DRUG TRENDS

NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT

Betty Ann Bowser reports on the fastest growing drug of choice in the
country METHAMPHETAMINE.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Phoenix police recently raided this house in a middle
class neighborhood looking for a methamphetamine production lab inside.

OFFICER: If you cannot afford an attorney, you have the right to have an
attorney appointed for you prior to questioning. Do you understand these
rights, Deborah?

DEBORAH: Yes, sir.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: What they found, instead, were small bags of the drug.
They also arrested a 15yearold runaway and four adults high on the drug.
Two young children were also found in the house and had to be placed in
foster care.

OFFICER: And you are under arrest for possession of drug paraphernalia

BETTY ANN BOWSER: On the street methamphetamine is known as speed, crank,
crystal, rock, the poor man’s cocaine. It’s the fastest growing drug of
choice in the country today. Snorted, smoked, or injected, the drug creates
an intense rush and feeling of euphoria.

OFFICER: Do you use needles? You need a lawyer. Do you use needles?

BETTY ANN BOWSER: It’s cheap and the high can last up to 10 hours, but it
can also cause mental confusion and agitation and violent behavior. Police
in Denver say a 25yearold skinhead was high on speed when he led police
on a 100mile per hour chase, shot and killed a veteran police officer, and
then shot and killed himself. But it is in Arizona that for the first time
meth addicts now outnumber people addicted to cocaine. In Phoenix alone,
emergency room overdose deaths have more than doubled. So drug treatment
officials are trying to get an antispeed message out through a series of
public service spots.

PUBLIC SERVICE AD SPOKESMAN: The drug is called meth. It seduced a man into
decapitating his child he thought was the devil.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Did that actually happen, what’s portrayed in that spot,
a father decapitated his son?

BARBARA ZUGOR, Treatment Assessment Screening Center: Yes, that’s a true
story, unfortunately. But there’s a lot of other violent acts and
aggressive acts that happen every day with people high on meth.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Barbara Zugor heads TASC, the Treatment Assessment
Screening Center, in Phoenix.

BARBARA ZUGOR: They have hallucinations, delusionary thoughts. They’re not
really in their right state of mind, and they have not been eating
properly, drinking properly. They’re really in a total state of confusion,
and so, therefore, their thinking patterns are way off. They have no
impulse control, and many times they think people are after them.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: When David, a selfemployed copier mechanic from Phoenix,
was abusing meth, he became paranoid about fires.

DAVID: I have a phobia of fires I’ve had since I was a child from actually
being burnt in a fire, and I would start always smelling smoke, so that was
my phobia. It would just amplify it. I smell electrical burning, this,
that, and of course, that was the phobia.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: So you would spend hours and hours and hours

DAVID: Looking around the house, looking for what this burning smell is,
pretty much just looking like a complete idiot.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: This is chemically induced mental illness.

BARBARA ZUGOR: I would say that that’s what we know about it right now,
right today. I think it is chemically induced mental illness. I think
there’s a lot of people out there. Now, sure, mentally ill people probably
use amphetamines, but I think it really, the chemical causes the psychosis.
Once you take the chemical away and people are off the drugs, they’re
fairly normal.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Sandy has been back to normal for more than a year, but
when she was high on speed, Arizona Child Protective officials had to take
her young children away from her.

SANDY: It’s something I hate to admit but it took me a long time to decide
who I loved the most. I mean, I love my kidsdon’t get me wrongbut I
didn’t want to give up that either. You know, that was the hardest.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Meth does that to you?

SANDY: Yes.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: It makes you make a choice between it and your children?

SANDY: Yes. And it wasyou knowI’m stillstill to say that bugs me
because I let it even be a choice. You know, I should have dropped that a
long time ago.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: For more than a year now Sandy has been sober. She also
has her children back. National Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey is alarmed when
he hears stories like Sandy’s, and he’s concerned about the spread of the
drug.

GEN. BARRY McCAFFREY, National Drug Policy Director: It’s a ferociously
addictive and dangerous substance. It’s become the number one drug problem
in Southern California, Hawaii, parts of San Francisco, Idaho, Arizona, the
Midwest. It spread in a very unpredictable fashion, and it may well be the
most destructive, dangerous substance we’ve seen in Americaeven worse
than crack cocaine in the mid 80's.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Producing methamphetamine can be even more dangerous than
taking it and the technology deceptively simple. A meth lab can be set up
in an apartment with simple household equipmentglass jars and coffee
filtersand the ingredients can include perfectly legal cold remedies like
Sudafed and easilyobtained chemicals like red lye, kerosene, and Drano.
This grainy video seized by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department shows
a meth cook making the drug in a clandestine lab in the attic of a home in
Phoenix. The fumes coming out of the top of the glass beaker can not only
be lethal; they can also easily explode, making the drug dangerous to more
than just the user. Jim Milford is the deputy administrator of the Drug
Enforcement Administration.

JIM MILFORD, Drug Enforcement Administration: It’s not uncommon for us to
get a report from the PD, for example. An individual manufacturing
methamphetamine in his basement or out in the shed, he’s high on
methamphetamine, he makes a slip, and the whole place goes up, and he’s
dead. That’s one thing. He’s killed himself. But when these individuals
really risk the lives of their children and neighbors and people around
them, then it really gets in the situation of public safety.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: That’s exactly what happened in Arizona this fall when
police believe threeyearold Michael Carnesi died from inhaling poisonous
fumes while he was sleeping in his mother’s appointment. His mother’s
boyfriend was allegedly cooking meth in the kitchen. As the number of meth
labs seized by the DEA in Arizona has skyrocketed from fourteen three years
ago to one hundred and thirtysix this year, so have the dangers associated
with them.

SPOKESMAN: What hazards could you assume with a reaction vessel if it was
running?

BETTY ANN BOWSER: The residue chemicals are so volatile that the DEA is
training local and state police from all over the country in how to
dismantle methamphetamine labs once they are found.

INSTRUCTOR: You plug in, turn on, take your first breath, and screw it down.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: In a oneweek program near the FBI training facility in
Quantico, Virginia, officials are exposed to the realities of a meth lab
explosion and taught what to do about it. At the DEA, Agent Guy Hargreaves
is known as the "meth king." He is also the designer of the training program.

GUY HARGREAVES, Special Agent, DEA: It is a law enforcement nightmare
because we have thousands of officers across the country who have not been
trained in how to handle this, this type of a problem. We have to have
selfcontained breathing apparatus; we have to have specialized clothing;
Nomex fireresistant uniforms when they go in if they catch on fire, less
likely to be injured. They have other types of equipment: air purified
respirators; air monitors, which cost hundreds of dollars, to check the
atmosphere to see if there are combustibles in the atmosphere.

SPOKESMAN: You rescued the injured agent but at what cost?

BETTY ANN BOWSER: So far the DEA has trained several thousand officers from
around the country and continues to train another nine hundred a year. But
DEA officials say that’s hardly adequate. Many of the officers come from
remote areas of the country like Prescott, Arizona, a town of 30,000 in the
central part of the state. The county surrounding Prescott is the size of
the state of Massachusetts, with only 100 police officers. Kathy McLaughlin
is assistant county sheriff.

LT. KATHY McLAUGHLIN, Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office: If you were going to
have a lab, you probably would not want to put it in a busy area; you would
want to get remote, in an isolated area, where nobody’s going to bother
you, nobody’s going to see your traffic; nobody’s going to smell the smell
of all the chemicals. You can get pretty invisible in some areas of Yavapai
County.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: But the biggest law enforcement problem is the recent
growth of the Mexican mafia into the meth production business. Last week,
federal drug agents arrested 100 people for involvement with the largest
Mexican meth gang in the country. Attorney General Janet Reno says the
raids are part of a national strategy to crack down on meth labs.

JANET RENO, Attorney General: We are disrupting the methamphetamine trade.
We are closing labs. And to the merchants of meth we make this pledge: We
will not tolerate your threat to our children or to our neighborhoods. And
we are not going to let methamphetamine spread across America the way crack
did in the 1980's.

BETTY ANN BOWSER: Law enforcement is also finding more creative ways to
arrest meth producers. In October, DEA agents and Phoenix undercover agents
busted 19 convenience stores for selling legal overthecounter cold
remedies in bulk to meth producers. Creativity may continue to be an
operative word for law enforcement as it tries to stop the spread of a drug
that isn’t illegal until it’s made.