NEW METH MENACE

Pop Bottles Used To Make Cheap, Volatile Shake-And-Bake
Concoction

If you find a two-litre pop bottle full of brownish or white sludge
lying by the side of the road, don't touch it.

Call the police.

There's a chance that you've discovered the highly toxic -- and
potentially explosive -- byproduct of so-called "shake-and-bake"
crystal meth production.

Turns out, meth doesn't have to be made in an elaborate, clandestine
lab, like the one depicted in the TV show Breaking Bad.

In recent years, meth heads have developed their own ways to cook up
small batches of the drug. It's fast, cheap and flies under the radar
of the authorities because only tiny amounts of the precursor
chemicals are needed.

The best known method is shake and bake, where a few pseudoephedrine
pills (the active drug) are crushed and mixed in a pop bottle with
some other readily available household chemicals.

The volatile chemical reaction produces a small amount of crystal
meth, enough for a few meth heads to party for a couple hours or keep
one addict going for a day or so.

Techniques like this are spreading like wildfire in the U.S. Midwest,
where meth use is an epidemic.

Edmonton isn't immune.

"We've busted a few of these user-based labs, but we haven't seen a
lot of them," said Edmonton police Staff Sgt. Darren Derko, noting
that they have yet to see the shake-and-bake type.

Nonetheless, members of the city police drug squad have travelled to
Detroit to learn from cops there how these small labs work, and what
to do with the chemicals when they find them.

Derko acknowledged they're extremely difficult to track down because
it's all done on the fly. All the chemicals and equipment can fit into
a backpack.

"It only takes two or three hours for the whole process, and then
they're gone," Derko said.

"It's not like a (marijuana) grow-op. It doesn't move."

In the U.S., it's been reported that meth heads routinely mix a batch
while driving around in a car. They keep the windows down to vent the
poisonous vapours. Once the batch is cooked, they toss the bottle and
its extremely toxic leftovers to the side of the road.

Police in the U.S. warn that during the chemical process, the highly
volatile chemicals are under extreme pressure.

"Every meth recipe is dangerous, but in this one, if you don't shake
it just right, it can build up too much pressure and the container can
pop," Mark Woodward of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs Control told the Associated Press.

"You see more extreme burns because they're holding it."

Derko added that because the "chemists" are usually addicts
themselves, they can get impatient and try to speed up the process by
adding heat, dramatically increasing the risk of an explosion.

While U.S. cops say they've seen a big increase in meth use the past
couple of years, largely due to user-based labs, Derko said cocaine
has always been far more popular than crystal meth in Edmonton.

He attributes that to the intense public awareness campaign about meth
earlier in the decade, along with tight restrictions on sales of the
chemicals used to make it.

Since 2005, cold remedies containing significant amounts of
pseudoephedrine must be kept behind pharmacy counters, while the
federal government has tightened restrictions on the sale of the other
chemicals.

"There was never the epidemic here that people feared there'd be," he
said.

Time will tell if these microlabs change that.