LOCAL METH LABS ON THE RISE

Illegal Drug 'Cooked' With Toxic Chemicals

Johnny Lee was so certain that people were trying to kill him that the
19-year-old Navy sailor called the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office for
help, authorities said.

When deputies arrived at his Folsom home two weeks ago, they found Lee in a
drug-induced state of paranoia, "a pot of freshly brewed methamphetamine
boiling in the carport" and a mixture of chemicals volatile enough to
explode, sheriff's spokesman James Hartman said.

After quickly turning the heat off the concoction, police turned the heat
up on their investigation of the growing number of local methamphetamine labs.

Known on the street as crank, speed, ice and zip, methamphetamine is
cheaper than cocaine, more addictive than crack and causes more brain
damage than cocaine, heroin or alcohol, studies show.

And if the drug doesn't cause enough harm to users, the hazardous chemicals
used to make it are toxic and can be explosive, burning houses and
apartment buildings to the ground.

The increase in meth labs "is alarming when you consider there were none
before," said Col. John Thevenot, commander of the narcotics division in
the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office. "It's on its way, and it's alarming
because of the dangers associated with the drug because of the violence and
the hazards of manufacturing it."

23 found this year

In 1998, Drug Enforcement Administration specialists in New Orleans
recorded three methamphetamine labs in their district, which includes
Jefferson, St. Tammany, St. James, Tangipahoa, Lafourche, Washington and
St. Helena parishes and New Iberia.

From January to May 30 this year alone, the number shot up to 23, and
local law enforcement officials suspect other labs have gone unreported by
police unfamiliar with the DEA's reporting process.

The drug problem is so alarming nationally that DEA Director Asa Hutchinson
kicked off a three-month, 32-state methamphetamine awareness tour in April.
In March, David Dugas, the U.S. attorney for the Louisiana Middle District
based in Baton Rouge, organized a methamphetamine summit in Gonzales.

Police across the state are educating their officers about the drug, and
St. Tammany police are organizing a task force to help combat the labs,
which often are as dangerous to tinker with as they are expensive to clean up.

"We're working aggressively to prevent further infiltration," Hartman said.
"This stuff is catching on. It's poor man's cocaine."

After police stumbled upon the Folsom lab, they snuffed the flame under 140
grams of meth cooking in the carport and found 2 grams of meth powder,
Hartman said.

There was a time when stumbling on such a home operation was a rarity in
St. Tammany, Hartman said. But in the past two years, deputies have
arrested six people in connection with 13 labs and have made about 25
arrests for methamphetamine possession.

Once predominantly found in the Southwest and on the West Coast, meth labs
spread in the 1980s, creeping north and to the upper Midwest. The problem
exploded in all directions in the 1990s as cooks fell back on a more mobile
and faster method of producing the illegal drug that, unlike other methods,
was immune to Louisiana's humidity.

"Anytime soon, we'll have a real flare-up down here. Everything usually
trickles down," said Lt. Octavio Gonzalez, commander of the bureau of
narcotics in the St. John the Baptist Parish Sheriff's Office.

Learning their craft

Some meth cooks learn their craft in prison, a DEA official said. Others
find the recipes readily available in books or on the Internet.

"But you throw them in a meth lab, and they're rocket scientists," the
agent said.

Often high and awake for days on end, they combine easily and legally
obtained ingredients using glass jars, hot plates and other everyday
kitchen items.

With numerous recipes for making meth, cooks set up shop in houses,
apartments, motel rooms, sheds, cars and trailers.

Cooks tend to lurk in rural or suburban areas, where neighbors have less of
a chance of smelling the ammonia-like odor their process creates, but drug
officials say that, too, is changing.

The users

Easy to manufacture and lucrative, meth is a powerful stimulant that, once
snorted, injected, swallowed or inhaled, can dissolve users into violent
and paranoid fits.

Caught in meth's clutches, users tend to lose weight quickly, scratch
through their skin at imagined "meth mites" and can look as much as 15
years older than their age.

Across the state, 296 meth users were admitted to publicly financed
treatment centers in 1999. Three years later, that number has spiked to
more than 640, said Michael Duffy, acting assistant secretary for the
Office of Addictive Disorders.

Meth seizures are on the rise, too. Jefferson narcotics detectives
confiscated 828 grams of the illegal drug in 2000. Last year, they seized
9,003 grams with a street value of more than $1 million.

"We have seen more meth possession over the last year than ever before,"
Thevenot said.

And more labs.

Last year, Jefferson deputies found three labs, including one in an
apartment on Wall Boulevard in Gretna. The cook in that case was wanted by
authorities in California for setting an apartment building on fire in a
meth-related blaze, police said.

"Three doesn't seem high, but to us, that was alarming. We didn't see any
for 15 years," Thevenot said.

Tangipahoa tops the DEA's district record for the year so far with 10 labs
reported.

Local efforts

Local law enforcement officials have taken steps to combat the ballooning
meth trade. Patrol deputies in St. Tammany, St. John, Jefferson and other
parishes have been taught to recognize the seemingly innocuous makings of a
meth lab and to back out until officers who have received clandestine lab
training arrive on the scene.

In St. Tammany, parish law enforcement officials are putting together a
methamphetamine task force using a $500,000 federal grant awarded in
November to crack down on the labs.

The number of recent busted labs is as staggering as the price to clean
them up. The average cost of dismantling labs in the New Orleans area is
$2,000 to $3,000 for each job, DEA officials said. Sanitizing larger labs
can cost $50,000.

Each pound of meth produced creates 5 pounds to 6 pounds of waste and
hazardous materials that can cause health and environmental dangers if they
are dumped haphazardly.

Last year, the DEA spent more than $22 million cleaning up 6,609 labs
nationwide.

Just hauling off four chemical-tainted mason jars from the Wall Boulevard
apartment in Gretna carried a $2,400 price tag, Thevenot said, a cost that
could cripple a police department's budget if the DEA didn't foot the bill.

With the dangers and costs of meth, and the police man-hours the drug
consumes, Thevenot said he hopes to hold the problem at bay.

"We're not surprised we're finding meth labs, based on the evolution of
meth around the whole country right now," Thevenot said. "We're still
hoping it doesn't surface in Jefferson Parish like it has in the rest of
the country. We think three is too many."