CALIFORNIA DROWNING IN METH

WASHINGTON -- Methamphetamine production is so rampant in California that
the street price of the highly addictive stimulant is running at about 20
percent of the national average, and dealers are marketing packets of the
drug to elementary school students for as little as $5 and $10, witnesses
said at a House hearing Thursday.

"California is completely flooded with methamphetamine," Ron Brooks,
chairman of the National Narcotic Officers Association Coalition, told the
House Government Reform Committee's drug policy panel.

"It is cheap," he said. "We're seeing it in junior high schools and upper
grade schools."

The grim national assessment of the drug's spread targeted California as
the production epicenter.

Joseph D. Keefe, chief of operations for the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration, said that 80 percent to 85 percent of the drug's total
production comes from California "super labs" operated by tightly knit
Mexican drug-trafficking cartels.

Methamphetamine is distilled from commonly available chemicals used in
agriculture and nonprescription drugs.

That makes it easy to produce the meth, although the byproducts are
dangerous and toxic and typically illegally dumped.

The drug sells nationally for about $100 a gram, but its abundance in
California has pushed down prices to as little as $20 a gram.

"Twenty dollars can buy enough to stay high all day," said Henry Serrano,
police chief in Citrus Heights, near Sacramento. Serrano said Sacramento
County has the highest rate of methamphetamine-related hospitalizations in
the state.

Citrus Heights also has one of the most aggressive programs in the country
to combat drug use.

Serrano said the program involves training police to better recognize
people who are high on drugs, collaborating with the University of
California at Davis Psychiatry Department on an effective drug education
program, getting drug education materials to users, and instituting
measures to protect children and elderly people living with drug-addicted
caretakers.

Witnesses at the hearing said that unlike with people addicted to other
drugs, treatment for methamphetamine users has not proven to be very
effective because the drug is so powerful.

"They know it hurts them, they know it's bad, but they don't care," said
John McCros-key, sheriff of Lewis County, Wash., which is facing an
explosive methamphetamine problem. "Drug treatment for meth is a dismal
failure.

"Prevention programs make better sense, and enforcement is working better
than treatment. I know if a meth cook is in jail, they aren't making meth."

Serrano said the most effective preventive tool Citrus Heights has found so
far is to show young school students "before and after" pictures of
addicts, who typically age quickly, are gaunt, and suffer disfiguring
dental and skin problems.

Brooks said he is disturbed by the number of children caught in the
methamphetamine crisis. He said 795 children were found inside labs raided
in 1999, and 647 children were found in such raids last year.

"I was recently at a lab seizure in Hollister where five armed suspects,
operating in a very toxic environment, were manufacturing more than 200
pounds of methamphetamine," he said.

"When agents raided that lab, they found a mother with her three small
children inside the actual lab site," he said. "The mother told agents that
she was eight months pregnant with her fourth child."