The Illegal Home Business: 'Speed' Manufacture

By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN

BLUE SPRINGS, Mo. The police officers searching a modest home here on
the outskirts of Kansas City late one recent afternoon encountered a
perverse vision of Middle American domesticity.

In the living room sat the computer where Dad had just been forging
driver's licenses, while in another room Mom kept their towheaded children,
8 and 4 years old, away from the family's sawedoff shotgun and a crude
laboratory that turned out methamphetamines from ingredients bought in
local stores. Toxic waste from the illegal drugmaking had been dumped down
the drain. When officers looked in the kitchen, said Dan Cummings, a police
detective, "we found several jars of meth in the freezer next to the
children's Popsicles."

The clandestine methamphetamine laboratory was one of more than 60 seized
so far this year by the Jackson County drug task force, whose officers are
drawn from seven towns here in the rolling hills of western Missouri.

Locally made methamphetamine, long popular on the West Coast, has become
the smalltown Midwest's drug of choice, authorities here say, the kind of
scourge that crack cocaine has long been to the inner city. And because it
is relatively cheap and easy for smallscale manufacturers to make, some
lawenforcement officials express concern that it may not be long before
the drug becomes just as popular in the East.

"It's a homegrown product," said Michael Shanahan, a retired agent of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation who heads the county drug task force here.
"It's American ingenuity at its worst."

The rise in local manufacture of methamphetamine has been extraordinary.
Shirley Armstead, spokeswoman for the St. Louis field division of the
federal Drug Enforcement Administration, said that in 1992, the agency
closed a total of only six methamphetamine laboratories in a region
encompassing Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and southern
Illinois. By 1995 the annual total of seized laboratories had grown to 66,
and last year to 303. And even at that, the authorities confess that they
are not catching all such labs. (By contrast, the drug agency closed down
one methamphetamine lab in New Jersey last year, and none in New York.)

Ms. Armstead described many of the laboratories in the Midwest as
momandpop operations that produce less than a pound of methamphetamine at
a time.

"We're finding when we bust small labs," she said, "the guys are saying,
'Hey, I was just making enough for beer money.' "

Methamphetamine, a stimulant variously nicknamed meth, crank, ice and
speed, has been around for a long time. A quartercentury ago, an antidrug
campaign spread the warning "speed kills." Methamphetamine was made and
distributed for years by outlaw motorcycle gangs in California and
elsewhere, until Mexican drug traffickers began smuggling it into the
United States in the 1990s.

But with the drug spilling into towns and rural areas in the West and the
Midwest, the snorters, smokers and injectors of methamphetamine have been
learning to make their own.

Within the last couple of years, lawenforcement officials say, homemade
methamphetamine has grown rapidly, thanks to recipes circulating on the
Internet and peddled among users, who are primarily bluecollar whites.
Homemade meth is harder to track down than heroin or cocaine, because there
are no imported ingredients or significant trafficking cartels.

After the government in 1994 restricted the sale of ephedrine,
methamphetamine's basic ingredient, bootleggers substituted
pseudoephedrine, a related compound extracted from diet pills and nasal
decongestants sold over the counter. The switch to that ingredient has
turned methamphetamine into a doityourself drug for people who never took
a chemistry class, leading to explosions, fires and environmental pollution
from the mishandling of volatile chemicals that are also a part of the
recipe.

"You're dealing with a 'Beavis and Butthead' mentality," said Shanahan, the
head of the county task force. "These guys have a mind for doing a criminal
endeavor. They consume part of the product and then sell to their friends."

Medical experts and some users say methamphetamine delivers a stronger,
cheaper psychoactive kick than crack cocaine, unleashing aggression and
leading to long binges that end with physical collapse.

"It just gives you a feeling of superiority, like there's nothing you can't
do," said Bruce Fowler, a former user who just completed courtmandated
treatment in Independence. "Meth just makes you want to go. You go out to
mow the lawn and end up manicuring it."

Dr. Herbert D. Kleber, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia College of
Physicians and Surgeons in New York City, said methamphetamine could be
more dangerous than cocaine because the high lasts much longer, making
paranoia and psychotic behavior more likely.

"It's a drug that's been associated with violence," Kleber said.

The arrival of methamphetamine in Jackson County, which extends eastward
from Kansas City and Independence to smaller towns like Blue Springs and to
farmland that shimmers in the summer heat, has been attributed to a
California biker who, lawenforcement officials say, rumbled through the
county four or five years ago, peddling the recipe for $1,000.

Around here, $25 will keep a user high for a day on a mere quarter gram of
methamphetamine. Some users cushion the acute letdown with alcohol,
although Ms. Armstead said, "We're finding kids as young as 15 using meth,
with some using heroin to come down from the crazy meth high."

Methamphetamine has also emerged as a public health hazard owing to the
environmental effects of its homemade manufacture, contaminating soil,
water, homes and sewers with volatile or corrosive chemicals like
hydrochloric acid and red phosphorous and poisonous byproducts like
phosgene gas.

The throat of an Independence police sergeant was scorched by fumes from a
laboratory that was raided last year. The county task force's entry team
now wears protective suits and masks, and the leader carries a beeper that
sounds if there is insufficient oxygen.

Ms. Armstead, the DEA spokeswoman, said it cost $1.5 million to clean up
the methamphemtamine laboratories seized in her region last year.

Lawenforcement officers may also face booby traps in the laboratories.
Cummings told of finding an overhead light bulb in a dark basement
laboratory in Independence that was filled with tiny lead pellets and
gunpowder, rigged to explode when the switch was flipped on. The task force
has also found a couple of pipe bombs and rattlesnakes in labs.

Each makeshift methamphetamine laboratory consists of little more than a
glass beaker and a camp stove, with a hose to carry off toxic gases. One
Independence couple vented the potentially harmful fumes through a closet
of the room where their 5yearold daughter slept, Cummings said.

Some ingredients, like pulverized diet and decongestant pills, antifreeze,
iodine crystals, caustic drain cleaner and muriatic acid, a corrosive acid
used to etch concrete, are so commonplace that untrained police officers
tend to overlook them in searches. Cooking methamphetamine gives off a
distinctive stench, so some bootleggers in Jackson County have moved out to
farms to escape notice.

"It doesn't take a brain surgeon to make it," said Steve Cook, an
Independence police detective who does undercover methamphetamine
purchases. "All you need is a recipe."

Because it takes experienced makers only two to four hours to produce a
batch of methamphetamine, "it's hard to hit them when they're cooking,"
Cummings said.

When laboratory operators try to accelerate the process by excessively
heating the chemicals, Cummings said, sometimes "they get sloppy and it
blows up." One such explosion burned down a garage in Independence last
winter.

Many sets of lab equipment are portable enough to be packed away in picnic
coolers or car trunks. One set was left in a shopping cart outside a
supermarket near Independence. The police have found others in garages, a
car wash, a discount store and motels. The use of motel rooms is
particularly alarming, Ms. Armstead said, because chemicals permeate the
carpet and the bedding, creating a health risk for subsequent occupants.

In New York and most other Eastern cities, crack cocaine rather than
methamphetamine still predominates. A drug dealer interviewed in Brooklyn
said he did not see much profit in methamphetamine, because customers
disappeared on weeklong binges. "With crack," he said, "they come back
every two hours."

But Shanahan predicted that methamphetamine would eventually reach New York.

When users "find out that it's cheaper and more accessible, crack will fall
to the side," he said. "It's a matter of economics."

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company