HIGHWAY HAZARDS: METH LABS HAVE BECOME BOMBS ON WHEELS

Driven from homes and motels, methamphetamine makers are increasingly
taking to America's roadways, mixing their bubbling brew in drug labs
inside tractortrailers, rental trucks, cars -- even on motorcycles.

To police, the roving labs making the illegal drug are toxic time bombs
that can explode, shutting down interstates, injuring officers and sending
motorists to the hospital.

Meth cooks see them as a way to avoid detection. Trucking down the highway
allows them to disperse the rotten-egg smell that the labs produce and keep
the lab waste out of their own homes.

In Southern Indiana, a man was arrested recently for making meth on his
motorcycle.

"Instead of beakers and Bunsen burners, they're using pop bottles and Igloo
coolers," said Brad Ellsworth, sheriff for Vanderburgh County, Ind.

Part of the lure of the roaming meth lab is the ease of production and
cleanup that makes it less difficult to conceal, said Lt. William Sparks,
spokesman for the Oak Grove Police Department. "If they're moving," he
said, "it's easier to hide."

Earlier this year, police in Oak Grove said they arrested two men and two
women who were getting high in a motel room near the Tennessee line after
cooking meth in the cab of a nearby tractor-trailer.

"They were making the meth in the cab, then taking it into the room to
snort it or smoke it," Sparks said.

The trailer, minus the food usually hauled in it, was found later at a
truck stop, meth-lab gear still inside, Sparks said.

Typically, truckers hauling the meth labs or chemicals used to make the
drug are hauling the illegal items along with legal cargo, said Cheyenne
Albro, director of the Pennyrile Narcotics Task Force in Hopkinsville.

Nationally, the number of such labs found in vehicles increased to 1,307 in
2001, from 869 in 1999, and the number of vehicles found with chemicals or
equipment used to make meth increased to 624 in 2001, from 30 in 1999,
according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. But because there is no
mandatory reporting requirement, it is difficult to gauge the total number
of roving labs.

Last November, a container of stolen anhydrous ammonium, a farm fertilizer
often used to make meth, exploded in a car on Interstate 24 in Oak Grove.

Traffic backed up for miles as all four lanes of the interstate were closed
for nearly an hour, and one lane in each direction was shut down for
another three hours during the cleanup, Detective Jody Lenave said.

"When they're moving it, with the fumes, you couldn't have people driving
through it," Lenave said. "They could be overcome."

It's the volatile nature of the chemicals used to prepare the drug that
makes the labs so dangerous. Nationally, one of every five meth labs is
discovered because of an explosion, Albro said.

Of the 2,000 chemicals available to make the drug, at least half are
explosive, Albro said. He estimates that in Western Kentucky, up to 20
percent of the meth labs are mobile.

Drug Enforcement Administration chief Asa Hutchinson, during a recent stop
in Lexington, said meth producers are being forced to come up with more
innovative ways to hide their labs because law-enforcement agencies are
more aggressive in making arrests.