FARM STORES ENLISTED IN WAR AGAINST DRUGS

SPRINGFIELD - Adams Feed & Seed has been in business for 65 years and the
Adams family knows most customers by sight and history. The family knows
who has horses and who raises sheep, who needs chicken feed and who buys
rabbit pellets.

They don't know anyone who needs to buy 7 percent iodine by the gallon.

But starting about a year ago, the owners of Adams Feed & Seed and other
Lane County farm supply stores saw a surge in liquid iodine sales. Scruffy
people they'd never seen before began asking for the powerful disinfectant,
and lots of it.

"I had one guy come in and ask for a 55-gallon drum of it," said Mike
Halleman, owner of Crow Mercantile south of Veneta. "Fifty-five gallons of
iodine - that would last you a century."

But the new customers use it quicker than that. It's a key ingredient in
making methamphetamine, the powerful stimulant that's produced in makeshift
labs by combining a variety of otherwise legitimate substances such as
decongestant tablets, ether, lye, distilled water and red phosphorous.

Meth makers boil off the liquid and use the iodine residue. They use about
a gallon of iodine in a process that produces an ounce or less of
methamphetamine, said Sgt. Pete Kerns, supervisor of the Interagency
Narcotics Enforcement Team.

The number of meth labs found by police has jumped dramatically this year.
Through August, INET detectives found 45 labs, including 11 in August
alone. INET officers seized 36 labs in 1997.

Most of the labs have been small operations, capable of producing a quick
quarter-ounce. There are several reasons for the proliferation, Kerns said:
The materials are easy to get, the cooking process is uncomplicated and the
ingredients are legal. As a result, more users have become cooks.

To make life more complicated for drug makers, INET detectives have asked
feed stores to keep track of iodine sales. Iodine isn't a controlled
substance, but most local feed stores now require photo identification from
people who buy it and record the license numbers of their cars. The
information is passed on to INET.

Meth lab operators are an adaptive bunch, police say, and began using
liquid iodine after stores quit selling iodine in crystallized form. Liquid
iodine is available in a 2.4 percent solution, but meth cooks prefer the
stronger 7 percent solution.

On Willamette Valley farms, iodine is used to treat livestock for cuts,
diseases such as ringworm and injuries incurred in routine procedures such
as when bulls are castrated and sheep have their tails docked.

A little goes a long way. At Adams Feed & Seed, for example, they've been
treating their own animals with a pint-size spray bottle they opened in
1993.

"Nobody needs a gallon," said Rich Adams, part of the owning family.

"About nine months ago we realized we were selling more than we used to,"
said his wife, Tina Adams. "We started noticing all these different people,
not the farmers that have been here forever."

Dick Yarbrough, manager of Eugene Farmers Co-op on Prairie Road, said he's
taken gallon bottles off the shelves to deter meth lab operators. He won't
sell that quantity to anyone he doesn't know.

"A sheepherder with 100 head would come in and buy a gallon," Yarbrough
said. "We have a few customers who legitimately probably use a gallon a
year. But all of a sudden we were selling two to four gallons at a time."

At Crow Mercantile, owner Halleman said some people would buy six pints at
a time. He finally quit selling iodine because he didn't want suspected
meth cooks in his store. Before that, he hid bottles behind other
merchandise or tried to keep some aside just for farmers. He also raised
the price.

The meth makers were obvious, he said. One came in with a list of feed
stores clipped from the Yellow Pages and was obviously making the rounds,
Halleman said.

"You see the same people," he said. "One gentleman's been in 15 or 20
times. Most of the time they pay with cash, 99 percent of the time, and you
can tell they're wired up most of the time."

He took to questioning buyers, trying to discourage them.

"I'd say, `You sure you need that much iodine?' " he said. "They always
gave the same story: They had a horse or a cow go through a fence."

Requiring identification and recording car license plate numbers has slowed
the iodine traffic, store owners say. Since May, Adams Feed & Seed has
recorded information on 21 people who bought 7 percent iodine or asked
about it, Tina Adams said.

Adams said she told one man she wouldn't sell iodine to him and he
responded by shoplifting three pint bottles off the shelf. He got away with
the theft but later was arrested in connection with a meth lab operation.

"It did deter some people, but not everybody," said Yarbrough, the Eugene
Farmers Co-op manager. "Some just don't care. We called one in, and the guy
had just got matrixed out of the jail the weekend before he was in here."