WILL CRYSTAL METH HIT NEW ENGLAND NEXT?

Drug Watch by Jason Gay

For some reason, New England has never gotten seriously hooked on meth.
Other areas of the country, from Southern California to the back nines of
the Midwest, have been knee-deep for the better part of a decade in
methamphetamine, an injectable, snortable, or smokable stimulant that is
known, depending on its form, as "crystal meth," "speed," "crank," "glass,"
or "ice." Yet New England has been largely unscathed, a six-state refuge
from a drug that has ravaged the inner city, farm country, and middle-class
suburbia with equal abandon.

The honeymoon may be over, however. The past year has witnessed a flurry of
methamphetamine-related arrests in New England, including the seizure of a
home this spring in Westport, Massachusetts, that authorities believe was
used as a laboratory to synthesize the drug. Recent reports of the drug --
which is associated with raves and nightclubs -- extend as far as rural
Maine, where police say they are swamped by a burgeoning meth market. In
1995, Maine police made one meth-related arrest and seized one gram of the
drug; last year, they arrested 22 people and seized 242 grams.

These numbers are still relatively small, but to drug-abuse authorities in
New England, the news is grim. If this region is on the verge of a meth
explosion similar to what other parts of the country have experienced, then
it's likely that big trouble awaits. Methamphetamine has been around for
decades, but newer, more potent forms have positively crippled communities
throughout California and the Southwest. In those regions, most of the
supply is funneled in from Mexico, but meth is also manufactured
domestically, especially in the countryside; residents in poor, rural
regions are taking the lead in meth production because the drug's telltale
smell is hard to disguise in populous areas. There was even a recent bust
of a Philadelphia meth and cocaine ring that extended west into Lancaster
County; among those arrested were two Amish men.

As New England tries to head off its methamphetamine threat, it will have
to pay close attention to the successes and failures of authorities in
other states. And it's this premise -- sharing information on the illicit
drug scene around the country to improve the national response -- that
brought more than 30 specialists to Boston last week for the 44th meeting
of the Community Epidemiology Work Group (CEWG), a consortium of
researchers sponsored by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The information supplied at the CEWG conference often comes from the front
lines of the illicit drug world. Much of it is assembled ethnographically
- -- researchers use focus groups to examine drug use in their communities,
as opposed to relying on cold data from law-enforcement or public-health
agencies. Later, that information is compiled and relayed to public
officials elsewhere.

"The common ground is that we talk dispassionately about what drug users
do," says Tom Clark, a specialist with Boston's Health and Addictions
Research, Inc., a nonprofit substance-abuse study group that helped
organize the conference. "And then we let the policymakers [draw] their own
conclusions about how best to use this information."

Clark and the other CEWG participants gathered in a top-floor ballroom at
the Omni Parker House for most of last week to hear their colleagues'
reports on drug-abuse developments in their respective states or countries
(20 US cities were represented, along with communities in Canada, Latin
America, Asia, and Europe). Many of these reports simply confirmed trends
of the past few years: heroin abuse has surged as the drug's purity has
increased; crack cocaine has leveled off; marijuana use remains high among
teenagers and young adults.

But there was also new information, especially from New England. On
Thursday, the CEWG researchers traveled to Boston University Medical
Center, where they heard a series of lectures from other specialists; one
of the more urgent presentations came from Patricia Case, a researcher at
the Harvard Medical School's Department of Social Medicine. In her lecture,
titled "Emerging Drug Use in New England," Case charted the rise of "club
drugs" such as gamma hydroxybutyrate, or GHB; ketamine ("Special K"); and
methamphetamine.

Case acknowledged that her report, like many studies of emerging illicit
drugs, was not definitive; it relied heavily on first

person interviews, police reports, and newspaper stories. But the picture
Case painted was startling. GHB, a liquid compound that produces a euphoric
high comparable to Ecstasy, is banned in Massachusetts, but its use is
thriving here. Because its ingredients can legally be packaged and sold
together, a consumer can easily synthesize the drug at home; Case reported
that sales of GHB kits are booming on the World-Wide Web, where little
information is given about standard dosages or potential side effects.
"This is the ultimate Internet drug," Case said.

Special K, too, is breaking out in this region, Case reported. A
tranquilizer used to sedate animals, it can be snorted or injected, and its
use is exploding in the club scene, especially among Caucasian gay men.
Case told of watching people snort "bumps" of Special K off their fists
right on the dance floor. "[Ketamine] is a widely used drug in every gay
bar I've been to in New England," she said. But because its user population
is so specific, Case said, Special K has largely escaped law-enforcement
attention.

The same cannot be said of methamphetamine, which is quickly becoming part
of local law-enforcement vernacular. For years, Case said, experts heard
three constant refrains regarding meth in this area: first, there wasn't
any; second, whatever meth did show up in New England came from California;
and third, what had happened in California and elsewhere wasn't going to
happen here. Not only was New England too detached from the Mexican
suppliers and stateside motorcycle gangs who provided much of the West
Coast's meth, the theory went, but most of the area wasn't rural enough to
protect local meth labs.

But in 1998, as recent arrests and overdoses can attest, meth is alive and
well and being created and distributed in New England. Case told the CEWG
audience she was particularly concerned by the leap in meth-related arrests
in northern Maine, beyond Bangor and toward the Canadian border. Given that
methamphetamine is traditionally created in rural areas, the drug's growth
in this region isn't surprising, she said -- meth "farmers" seek out
wide-open spaces with comparatively light law enforcement.

Case suspects a meth-running corridor between northern Maine and southern
New England cities like Medford, Massachusetts -- another place where
methamphetamine is increasingly showing up on the law-enforcement radar.
"The relationship between Massachusetts and Maine is strong," Case said.

Certainly, this is little more than a piecemeal outline of the New England
methamphetamine problem. But CEWG reports from other locations show that
meth is highly addictive and can quickly overtake a region. In the
Minneapolis-St. Paul area, for example, methamphetamine treatment
admissions doubled between 1996 and 1997, and of all the people under 25
admitted for drug treatment in the past year, 46.5 percent reported meth
addiction. Any information that drug-abuse specialists and law-enforcement
officials in affected regions like Minneapolis-St. Paul can provide may
help other areas prepare for an outbreak, or perhaps even prevent one from
occurring.

What's different about the information that the CEWG disseminates is its
focus on the behavioral aspects of illicit drug use. Instead of simply
citing statistics from police logs, CEWG researchers discuss how people are
using drugs, and why they are using them.

This approach was on display when George Arlos, a specialist affiliated
with Safe Place, an outreach center headquartered near Roxbury's Dudley
Square, presented his research on Bostonians who inject crack cocaine.
Arlos explained how Safe Place convened a focus group of 11 men and women
who had begun injecting crack in recent years. At first, it would seem
strange that anyone would go to the trouble of shooting up crack -- after
all, the whole idea of the drug is to achieve a quick, cheap, potent
cocaine high. The people in Arlos's focus group, however, had begun using
needles for two reasons: injecting crack provides a distinctive rush
compared to smoking it, and once the drug is liquefied it can be combined
with heroin into a powerful "speedball," an injectable narcotic cocktail.
Given the relative scarcity of powdered cocaine in the Dudley area, Arlos
said, loyal speedballers were turning to crack as an alternative.

Though his information was alarming, Arlos's presentation style was
undramatic and clinical -- he seemed more like an anthropologist than like
an advocate of any particular prevention initiative. Indeed, he described
the process for injecting crack the way Julia Child might recite a recipe.
Such detached observation of drug use might seem treasonous to anti-drug
activists or law-enforcement officials, but it's the CEWG's stock in trade,
says Tom Clark. Though the conference's participants generally agree that
illicit drug use should be reduced, Clark says there is a wide range of
opinion among CEWG researchers over how to attain that reduction, and the
group tries to stay apolitical. "You might miss something that's going on
if you let your anti-drug bias cloud your view," he says.

Right now, methamphetamine and other club drugs are clearly in the CEWG's
view of New England. And officials here need all the scouting reports they
can get. "Our main job is to report trends," Clark says. "But it's
certainly the hope that [this information] would be used for advance
warnings."

Jason Gay can be reached at jgay@phx.com. Tom Clark Health and Addictions
Research, Inc. 419 Boylston St. Boston, MA 02116 USA 617-266-9219 x110,
fax: 617-266-9271 tclark@har.org twc@world.std.com

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)