FOR SOME, 'YABA' BECOMING A DRUG OF CHOICE

It comes in a little pill, often with sugar and an aroma added to make it
more palatable. It probably was made by minions of a Burmese warlord. The
Thais call it "yaba," or "crazy medicine."

We call it methamphetamine.

But whatever you call it, law enforcement officials say the highly
addictive tablet has become the drug of choice among drug users in
Sacramento's burgeoning Southeast Asian community, and has the potential to
spread elsewhere as it becomes more prevalent.

"We are seeing it in pretty significant numbers," said Sacramento County
Undersheriff John McGinness. "We are going to see it at problem levels,
there's no doubt about it."

The drug drew national attention two weeks ago when federal agents arrested
10 Sacramento and Lodi residents in the first major U.S. drug bust
involving yaba.

The arrests followed a two-year investigation during which federal customs
agents seized hundreds of thousands of pills in nearly 200 shipments of
yaba mailed to Sacramento addresses from Thailand and Laos.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Anne Pings, who is prosecuting the cases, said
there are six separate yaba cases involving 13 defendants pending in
federal court here, and that they may be the first major cases involving
the drug in the United States.

Pings declined to say whether the cases or defendants are connected. But
other law enforcement sources said they are connected at least by their
destination market.

"What we have seen is that most of this stuff has been destined for the
Mien and Hmong communities in Northern California and the Central Valley,"
said Gordon Taylor, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement
Administration's office in Sacramento. "And from what we've seen, it's been
pretty much staying in the Asian community."

Some local leaders in the Southeast Asian American community said they knew
little or nothing about the drug or its presence in the area.

"I don't know about it," said Xia Kao Vang, director of the Sacramento Lao
Family Community Center. "I can't really say whether it's here."

But another leader in the community, who asked not to be named, said "it's
a biggie, a real biggie."

"We've heard about this for the last three years," the person said, "but
it's hard to recognize because it looks like medicine. And it's terribly
potent."

Most methamphetamine in the Central Valley -- where much of the country's
meth supply originates -- is manufactured and distributed in powdered form
by cartels controlled by Mexican nationals.

But yaba has its roots in the mountains of northeastern Myanmar, formerly
called Burma. There, groups run by warlords for decades have produced a
large share of the world's heroin.

In the past few years, they have branched out into the yaba business,
producing as many as 800 million pills annually.

The pills typically weigh about 100 milligrams and consist of about 30
milligrams of methamphetamine, 60 milligrams of caffeine and the rest
binding agents.

Although yaba pills most commonly are ground into powder and smoked, they
are often brightly colored, flavored with sugar and given a pleasing aroma
such as vanilla. That makes them easy to swallow as well as harder to
detect by drug-sniffing customs canines.

Yaba pills cost as little as a nickel apiece to make and are easier to
transport than powdered heroin, often concealed in items as varied as
candlestick holders and spatula handles.

Many of the pills end up in neighboring Thailand, where they're sold for $2
or $3 each. Thai officials estimate that up to 3 million people -- or 5
percent of the population -- use yaba at least occasionally, and addiction
rates have soared.

Last year, officials in Switzerland seized a shipment of 450,000 yaba pills
made by the United Wa State Army, a Burmese paramilitary group, and the
drug has shown up in other parts of Europe as well.

In addition to expanding into Europe, yaba makers have followed a segment
of their original market to the United States.

"This was a familiar drug to people in Southeast Asia," said one law
enforcement source, "and it just followed them here."

It's an expanding market. In Sacramento County, the segment of the
population who are of Asian/Pacific Islander descent grew at nearly three
times the rate of the county's overall population between 1990 and 2000,
according to the U.S. census, and constitutes almost 12 percent of the total.

And according to the DEA's Taylor, drug users in the Southeast Asian
community gravitate toward yaba even though, at $20 a pill, it's three
times the price of an equivalent amount of Mexican cartel-produced meth.

Drug agents said the Mexican makers of meth so far have stayed out of the
meth pill business, and the Southeast Asian distributors have confined
their sales efforts largely to familiar customers.

"The people selling this are not part of an assimilated community," said
one law enforcement source. "I don't think they could walk across the
street and say, 'Hey dude, why don't you offer your customers some of this,
and I have a lot of it.' "

Still, there are signs that the meth marketing divisions may be blurring.
DEA intelligence has reported that some yaba sellers have branched out to
sales of the party drug Ecstasy as well as a potent form of meth called
crystal.

And there are reports of yaba use at area raves, where it is sometimes sold
as Ecstasy.

While Ecstasy has a vast array of dangers in its own right, many drug
experts regard it with less alarm than meth, which is far more addicting
and far more likely to trigger violent behavior and paranoid delusions.

"We've been hearing the word 'yaba' in California more and more for the
past four or five months," said Bryan Olsey, the board president of
Dancesafe.org, an international nonprofit group that provides information
at dances and raves about potential dangers from drugs and offers free
analyses of pills.

"At some raves, we are finding that about one in 10 pills tested is meth
and caffeine.

"And that's yaba."