HOME-BREWED 'SPEED' GAINS IN MISSOURI

Drug Enforcement Agents See Growing Use Of Risky Stimulant

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. - Caring for
two young children while juggling three jobs, Stacie Blanner found
go-getter pep - with a super-charged sex drive thrown in - from
ingredients as handy as the nearest Wal-Mart.

Methamphetamine, the home brew of the hard-drug set, sent her into
orbit for hours on end and left her with the energy to tackle a
mountain of chores.

``It's the best high in the world," Blanner said. ``You think
you can do anything you need to do. It made me feel on top of the
world."

For years she rode the speedy buzz until her body, and her life, came
crashing into a crisis that ripped apart her family and her future.

Her story of methamphetamine is repeated time and again across
Missouri, where the drug sometimes called ``redneck cocaine" is
cooked in houses and barns and motel rooms.

And even as police and neighborhood groups are hunting down
methamphetamine laboratories - like Eliot Ness axing illegal
distilleries generations earlier - more remote labs and large-scale
drug traffickers are stepping in to meet the demand.

In the meantime, word spreads throughout the Midwest about about an
unusually powerful do-it-yourself drug.

The Missouri infatuation with methamphetamine started in the
motorcycle gang culture that runs through many of the predominantly
white low-income neighborhoods of Harry Truman's home town. After
outlaw bikers created an appetite for the drug in Independence,
simpler recipes emerged that let the partying crowd whip up a drug in
the kitchen.

``First the meth disciples came in and made the drug popular
here," said Mike Shanahan of Missouri's Jackson County Drug
Task Force. ``Then in the mid-'90s people figured out an easier way to
make it and people around here figured out they could make it on their
own."

Those trying to rein in abuse of the drug estimate that among the
roughly 1.6 million people who live in the Kansas City area, as many
as 100,000 smoke, snort, or shoot up the crystalline drug known simply
as ``meth."

Only California leads Missouri in production. Although meth has a
growing following in Hawaii, Arizona, and Oregon, nowhere have so many
mom-and-pop labs sprung up to make the illicit drug as in Missouri.
Shay estimated the state may have as many as 500 labs operating on a
given day.

And each one, said US Drug Enforcement Agency agent George Spaulding,
is a menace.

``There are these `Beavis and Butt-head' labs all over the place run
by not-so-bright guys who usually want to feed their own habit and
sell a little on the side," he said. ``The danger is that these
guys who don't know anything about chemistry will die from the fumes
or blow up the house."

Homes have vaporized in flames when meth ``cookers" got careless.
Hazardous materials units routinely clean up after police raid trailer
park laboratories. Blanner's toddler daughter was burned over 30
percent of her body when meth-making chemicals spilled on her.

The Chinese discovered the stimulating powers of the ephedra plant
centuries ago when they began using the ma huang herb for respiratory
ailments. A similar substance kept Nazi pilots alert on long bombing
missions. Today, the No. 1 stimulant is known as ``speed,"
``crank," ``crystal" and ``go." Like the
pharmaceutically produced amphetamines popular in the 1960s and 1970s,
its appeal comes from its ability to electrify the central nervous
system.

Meth's users, for reasons police and therapists have yet to completely
explain, are predominantly white and more rural than urban.

``It's one of these drugs that you don't usually buy on the street
corner," said Shannon Taylor, an assistant prosecuting attorney
in Jackson County, Mo. ``It travels from friend to friend to
friend." For meth heads, the drug is like crack cocaine on
steroids. The buzz runs 40 minutes instead of five and a lingering
high can stretch on for days.

``Women like it because it's a way to lose weight" -
Blanner's father said meth gave her the look of a too-tight face
lift - ``because your appetite absolutely disappears," said drug
counselor John Cannon.

``Men seem to like the way it tweaks their nervous system," he
said. ``Some people start out using it so they can get a lot of work
done. Then they get addicted to the intensity of the drug."

Independence, a middle-class suburb of Kansas City, saw the number of
meth labs rocket in the early 1990s as a new kind of scattered drug
network took shape.

All the ingredients of meth, unlike those of cocaine, were as close as
the corner store, and its varied recipes are as handy as the Internet.

``There are dozens of neighborhoods where the whole street has
experienced methamphetamine drug use," said US Attorney Stephen
Hill. ``I think of this like a public health model of an infectious
disease. They rarely jump cultures and they move geographically."

Soon patterns set in. Users tended toward long, odd hours. Their
homes, fueled by the drug's tendency to make addicts sex-obsessed and
paranoid, had extraordinary amounts of pornography and guns, law
enforcement officials said.

The distinctive chemical stench of meth labs became familiar to patrol
officers. Police sting operations nailed drug store owners for selling
the same person a seven-year supply of drugs that can be used to make
meth week after week.

Landlords have been schooled to look for such things as large numbers
of glass tubes and flasks as meth lab give-aways.

Neighborhood groups picked up the savvy, too. And in places like
Independence, where the labs are most common, investigators say meth
production has been dropping off.

In 1997, police in Missouri closed down nearly 400 meth labs. Only
California was close with 178 such seizures. In August 1998, a new
Missouri law gave officers the power to pursue drug investigations
into border states while detectives in those states the same authority
to chase meth networks into Missouri.

But if local production is down, demand remains stubbornly steady.
Drug investigators have seen a more traditional, large-scale delivery
system take shape.

``The labs may be going away," said DEA agent Spaulding, ``but
the traffickers have stepped in."

The largest meth seizure in Kansas City's history came with a bust
that netted 17 pounds in August. Hill, the US attorney, estimates
about 50 pounds of meth - a one-eighth gram hit sells for about $10 -
is shipped from Mexico and California to the city every week.

``There's been a market analysis by the drug cartels and they see a
great appetite here," Hill said. ``We may have shut down a large
number of the labs, but the market is still there."

For Blanner, now 35, the thrill is gone. Where she once found the drug
a power-packed aphrodisiac, it eventually stole away all desire. It
cost her a nursing license, several jobs, and an untold amount of money.

She talks painfully about how her youngest daughter spent the first
years of life tagging along on meth binges. She stole her brother's
stereo, swapped her son's waterbed for meth, and lost her
grandmother's engagement ring.

She quit the drug after what she describes as an overdose that came
shortly after her daughter was burned in the meth lab spill. ``As
fantastic as the high is," she said, ``the crash and all that
comes with it is just as intense."

Checked-by: Patrick Henry