METH'S EXTRA MENACE

Drug Labs Fraught With Hazards, Even For Law Officers Who Bust Them

Ohio law enforcement has a new face, and it's wearing a
chemical-resistant mask.

Methamphetamine and its toxic ingredients have turned officers
accustomed to raiding drug homes and making arrests into garbage collectors.

"Used to be, we bust a guy with some dope, whether it was pot or
crack or whatever, and we bag it and tag it as evidence and go about
our business," said Scioto County sheriff's office detective John
Koch. He is one of two Scioto County deputies who help with meth
raids by other agencies in the southwestern quadrant of Ohio, the
area the state says has the biggest problem.

"Now, I wrap myself up like a storm trooper and become a
hazardous-materials handler."

Though other drugs account for far more arrests and treatment in
Ohio, methamphetamine and its highly toxic ingredients have drawn an
unprecedented response from Ohio law enforcement since they emerged
as a serious threat nearly a decade ago.

Federal, state and local governments have spent millions of dollars
fighting and cleaning up meth labs in Ohio.

"We learned our lesson in the '80s with crack cocaine," said Scott
Duff, head of the clandestine-lab unit operating since 2004 under the
office of Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro to deal almost exclusively with meth.

"With crack, we got caught with our pants down, and we still haven't
pulled them all the way back up."

Few can dispute that Ohio has a problem with the home-brewed drug,
which can be snorted, smoked, swallowed or shot into veins. Since
2000, the number of labs raided annually has increased from 36 to nearly 500.

Consider:

The Ohio attorney general's office has spent close to $2 million
since 2004 to establish and run Duff's specialized unit.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has spent nearly the same amount
cleaning up hazardous meth waste in Ohio.

Nearly $100,000 in grant money went to faith-based groups in Ohio
last year to help reduce the growing meth problem.

The state bankrolled training for 135 law officers from across the
state to handle the noxious chemicals used in meth production.

At least one county sought a social-services levy partly to deal with
the rising costs associated with caring for children from meth homes.

Methamphetamine produces a high similar to that of other stimulants
such as cocaine, but the way the drug is produced poses a very different risk.

The form of the drug most common to Ohio comes from grinding common
cold medicines into powder and then using a chemical agent to extract
ephedrine, meth's key ingredient. Using readily available chemicals
that even separately can be dangerous, the meth cooker concocts a
dangerous brew.

Recipes that read like chemistry lessons have been handed down by
relatives, circulated among friends and posted on the Internet. The
cookers mix the chemicals in jars, containers, buckets and coolers in
many places, including their kitchens, cars in shopping-center
parking lots and the middle of farm fields.

Some methods produce noxious chemicals, and explosion is a risk. A
Hocking County man currently in serious condition in a Columbus
hospital is an example of that.

Christopher Cook stumbled from the burning garage at the property he
was renting in southeastern Ohio on April 19, his charred skin
dripping from his body. The garage was destroyed. Investigators say
it was meth cooking gone bad.

"That's why we take this seriously," Duff said.

Meth cooks operate less frequently in metropolitan areas than in
rural areas, authorities say. As the drug spread across the Ohio
countryside, the possibility of explosion and potential chemical
exposure forced law enforcement to change its methods, Duff said.

Much of the time once spent working other active cases is now spent
standing guard over meth labs until cleanup crews hired by the
federal Drug Enforcement Agency arrive, Scioto County's Koch said.

He and his partner, Adam Giles, say they've waited as long as eight
hours. It wasn't that way before the risks were known.

"I remember busting my first labs with nothing but some rubber gloves
on," Giles said. "As long as things didn't smell bad, we thought we'd
be OK. Everything I heard, all the warnings about the chemicals,
sounded excessive. Now, I know better."

Television and radio stations in Utah and Minnesota have reported
that a growing number of officers in those states, both with a much
older and worse meth problem than Ohio, are suffering from lung
disease or cancer because of what they say was unprotected exposure
to meth labs.

Ohio has had no such reports, its Bureau of Workers' Compensation says.

Nevertheless, Giles and Koch take mandated precautions now. They are
two of the 135 officers that the Ohio attorney general's office
trained for meth-lab response since 2004.

In exchange for taking the state's free, weeklong class and accepting
the nearly $1,300 worth of specialized gear, the officers agree to
leave their own jurisdictions when called to help departments that
have no one qualified to deal with meth labs.

A team of these specially trained officers, led by state agent Chuck
Bell, rolled up to an old brick house in the middle of the Montgomery
County village of New Lebanon just before noon one day in February.
An informant said they would find a 12-foot horse trailer full of
chemicals used to produce meth.

Detectives were told they'd find a 5-gallon bucket full of ground
cold pills soaking in chemicals. Investigators also expected to find
a 30-gallon drum of Coleman fuel and at least 75 gallons of anhydrous
ammonia, both key to the drug-making process.

But they were too late. The pills had been separated, the ammonia
used. What they found instead was garbage.

Wearing chemical-resistant suits and gas masks, the agents pulled
dozens of bags and buckets jammed with crushed cans of camp fuel and
starting fluid, and rusting bottles of ether. They sifted through
jars, bottles, cups and containers of sludge and liquid.

The trash included several burned sets of pants and a couple of
charred propane containers, all likely the result of something gone
wrong. The meth-lab waste had probably accumulated elsewhere during
months, maybe years, of cooking, and then the trailer was dropped at
the site, Bell said.

"This is the most I've ever seen," he said. "To someone driving by,
this would have looked like any other junked-up backyard you can see
everywhere. But imagine a kid getting around here and playing with
this. That's why it matters."

By day's end, the agents and officers had spent more than 12 hours
sorting through the waste for evidence. A cleanup crew, hired under
contract with the DEA, didn't finish until nearly dawn the next day.

Despite amassing thousands of dollars in cleanup and manpower costs,
no one was in custody. About 1,000 pounds of hazardous waste was law
enforcement's only trophy that day.

The man and woman living in the house couldn't be tied to the
garbage, and Bell said no one could prove that they even knew what
was inside the trailer.

"That happens a lot," Bell said. "We end up finding the waste in the
middle of nowhere, and we have to spend time and money to clean it up
and no one gets arrested. It's frustrating, but part of our job is to
keep people safe."

Though much has been made about the dangers of these labs to the
users and those who arrest them, there are others to consider: children.

The National Crime Prevention Council says that 80 percent of labs
seized nationally have children on the premises, and 35 percent of
those children show signs of health problems from exposure to the
chemicals or the drug itself. Though Ohio doesn't have a handle on
how its meth problem relates to children, officials heed the statistics.

This month, state and local agencies will meet to establish standard
procedures for dealing with children found in drug houses. The
impetus behind the movement is meth.

The summit will include lawenforcement officers, prosecutors,
children services workers, doctors and clinicians.

Next year, the state will begin to track what kinds of drugs found in
homes where children are present.

Some counties reported that it is already worse than expected.
Officials in Clermont County, just east of Cincinnati, say the number
of children in their custody rose 50 percent during two years, and
they attribute much of the increase to meth. Ashtabula County, in the
northeastern corner, blames a budget crunch on the same problem.

Ben Murray, executive director of the Ohio Network of Children's
Advocacy Centers said that in the past, when childwelfare workers
went to a home where drug use was suspected, they could sometimes
call a neighbor or relative to care for the children.

"But meth changed all that," Murray said. One of the characteristics
of the drug is extreme paranoia that often causes a user to cut
himself off from anyone who doesn't share a passion for the drug.

"Now, if you're calling one of their close relatives or friends, the
probability that that person uses also has increased," he said. "None
of the old assumptions any longer apply."

With so much time, attention and resources paid to the drug during
the past few years, officials now hope they are making a dent in the business.

A law that took effect in May to restrict the sale of pseudoephedrine
is expected to dramatically reduce the number of labs. The drug is
found in common cold medicines, which must be kept behind the store
counter under the new law. Customers have to sign for drugs that
contain pseudoephedrine. Meth-lab seizures have fallen 77 percent in
Iowa since a similar law took effect there one year ago.

Officials here also hope to stem the theft of anhydrous ammonia, a
key ingredient in meth-making. Several state agencies want to tap $1
million in federal Homeland Security money to purchase special locks
for tanks of anhydrous ammonia, a nitrogen fertilizer for corn.

Meth cookers have routinely stolen the fertilizer from tanks in
farmers' fields and from feed mills. In 2004, legislators made the
theft of the chemical a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five
years in prison.

Iowa, which at one time was No. 2 in the nation for meth labs, is
just wrapping up a five-year program to lock every large anhydrous
ammonia storage tank in the state.

"That probably helped us just as much, if not more, than the law
limiting the ephedrine," said Marvin Van Haaften, a former longtime
sheriff in Marion County, Iowa, who now heads the Iowa Governor's
Office of Drug Control Policy.

"Other states like Ohio that didn't have as much of a problem as we
did should be doing the same things to prevent it from becoming an epidemic."

Once most of the labs were gone and the anhydrous ammonia thieves
were run off, Van Haaften said, Iowa's officers were able to
concentrate on doing what they do best: "following intelligence,
following leads, running investigations and not sorting through
garbage bags full of empty pill packs and empty Coleman fuel cans," he said.

Duff, of Ohio's clandestine-lab unit, said he hopes that's what's next here.

"We know the demand has been created, and people will step in to try
and fill it," he said. "But we'll adapt. Things in the dope business
change every day. Always have. So we change, too."