METH LABS LEAVE BEHIND TOXIC MESSES

The Cumberland Plateau's methamphetamine epidemic is a devil with two heads.

On one side are the strung-out operators of what drug agents call "user
labs." These are the kitchen-stove laboratories where "cooks," who are
usually addicts, produce the drug. Meth suspects are paranoid, sometimes
violent, always unpredictable, according to officers.

But arresting these amateur chemists is only half of society's problem. The
other face of the meth demon involves the environmental hazards associated
with the production of the illegal stimulant.

At risk are a diverse group of people: children of the drug makers, cops
who raid meth labs, neighbors of labs, future tenants of a raided site, not
to mention the users themselves.

According to experts, a meth lab is an environmental disaster waiting to
happen at every step of the process.

Unlike marijuana and cocaine, which are plant derivatives, or prescription
pills, which are made in factories under sanitary conditions,
methamphetamine is a homemade drug. Numerous caustic and/or flammable
components - lye, acetone, muriatic acid and Coleman fuel, for instance -
are used to transform pseudoephedrine, an ingredient in many
over-the-counter cold remedies, into methamphetamine.

The "chili" is cooked over a hot plate or a kitchen stove in a series of
chemical processes that often create volatile reactions and potentially
deadly gases.

"And the guys making this stuff don't have chemistry degrees. They just get
someone to teach them when to mix this with that," said James R. "Russ"
Dedrick, a federal prosecutor from Knoxville.

Most of the clandestine labs raided by Tennessee authorities are small. All
the ingredients - glass beakers, hoses and necessary chemicals - can be
packed into a duffel bag. But even a small lab can produce several pounds
of toxic byproduct each time a batch is cooked, according to the National
Institute on Drug Abuse.

Often, the liquid waste is dumped into septic-tank systems or onto the
ground, possibly leaching into underground water supplies. Inside, residue
from the witches' brew of chemicals saturates carpets and wallboard and
settles into ductwork, leaving a Pandora's box of potentially unhealthy
surprises for the next occupants.

For most people in rural Plateau counties where methamphetamine has become
the drug of choice, the meth lab in the rental house next door may be the
closest they ever come to a hazardous waste site. Unfortunately, they might
not know it, because no single agency is maintaining a public database of
meth sites that would tell them.

Of course, neighbors may smell a working lab, a noxious odor one lawman
described as "a cross between a carpet saturated with cat urine and ether."

"If it were a plant in the industrial park making this stuff, they'd have
venting systems and filters. OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety and
Health Administration) and EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency) would
be all over them if they didn't," said Steve Randall, director of the 13th
Judicial District Drug Task Force in Cookeville.

But in the tilted world of clandestine user labs, safety and environmental
rules don't matter.

The only rule is: Don't get caught.

When meth addicts turn the family kitchen into a makeshift methamphetamine
lab, their kids are exposed to the odorous reactions of the chemicals and
the toxic mist that falls inside the home.

"We're seeing more and more of the kids for return visits to the emergency
room. They keep coming back and we can't seem to get a handle on it. Lots
of upper respiratory infections," said Dianna Butler, director of emergency
nursing services at Cumberland Medical Center in Crossville. She knows the
kids are children of meth cookers because her hospital has treated the
parents or because the youngsters' clothes bear the telltale smell of a lab.

"It's a smell you don't forget," she said.

Caseworkers from the state Department of Children's Services also know the
smell. In the past 2 1/2 years, more than 100 children have been removed
from Plateau-region homes because of methamphetamine raids.

"You never know what you're walking into. It's the scariest thing I've ever
seen," said Betsy Dunn, a DCS case manager in Cookeville.

"We don't go in if the smell is overpowering, but my job is child
protection, and I'm going to get that child out of that situation even if
my head starts pounding and my eyes start burning." Since May 2000, Dunn
has removed more than 30 children from meth labs found in her assigned
four-county area.

"It's just taken this area by storm. I've never seen anything like it."

For instance, Van Buren County had two kids in foster care at the end of
last year. By the spring of this year, there were 27, with 20 of those
cases related to methamphetamine manufacture and/or use by the children's
parents.

"Van Buren was one of those counties that didn't have enough happening for
a full-time worker there," said Stephanie Craven, a DCS worker from
McMinnville. She said her department began a special foster family
recruitment program in Van Buren as a consequence of meth's sudden arrival.

"One morning I had six referrals within a few hours. All had something to
do with meth," Craven said.

The DCS workers worry about the long-term physical effects of children
playing, sometimes sleeping, on carpets stained with the powdery residue of
the meth-making process. When kids are removed from meth homes, they are
taken to the nearest hospital for a physical examination. They are given a
bath, their clothes are thrown away, and blood is drawn to test for meth in
their systems.

"Knock on wood, I've never had a child to test positive, but no one knows
what the long-term effects could be. There's likely to be some
psychological effect, too," Dunn said.

"It's so sad. They have to leave everything behind, even their favorite
teddy bear, because it's all contaminated."

Exposure to the elements is only one risk to children when a parent makes
methamphetamine. In White County, a toddler drank muriatic acid, commonly
used by brick masons but also used by meth cookers in their "recipe." The
child was hospitalized and continues to recover.

In Grundy County, a fire resulting from a meth lab explosion left a toddler
with severe burns, according to Diane Easterly, a DCS supervisor. "She has
to wear one of those face masks, and she's going to require lots of plastic
surgery. Her life was changed in a flicker."

Equally distressing are meth babies, infants born to addicted mothers. Four
babies have tested positive in her area recently, Easterly said.

"It's pitiful. They have seizures ,and their eyes roll back. It reminds me
a lot of fetal alcohol syndrome. You can't console these babies. They just
cry and cry."

For many law enforcement officers in the rural counties of the Cumberland
Plateau, fighting the meth epidemic is the most likely day-to-day hazard to
their health that they may encounter.

Officers find drug labs while responding to domestic disputes, while
checking out complaints of child neglect. They even find components of labs
in the trunks of cars while making traffic stops.

"A lab is one of the most toxic and dangerous situations an officer is ever
going to face," said Dedrick, the U.S. prosecutor. "It's not a good
situation for anyone involved."

First responders, such as the police and those from the Department of
Children's Services, especially need to be mindful, said Ann Duncan, deputy
commissioner of the state Department of Health.

"There's still a lot we don't know about this drug as to the long-term
effects on people who are exposed to it while it's being produced."

In the short term, however, law enforcement officers from the Plateau have
reported a variety of ailments, including headaches, respiratory
infections, nausea, rashes and body sores after being exposed to a working
meth laboratory. While none of the ailments has been serious enough to keep
officers off duty for more than a day or two, law enforcement agencies have
changed their response protocol to protect officers.

Sheriff Jackie Matheny of Warren County has a clear memory of the first
time he entered a meth lab, three years ago. "My lungs burned for two
weeks. When you see inside one of these houses, you understand why. It's
not uncommon to find brass bolts on ceiling fans and handles on kitchen
cabinets just eat up with corrosion. But in the beginning, we didn't know
any better than to just walk right in."

Today, law enforcement agencies know better than to walk in on a lab
unprotected. Standard operating procedure now is that only officers who
have received special training from the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration enter labs, and the cleanup is left to hazardous-waste
removal experts, who don breathing gear and protective clothing.

"We don't want to take any chances. At what point in the making of it that
we arrive is crucial because, if they overheat it at one stage, it creates
phosphine gas," Sheriff Butch Burgess of Cumberland County said. The
colorless gas was used in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, anyone near the vapor
cloud is usually unconscious on the first breath and dead within minutes.

"For the life of me, I don't understand why anyone would fool with this
stuff," Burgess said.

Last December at the front desk of the Alpine Lodge, a Cookeville motel, a
light flashed a warning that the fire alarm had been activated in a room on
the third floor. The clerk dispatched a maintenance person to check it out.
When he knocked, a man came to the door and said everything was OK.

The maintenance worker knew better. He knew a meth lab when he smelled one.

When Putnam County officers arrived minutes later, they discovered three
men from Sparta, Tenn., and a batch-in-progress of methamphetamine being
cooked on a hot plate.

And that is when Martina Gabriel's nightmare began. Gabriel, a hotelier for
three decades, was faced with the forced evacuation of two sections of her
hotel, 56 rooms total. A day later, half of the rooms were reopened, with
the remainder reopening after a third day.

"All except the room where the men were. They wouldn't let us use it for
about two months," she recalled.

Gabriel lost not only the use of the room and potential revenue for the
other rooms that were temporarily closed, but also had to pay about $500 in
direct expenses for the cleanup, including an EPA-approved cleaning of the
carpet.

"It was so much trouble, and it was money from our pocket. We were told we
could sue the individuals, but if they have nothing, where is there
something to get?" she asked.

In protecting the public from secondary exposure to the toxic byproducts of
a meth lab, Gabriel's experience is one of the better stories to be told.
There's evidence that other property owners have not been as diligent.

Ann Duncan of the state Health Department said she learned of the meth
problem when she took a call late on a Friday afternoon a year ago.

"It was from a woman who was concerned that her pregnant daughter and
little 3-year-old granddaughter had moved into an apartment in the Upper
Cumberland area. They had found lots of powdery residue everywhere -
cabinets, countertops, carpeting," Duncan said.

After the mom and daughter cleaned up the apartment, the neighbors told
them it had once been a methamphetamine lab.

"The mother was concerned with what the risks were to her pregnant daughter
and granddaughter. I didn't have much I could tell her."

Similar cases are occurring with regular frequency across the Plateau as
people rent, and sometimes buy, properties that once were the sites of
clandestine drug manufacturing. There is no clearinghouse of information
about the locations of former meth labs, nor are there state regulations
with regard to how meth-free these sites should be.

Most counties post a warning sign at a raid location, but there are no
restrictions on whether the property can be rented again, nor is there any
agency making sure a thorough cleanup is made.

"There's no regulation that requires any type of inspection of these units,
so what generally happens is that it depends on the conscientiousness of
the landlord," said Frank Grubbs, emergency services coordinator for the
state Bureau of Environment, a division of the Department of Environment
and Conservation.

Some Western states, where the current proliferation of meth labs began,
have adopted stringent codes to make sure the public is protected.
Washington state applies a standard of no more than 5 micrograms of residue
per square foot. Oregon is even pickier, with a standard of 0.5 micrograms
per square-foot. No such legislation has been proposed in Tennessee.

The DEA does make an effort to flag the location of meth labs for the
public by informing local registers of deeds, but it does no good,
according to these county officials.

"I know we get the letters, but we can't do anything with them, because
they're not recordable," said Gary Brogden, register of deeds in White County.

"We're only permitted to record what the law permits us to record, things
like mortgages, building liens, court judgments and liens from the IRS and
the state Department of Revenue. Anything else and the legislature is going
to have to change the law."

About the only factor related to a meth lab that might show up on a deed is
whether a lien has been issued by the federal government in an effort to
recoup cleanup costs, Brogden added.

"I'd like to see the laws changed concerning this, because I know there are
some houses being sold that I question whether they are clean enough," said
Sheriff Guy Goff of White County.

Unsuspecting renters or home buyers do have rights, but could sue only if
they got sick.

"I assume once it's been decontaminated it could be rented again, but if
someone got sick and they could prove that they were sick because of meth
residue, they probably could sue the landlord," said District Attorney
General Bill Gibson of Cookeville.

The time-honored caveat "let the buyer beware" has never been more
important, he said.