METH 'COOKS' MAKING DRUG LABS MOBILE TO ELUDE POLICE

OAK GROVE, Ky. - Meth on wheels.

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

To police, the roving labs are toxic time bombs that shut down interstates,
injure police officers and send motorists to the hospital when the labs
explode.

Meth makers see them as a way to avoid detection.

Trucking down the highway allows them to disperse the rotten egg smell the
labs produce and keep the lab waste out of their 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 easy 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 state 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," Lt. Sparks said.

The trailer was found later at a truck stop, meth lab gear still inside,
Lt. 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, Ky.

Nationally, the number of labs found in vehicles increased from 869 in 1999
to 1,307 in 2001, and the number of vehicles found with chemicals or
equipment used to make meth increased from 30 in 1999 to 624 in 2001,
according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

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

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," Detective Lenave said. "They could be overcome, also."

The chemicals used to prepare the drug are volatile. Of the 2,000 chemicals
available to make the drug, at least half are explosive, Mr. Albro said,
and nationally, one of every five meth labs is discovered because of an
explosion.

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.

"That includes keeping them in the trunks of their cars, or in trucks or
vans so they are more mobile and less easy to track," Mr. Hutchinson said.

Other meth makers do not want to contaminate their homes with meth- making
residue and fumes, police say.

"The chemicals are so dangerous, it gets into the walls and the curtains,
and people have poisoned their own families just to make a buck - if they
don't blow themselves up in the first place," said Lt. Sparks of the Oak
Grove police.

About 20 students and staff members were evacuated in April from Westwood
Elementary School in New Castle, Ind., after officers stopped a pickup
truck driven by a suspected meth maker.

Anhydrous ammonium was found in the back, and officers reported strong
ammonia fumes.

In September in Utica, a small community in western Kentucky, 50 people
were evacuated from their homes in the middle of the night and seven people
hospitalized after anhydrous ammonium leaked into the air during a botched
attempt to steal a tank from a farm supply store.

Most meth makers don't appear to know how to store the chemicals they steal
to make their drugs and they don't know how to use them, Sheriff Ellsworth
said.

He added: "They've got the high school chemistry 101 class and think they
are chemists."