooked
on the cook."

"It's similar to the old moonshine philosophy, where there's a certain
pride in what people make," said Charles Rhodes, Jackson County district
attorney.

"A lot of people here get off on the cooking aspect --- it's almost a
social phenomenon among people who do that," he added. "You find two or
three or four people getting together in a house or trailer, they cook some
up, then move to another house and cook some more. It's like a potluck."

Getting "hooked on the cook" cuts both ways. Kennamer said there's an
almost mystical infatuation with making meth that can be as addictive as
the drug itself. He recalled surfing the Internet for hours in search of
new "cooking tips" and refining what he made.

"You see somebody cook it one time, and it sweeps you off your feet," he
said. "You take these chemicals, get a big reaction and that acid smell. .
. . Man, I don't know what it is about cooking, but it can flat take you away.

"People start out with the intention of getting filthy rich, and they end
up just making enough for their own habit," he added. "Everybody's story is
exactly the same. It's just the characters who are different."

Rehab rarely works

Despite beefed up enforcement and education, there's little hope in the
region for the demise of meth.

It's changed the nature of the local drug problem: Pot farmers, who once
flourished in the same hills that meth labs now dominate, have dwindled to
a fading nuisance. "Today we'd just love to see some potheads," said Stacey
Neeley, director of the drug treatment program in DeKalb County, Ala.,
which sees almost exclusively meth cases.

And the boutique makeup of most meth operations --- one expert compared
their pervasiveness to a Starbucks on every block --- has city and county
drug agents chasing them down continuously.

"When I first started working dope [in 1989], there were just a few people
who had a lot," said Darrell Collins, drug task force commander in
Alabama's DeKalb County. "Now, with meth, there's a lot of people with a
little dope."

Enforcement successes have only pushed the problem east and north, drug
enforcement officials say, with meth labs cropping up in alarming numbers
all the way into southern Kentucky. The volume of lab busts has also opened
a market for the Mexican methamphetamine in northwest Georgia.

"It's the law of supply and demand," said Russ Dedrick, assistant U.S.
attorney in Knoxville and coordinator of the Southeast Tennessee
Methamphetamine Task Force.

Rehabilitation for meth addicts has a notoriously poor success rate ---
more than 70 percent return to the drug --- and is viewed as a low priority
among most drug enforcement officials in this region. Many cooks get out of
jail on bail, set up shop again and are rearrested. Phillips recalled that
one defendant was sent to a drug treatment center, which then kicked him
out after it discovered a lab in his room.

"Everybody and their brother's doing it," said Kennamer. "It's worse than
anybody can imagine. It's a sorrowful thing that's happened to this area."

THE METH BELT

Homemade crystal methamphetamine has become an epidemic in some counties in
Alabama and Tennessee.