MOVING AGAINST METH

Alaska Law-Enforcement Officers Confront A Growing Market For Methamphetamine

Matt Lauchart lost everything to methamphetamine.

Last summer, when the 35-year-old carpenter tried his first line of meth,
provided by a neighbor, he weighed a healthy 195 pounds. He was working
regularly and lived in his Wasilla home with his wife and 13- year-old
daughter.

Five months later, when he was arrested while preparing to cook up a batch
of meth with two other users in his home, Lauchart weighed 145 pounds. His
arms were covered with infected needle tracks. His wife and daughter had
left him. His life had become a hellish cycle of weeks without sleep,
stealing the ingredients to make meth, "cooking" the drug out of a fuming
mix of allergy pills, Coleman fuel and Red Devil lye, and injecting the
noxious, chemical-soaked end product into his veins.

Lauchart was eventually sentenced to 30 months in prison for attempting to
manufacture methamphetamine. The night he was arrested, someone -- he
suspects one of his meth-running partners -- burned his house to the ground.

Lauchart considers himself lucky. If he hadn't been arrested, he'd probably
be dead by now, he said in a telephone interview from Wildwood Therapautic
Community, a prison drug rehab program.

"I just want people to know it's an evil drug," Lauchart said. "That you
can make it yourself makes it more evil."

Meth In Alaska

Methamphetamine -- also known as meth, speed, crank, crystal and ice -- is
a central nervous system stimulant that causes alertness and elation
followed by depression, paranoia and psychosis. It has a far longer-lasting
high than cocaine and is even more damaging to users' minds and bodies,
medical studies indicate.

Meth labs like the one Lauchart was operating can ignite deadly fires and
leave behind a stew of toxic chemicals that can do untold environmental damage.

Meth's low cost -- it's known as "the poor man's cocaine" -- and its ease
of manufacture have helped it spread across the Lower 48 over the past
decade. Now it's spreading in Alaska.

"We've had a real upsurge of methamphetamine," said Lt. Al Storey,
commander of the Alaska State Troopers' statewide drug enforcement unit.

Last weekend, Anchorage police arrested a man at his trailer in the
Hillside On Gambell Motel and RV Park. Among items they found in his
trailer: materials for cooking meth.

Storey said 50 meth labs were seized in Alaska in 2000, double the number
seized in 1999. Arrests for possession and sale of meth have gone up as
well, he said.

This increase has forced local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies
in Alaska to develop new tactics. Until five years ago, Storey said, most
of the small amounts of meth seized in Alaska came from outside the state.

Now officers are seeing a proliferation of meth labs across the state.
Since first appearing in Anchorage and Fairbanks, labs have been discovered
in Kenai, Nikiski, Kodiak, Juneau, Valdez and throughout Mat-Su.

It's easy to see why. Recipes are widely available over the Internet and by
word-of-mouth. The ingredients are easily bought or stolen. An ounce of
meth that costs $200 to manufacture has a street value of around $2,000.

But the dangers are great. Most meth cooks are also meth users. Strung-out
addicts and dangerous chemicals make a deadly mix.

Bad Chemistry

Meth cooks use ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, common in over-the- counter
cold and allergy pills, as a starting ingredient. Mixing the pills with
iodine and red phosphorus, found in matchbook striker plates, creates
methamphetamine. Organic solvents like Coleman fuel and bases like lye
allow the cooks to extract the meth from solution.

Many of these chemicals are highly flammable or caustic on their own.
Mixing them for a heat-producing chemical reaction can cause fires,
explosions and releases of poison gas. Drug officers must wear full- body
protective suits with face masks and breathing gear when entering labs.
Cleaning up a house polluted by a meth lab can cost up to $10,000, Storey
said, and sometimes houses are so polluted they must be demolished.

Because a meth lab can render a home unlivable, meth cooks often set up
labs in rented motel rooms and apartments. Often, the resulting fires are
the first clues to tracking down meth users.

A fire that started in a meth lab in a Nikiski hotel room in November 1999
led to the arrest of the biggest group of meth cooks and users ever
prosecuted in Alaska. Known as Operation Arctic Chef, the joint federal,
state and local law-enforcement effort eventually implicated 27 people,
some of whom are allegedly responsible for starting a half- dozen fires
over a one-year period. One fire in a South Anchorage four-plex injured two
people and caused $75,000 in damage, and another fire in a Midtown mobile
home almost burned down a day care center next door.

Lt. Audie Halloway, head of the Anchorage Police Department's metro drug
unit, said meth lab activity in Anchorage has dropped off over the past
year. The unfortunate upshot, he said, is that meth cooks have moved from
Anchorage to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and the Kenai Peninsula, where
there is less police pressure.

One way meth cooks avoid police is by setting up labs in trucks or vans. In
Kenai, troopers seized three such mobile "box labs" last year and
discovered a meth lab in a Nikiski home in July 2000.

The big loser in this relocation, however, seems to be Mat-Su.

"Meth has never been more prominent here than it is today," said Doug
Sonerholm, a Wasilla police officer who served the last three years with
the Alaska State Troopers' drug-enforcement task force.

Before 1999, he said, he had never busted a lab in Mat-Su. In 1999, three
labs were seized, and in 2000, 13 were seized. This year, seven labs were
seized in January alone.

One of the meth cooks Sonerholm arrested in January was Matt Lauchart.

Harm To Users

Cocaine is still the hard drug of choice in Alaska, but that in itself is a
worry. Law-enforcement officials agree that almost all meth users start out
as cocaine users and switch to meth because of its longer- lasting high.

Unfortunately, the physical effects of meth are worse than cocaine.
Hard-core users go for days or weeks without sleep and experience paranoia,
hallucinations and other intense psychotic symptoms that can persist long
after they've stopped using meth. And recent medical studies indicate
chronic meth use permanently impairs memory and coordination, and destroys
the brain's transmitters of dopamine, a chemical that allows people to feel
pleasure and well-being.

This may explain the high rate of relapse among meth addicts. Figures from
the state Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse show that 172 people sought
treatment for meth addiction in Alaska hospitals in 2000, up from 44 people
in 1993. But studies done for the National Institute of Drug Abuse show
that 93 percent of meth addicts who undergo traditional 28-day inpatient
treatment programs return to the drug.

"Meth addiction is treatable," said Dr. Alex Stalcup, medical director in a
Concord, Calif.-based 12-month outpatient treatment program for meth
addicts. "But I don't think I've had a single patient who didn't go through
two or three periods of relapse before they got sober."

Meth's utilitarian appeal -- a quarter-gram that costs $20 to $40 is enough
to keep a beginning user high for days without food or sleep -- means that
people can get hooked before they learn of the drug's dreadful long-term
effects.

"The user profile is more of a mainstream person now," Sonerholm said.
"Housewives who are trying to lose weight, teens looking for a cheap
thrill, long-haul truckers and commercial fishermen who want to stay awake
for long drives or fishing openings -- these are normal people."

People like Lauchart.

"I feel like I was recruited," Lauchart said of the neighbors who
introduced him to meth. "They were nice to me at first," and they even
offered him the drug for free. But soon enough, he said, "they turned me
into an all-out worker," first helping to cook the drug, then shoplifting
ingredients.

"I felt like a pawn," Lauchart said, "but by then it was too late. I was
already addicted."

Now he fears meth is being spread in his community by the same kind of
people who gave him his first taste of it.

"They were getting young people involved too," he said. "All of a sudden it
seems to have spread like wildfire."

And, he said, "it seemed like everyone who touched it came back for more."

Harm To Others

The paranoia and psychosis methamphetamine abuse causes can put addicts'
families and neighbors in danger. In June, troopers raided the Wasilla home
of 25-year-old Jeremiah Sanders. Court documents indicate Sanders made
threats to take his girlfriend and child hostage if his house was raided.

Besides a meth lab, troopers said, they found a video surveillance system,
several high-powered rifles and two bulletproof vests in Sanders' house.
(Sanders, in custody awaiting trial, declined to comment for this story.)

Meth can do terrible harm to users' families and children. One such
situation came to light in Wasilla last November after a 13-year-old boy
reported to state troopers that his parents, Fred and Amy Esguerra, were
forcing him to help them make meth in their apartment. Trooper Sgt. Patrick
Davis was one of the officers who arrested the couple.

"They had four children, three of whom were under the age of 5," Davis
said. "When we came through the door, the 18-month old was sitting on
Daddy's lap, and there was a syringe filled with what was believed to be
meth oil right underneath the baby. They were actually cooking meth on the
kitchen stove, and the whole family was breathing the fumes."

The children were taken by the state Division of Family and Youth Services
and are living with out-of-state relatives, Davis said. (The Esguerras, who
are in custody, declined to comment for this story.)

DFYS cannot release information about children in its care and does not
track cases of meth-related child abuse and neglect. But Tim Fox, intake
supervisor at the DFYS Mat-Su office in Palmer, said his office has been
getting one to three reports per week of children being harmed or neglected
in connection with methamphetamine.

"We're seeing an increase in kids exposed to meth labs," said Dr. Cathy
Baldwin-Johnson, a Wasilla family physician who works with maltreated
children. "I've had kids describe odors in the air making them feel dizzy
and bothering their lungs and eyes. If you look at the list of ingredients
and what's left over, it's scary."

Once meth has a foothold in a community, it's hard to get rid of. While
Anchorage police have seen meth lab seizures drop, meth-related drug
arrests have remained stable, indicating that meth made in Mat-Su and Kenai
is still reaching Anchorage streets.

And as the market for meth grows, cooks become more sophisticated. A raid
at the Wasilla home of Donald Wares in January turned up an active,
commercial-size lab housed in a Ford van buried in his back yard. Court
records indicate that the two people arrested with Lauchart were known to
Wares, who said they had been selling meth from Wasilla to Homer.

Countermoves

Tony Grootens, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, came to Alaska
last year after 13 years fighting drugs in parts of Missouri and Illinois.
Meth hit those areas around 1992, he said, and brought a host of problems
with it.

"Homicides skyrocketed, police-involved shootings skyrocketed, overdoses
related to methamphetamine skyrocketed, suicides skyrocketed" in Missouri
after meth hit, he said. "Everything went through the roof."

In 1997, his first year working in Illinois, about 20 meth labs were seized
by law-enforcement officers. In 1999, 246 labs were seized.

Grootens, now the DEA's resident agent-in-charge in Alaska, is trying to
prevent what happened in southern Illinois from happening here. His biggest
handicap so far has been a lack of officers trained to handle meth labs. A
weeklong training session in August helped alleviate this shortage by
certifying 50 local, state and federal officers in the use of protective
gear and chemical testing equipment.

Another advance is on the legal front. A bill sponsored by Rep. Tom Brice,
D-Fairbanks, and passed into law by the Legislature in May 2000 made it a
felony offense to possess certain chemicals used in meth labs and increased
the penalty for manufacturing meth.

Before the law passed, most big meth cases in Alaska were federally
prosecuted. The new law has allowed state prosecution of several cases,
including one in Anchorage involving 10 defendants in Operation Arctic Chef.

The Division of Family and Youth Services in Anchorage has brought in
police officers to teach caseworkers how to identify meth labs in people's
homes. A similar education program for caseworkers and home health care
workers took place this week in Wasilla. Retailers also can help catch meth
cooks by reporting suspiciously large purchases or thefts of ingredients
like cold pills and matchbooks.

But the most important step in fighting the spread of meth, Grootens said,
is educating the community about its dangers. In August, he and other
law-enforcement officials addressed the subject at a meeting of the Alaska
Conference of Mayors. In response, the mayors present drafted a resolution
supporting anti-meth education and urging legislators to increase criminal
penalties for operating a meth lab where children are present.

"Hopefully we're ahead of the curve" on fighting meth, Grootens told the
mayors. "I don't know that we are, and we won't know for some time."

Those who have already succumbed to meth addiction face a long and
difficult recovery. Lauchart, for one, vows to stay clean for his family.
Since enrolling in one of the few long-term treatment programs available to
prisoners in Alaska, "I'm getting to be a lot healthier; I can think
straight," he said.

Still, he knows the drug will be outside waiting for him.

"I never thought in my life I'd put a needle in my arm," he said. "My wife
told me, Either you're going to die, go insane, go to jail or straighten up.' "

"I'm not dead or insane, but I'm in jail," he said. "I wish I had listened
to her."