INCREASE IN SMALL DRUG LABS

Methamphetamine: Officials worry about explosions, pollution.

Law enforcement officials call them Beavis and Butt-head labs. That's
their grim private nickname tying the dim cartoon characters with a
growing crowd of people who are cooking up volatile batches of
homemade methamphetamine in their closets, kitchens and even
children's rooms.

As officers on the Peninsula and all over the Bay Area stumble upon
more and more of these amateur drug factories, they openly worry about
explosions -- both of the chemicals used to make the drug and in the
numbers of users of the powerful and addictive stimulant.

In Menlo Park, a man was shot in the back last week in what police say
was a culmination of a two-day, methamphetamine cooking-and-smoking
binge in a small kitchen filled with combustible chemicals and dirty
dishes. A Santa Cruz man was busted last year when officers found a
mobile lab set up in the back of his pickup truck. In East Palo Alto,
a suspect fled in flames from an exploded lab last year and was never
found.

These are not the Mexican drug lords, overseeing multibillion-dollar
networks and churning out pounds of the drug at a time at
sophisticated and well-guarded ``super labs.'' These are an
uncoordinated and rapidly growing community of addicts and small-time
dealers, downloading the recipe for the drug off the Internet and
cooking up an ounce at a time for themselves and their friends. And
law enforcement, drug addiction counselors and local government
leaders are worried about them, very worried.

``The scary thing is that they don't know what they are doing,'' said
David Dresson, commander of the South Bay Methamphetamine Task Force
for the California Department of Justice. ``It's one thing to endanger
yourself, but they are putting everyone near them and where they dump
the stuff at risk.''

The number of lab seizures in the South Bay jumped to 94 from 64
between 1998 and 1999, and this year the number is likely to break
100, according to the state Department of Justice. The South Bay
region includes the counties of San Mateo, Santa Clara, southern
Alameda, Santa Cruz, San Benito and Monterey.

``This is a tremendous explosion,'' Dresson said. ``And there is an
opportunity for this to get even more out of control.''

The Bay Area increase mirrors a similar increase seen statewide and
nationwide. Dresson and state law enforcement officials said they
suspected that the methamphetamine trend has become as bad as the
crack cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

This time, though, communities say they are more prepared to deal with
the problem. Working with state and national legislators, drug abuse
counselors, researchers and law enforcement are crafting tougher laws
for methamphetamine manufacturers, giving police training in finding
and safely dismantling the clandestine labs and looking for better
ways to treat addicts.

In Belmont today, San Mateo County officials begin a two-day
methamphetamine conference to target many of those fronts. The
conference is part of a three-year federally subsidized study to see
if specific treatments are more effective than a more generic
treatment of drug addiction. But county officials and local law
enforcement are also hoping to use the conference to educate each
other on how to fight what looks like a new epidemic of an old drug.

``Methamphetamine addicts are crowding up the courts, the jails, the
emergency rooms and the welfare offices,'' said Pat Morrisey, the
director of the Methamphetamine Project, based in San Mateo. ``This
disease affects all of those systems. When we can spend a buck now, we
will save a lot of money on the back end.''

The state attorney general has offered a $5,000 bounty for anyone who
can help locate labs that were dumping chemicals in Menlo Park and
East Palo Alto and has created an ad hoc local task force on the
Peninsula to search for them. San Mateo County District Attorney Jim
Fox has vowed to ``vigorously prosecute'' illegal labs and toxic dumping.

The picture is similar in other parts of the state. The state Bureau
of Narcotics Enforcement reported that more than 1,932 illegal speed
labs were seized in California last year, a fourfold increase over the
465 labs busted in 1996. Most small ``user'' labs are found by
accident, usually by officers responding to an unrelated complaint.

Ron Gravitt, coordinator of the state Department of Justice's
clandestine laboratory seizure program, estimated that as many as
20,000 small methamphetamine labs operate in California.

Methamphetamine has been around since the 1950s, known as a
blue-collar drug of choice. Motorcycle gangs made it. Truck drivers
used the ``upper'' to keep awake over their long and tedious journeys.
Over the last decade, it has spread eastward from California and into
many other social groups.

The Asian-American Recovery Services in Daly City, for example,
reported that 80 percent of its clients reported this year that they
were using methamphetamine. The gay community reports that it is used
as a sexual enhancement. Some single mothers and high school
cheerleaders use it to stay thin.

Law enforcement officials believe much of the geographic and
demographic spread can be attributed to the ease of making the drug.

Methamphetamine -- the only hard drug for which America is the source
country -- can be made from a few readily obtained chemicals in about
the same time it takes to make a beef stew.

But methamphetamine labs are extremely dangerous. Although there have
been no reported deaths locally, dozens have been hurt or fatally
injured in California when the labs explode. In San Jose, officers
have been hospitalized when they inhaled the fumes.

A recent law enforcement strategy is to charge parents who are
suspected of making methamphetamine with endangering their children. A
San Jose woman arrested last week was held for $500,000 in bail when
she was charged with making methamphetamine in her apartment building,
a plasterboard wall away from a 10-month-old baby.

And leftovers -- often dumped into sewers -- can create poisonous
pollution.

``Here are users looking for an easier, safer and cheaper way to make
the drug,'' said Lt. Don O'Keefe, commander of the San Mateo Drug Task
Force. ``They end up creating a toxic dump.''

But the real damage methamphetamine is doing, experts say, is to the
addicts.

Addicts can suffer from paranoia, weight loss and long-term brain
damage, Morrisey said.

Although research has not proven it, law enforcement officials say
that methamphetamine, unlike most other major drugs, can cause a
pattern of violent episodes.

A Menlo Park man, Roy Maloney, nailed up police tape and a used
methamphetamine test on his door as sort of a talisman against the
drug that he said had wrecked his 26-year-old life. Menlo Park police
say Maloney and two other men had been cooking and smoking the drug
for two days straight when the two other men began to argue. One shot
the other.

Maloney, who was not charged, kept putting his finger in the hole in
his wall where the bullet ended up.

``Poison,'' Maloney said over and over in a slurred voice, as he
talked recently in his home. ``I wish I could just cut it out of me.''

He said he had been doing ``crank,'' or methamphetamine, since he was
a teenager. His life began to orbit around the drug, how to get it,
how to keep the high going for days and nights at a time. Maloney
didn't want to talk about too many specifics, other than he sometimes
traded sex for the drug.

It wasn't even fun anymore.

Now he was run-down with no sleep, shaking, dirty, with scabs on his
face where the drug made him itch uncontrollably. He had lost about 30
pounds in the last few months. He was scared that someone would kill
him for what he saw that night during the shooting. Maloney kept
pacing and looking down the street for something or someone.

``Man, if I could go back and stay away from this stuff I would,'' he
said. ``It's like a nightmare.''

Contact Sean Webby at swebby@sjmercury.com or call (650) 688-7577.