IS A MIDWEST SCOURGE HEADED FOR EAST COAST?

Missouri battles an easily made form of meth.

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- Finding the children is what most disturbs Mark Deeds.

Children like the baby in dirty diapers, ignored as it crawled around at the
feet of the six people -- all armed -- who were "cooking" methamphetamine in
the kitchen of a filthy, dilapidated house.

"The baby couldn't have been more than six months old, and they were cooking
meth right on the table. The fumes were everywhere. One electrical spark and
the whole place would have exploded," said Deeds, a Springfield police
officer who has "taken down" dozens of meth labs.

"The mother was right there in the room," he said. "She wasn't seeing the
baby. All she could see was the meth."

The powerful stimulant methamphetamine is being produced in hundreds of
small, portable labs across the rolling green hills of the Ozarks in
southwest Missouri. Characterized by an hours-long high, its repeated heavy
use can lead to severe weight loss, depression, prolonged sleeplessness,
paranoid delusions and violent behavior.

Local and U.S. law enforcement personnel here call meth a life-destroying
scourge that eats people away from the inside, remolding them into "meth
freaks" with characteristic hollow eyes and sunken, defeated features.

Around Springfield, a city of 180,000 that is headquarters of the Assemblies
of God Church and ground zero for the growing Midwestern meth problem, law
enforcement officials will tell you how for three years they have waged a
full-scale battle against the spread of a drug as dangerous and pervasive
here as crack is in some Philadelphia neighborhoods.

And they have a message for the Eastern Seaboard, where only 48 meth labs
from Maine to Florida -- including five in Pennsylvania -- were closed by
federal raids last year, as opposed to 421 in Missouri: A cheaper,
easier-to-make methamphetamine is coming your way.

"I have a friend who works for the feds and he transferred to[Illinois]a
couple of years ago," Deeds said. "He said when he first got up there they
weren't seeing any meth labs. Now they bust them all the time."

Steve Whitney, Vietnam vet and sheriff of rural Christian County, south of
Springfield, has watched as meth production crept out of the mountains in
the mid-1990s, first seeping into Kansas City before crossing the
Mississippi River to move eastward into Illinois and Tennessee.

The federal Drug Enforcement Agency seized 14 labs in Illinois in 1997, and
36 last year; in Tennessee 24 were taken down in 1997 and 40 last year.

Of the Northeast, Whitney said: "You haven't got much of a problem with this
up your way, but wait a couple of years."

By "this," Whitney means methamphetamine that is based on the legal drug
ephedrine, a common component of cold, flu and allergy medications.

There is plenty of meth in Northeastern cities such as Philadelphia, but it
is old-fashioned "biker" meth, based on the solvent phenyl-2-propanone (P2P)
and produced in a complex, highly volatile process made even more difficult
by the fact that since 1980 access to P2P has been heavily restricted.

Ephedrine-based meth, in contrast, is simple to produce, and almost
everything needed to make it on a small scale can be bought in, say, a
Wal-Mart.

For just that reason the Wal-Mart Corp. last year began limiting the sale of
over-the-counter medications containing ephedrine.

And last week the Kansas legislature was considering restricting sales of
such products to two at a time.

Still, a $300 investment can produce $4,000 worth of methamphetamine once
the purity is cut, or "stepped on," for street sale.

It is the ease with which meth -- a powder that can be snorted, eaten, mixed
with water and injected, or, increasingly, smoked -- is manufactured that
makes it at once so attractive to users, an estimated 85 percent of whom
become addicted, and so frustrating to police.

Using a recipe first developed by the Germans in World War II and re-created
in the early '90s by a man sitting in a Springfield library, ephedrine-based
meth can be made almost "as easy as a batch of cookies," said Cynthia
Rushefsky, an assistant Greene County prosecutor.

"It is estimated that each cook teaches 10 others," she said. "We ended up
with the stuff being circulated everywhere.

"Historically, it is a lower-class white drug. The meth trade was controlled
by white biker gangs out of California. That's no longer true.

"Now it is cutting across all socioeconomic lines," she said. "We are
finding upper-middle-class, managerial types whose weekend, recreational
drug use has turned into addiction."

In the early 1990s, the biggest drug problem in southwest Missouri was
marijuana grown in the isolated hollows and folds of these lovely mountains.
Many times people would look the other way, even if they knew about a patch
of "grass" on a neighbor's hillside.

"People down here kind of kept their nose out of their neighbors' business,"
Whitney said. "We didn't have a lot of cocaine, just a little marijuana
problem."

What little methamphetamine there was rode in with bikers from California
who might be passing through on Route 66, which bisects the region from east
to west.

The drug they brought was P2P meth, produced by the fairly complex operation
requiring bulky equipment and a place to cook that could be afforded the
security a gang could provide.

Then about 1992, police say, a man named Bob Paillet moved to Springfield
from California and found that the price of meth, his drug of choice, was
very high. Using a local college library, Paillet painstakingly figured out
the ephedrine-based recipe that had first been used to make what is now
widely known as "Nazi dope."

The German army, like many others, routinely supplied its combat troops with
the drug to keep them alert for long periods, bolster their spirits, and
suppress their appetites. But the Nazis hit on a formula that was simpler
than those used previously.

It was that one that Paillet -- who had no chemistry background -- figured
out, adapted to the products he had at hand, and then spread far and wide,
authorities here say.

"He was intrigued by it. He loved it," said John Cornille, a DEA agent in
Missouri.

According to DEA agents, when Paillet's lab was busted in 1993 it was only
the second one in the country they had found making the "easy-bake"
ephedrine-based meth. The other had been found in California in the 1980s
and apparently was destroyed before the technique spread.

"He brought it to life in this area," Dan Schrader, a Springfield policeman,
told the Springfield News-Leader, the local newspaper.

Paillet was busted in 1993, received five years of probation and has since
moved to Texas. But police say that by the time they caught up with him he
had taught dozens of others to cook meth with his process.

Southwest Missouri, a largely rural area policed by sheriff's departments
that are often sparsely staffed and poorly trained, by 1996 had the
distinction of being the third-largest producer of methamphetamine in the
country, trailing only California and Texas, where meth from the "Mexican
mafia" flows over the Rio Grande.

"Maybe that's why we were so vulnerable -- we have little towns and little
police departments," Sheriff Whitney said. "We were the perfect targets for
meth labs. The last three or four years have been unbelievable. It used to
be busting a lab was a big production. Now, it's an almost weekly thing. And
how many labs don't we find?"

People in Springfield, Missouri's third-largest city, talk up the city's
slow pace and lack of crime, equating it with mythical Mayberry, the genial
TV town where benevolent Sheriff Andy Taylor presided without a gun.

Scratch the surface, however, and the story is different.

Last year, a string of nine home invasions in Springfield were chalked up to
thieves looking for money to buy meth.

In August, a police officer was seriously wounded by a man who was being
busted for meth production for the third time.

A recently passed half-cent sales tax in Springfield will pay to increase
the police force by 60 officers -- nearly 20 percent -- over the next four
years.

"Every fence we have in the county is a meth dealer who is taking stolen
property in exchange for drugs," said Whitney, who estimates that 85 percent
of Christian County's crime is connected to methamphetamine.

Everyone agrees that, because of rising meth usage and growing police
pressure on producers, violence is increasing.

Last month, a pregnant woman and her three children, ages 8 to 11, were
strangled in a plot that revolved around meth, money and a love affair gone
wrong.

One of the three people charged in the murders told police he took part
after being promised an "eight-ball" -- 3.5 grams of the drug, worth about
$350 -- for his help.

"The violence is increasing, I think, because the purity of the dope is
increasing," Rushefsky said. "The labs are here. They're getting it right
off the burner. The paranoia skyrockets. They live and die for meth,
literally."

So far, meth does not appear to have become a problem in local schools. "If
they're doing meth, they're not in school," Deeds said. But in a recent
arson case brought against a group of high school students, one was found to
have an $800-a-day meth habit.

"Roll down your window," Deeds tells his partner, Brian Disylvester.

It is 8 p.m. Deeds, 34, and Disylvester, 26, both outfitted in bulletproof
vests, are "kicking it a little bit," cruising areas of known meth activity.

"Smell that trash burning," Disylvester says, his nose turned to the cool
night air streaming through the open car window.

"Yeah, somebody's cooking somewhere around here," says Deeds.

Because the making of methamphetamine produces such strong odors, primarily
from the anhydrous ammonia and ether used in the process, people often burn
trash to mask the smell.

This section of Springfield, a warren of beat-up trailers, sagging clapboard
houses, and rusted cars known as the Holler, used to "really rock with dope
before we locked almost everybody up," Deeds says.

Still, police routinely cruise this and another lower-income neighborhood in
southwest Springfield that Deeds calls "a dope haven."

"Just about everybody in this neighborhood that's moving this time of night
is dirty to an extent," he said.

Meth labs are small and portable, made of everyday objects such as plastic
tubing and 1.5-liter soft-drink bottles. The night before, police had found
a meth lab on the floorboard of a car stopped for a routine traffic
violation.

Most meth producers are also users, making drugs in relatively small
quantities for their own use and to turn some profit on the side.

"It's a small universe," says Disylvester, who adds that he has never busted
a meth lab where the cook was not also using. "You have little groups that
operate together. One group won't necessarily operate with another, but they
all know each other and we know all of them."

Unlike such drugs as crack or heroin, this new meth has spawned no
centralized organization here. There are no big-time dealers, no couriers,
no marketing systems passing drugs from producer to distributor to
street-level salesman. The meth system is widespread, amorphous and
constantly in motion.

In the Ozarks, it has grown so rapidly that people have modified their
traditional "live and let live" philosophy. Public-awareness seminars have
trained cable-TV installers, Avon salespeople and utility-company meter
readers to detect meth's telltale odor.

Police say most of their busts now come through tips, either from informants
or from people who simply are out driving and catch the scent of meth on the
breeze.

According to Rushefsky, the strategy is working.

"I think we have seen the bottom of the problem," she said. "Not to say it
is going to end. I base that on a couple of promising things: We are busting
more incomplete labs and we are seeing more labs moving into the rural areas
out of the urban areas."

Because of the increasing awareness here, methamphetamine labs are on the
move, turning up to the north in Iowa, to the south in Arkansas, and,
steadily, moving east as well. No one here thinks the spread will stop.

"No, it's not too prevalent on the East Coast right now," Rushefshy said.
But, she adds, "give it time. The dope is too good, and it's too easy to
make. Give it time."