POTENT MEXICAN METH FLOODS IN AS STATES CURB DOMESTIC VARIETY

DES MOINES -- In the seven months since Iowa passed a law restricting
the sale of cold medicines used to make methamphetamine, seizures of
homemade methamphetamine laboratories have dropped to just 20 a month
from 120. People once terrified about the neighbor's house blowing up
now walk up to the state's drug policy director, Marvin Van Haaften,
at his local Wal-Mart to thank him for making them safer.

But Mr. Van Haaften, like officials in other states with similar
restrictions, is now worried about a new problem: the drop in
home-cooked methamphetamine has been met by a new flood of crystal
methamphetamine coming largely from Mexico.

Sometimes called ice, crystal methamphetamine is far purer, and
therefore even more highly addictive, than powdered home-cooked
methamphetamine, a change that health officials say has led to
greater risk of overdose. And because crystal methamphetamine costs
more, the police say thefts are increasing, as people who once cooked
at home now have to buy it.

The University of Iowa Burn Center, which in 2004 spent $2.8 million
treating people whose skin had been scorched off by the toxic
chemicals used to make methamphetamine at home, says it now sees
hardly any cases of that sort. Drug treatment centers, on the other
hand, say they are treating just as many or more methamphetamine addicts.

And although child welfare officials say they are removing fewer
children from homes where parents are cooking the drug, the number of
children being removed from homes where parents are using it has more
than made up the difference.

"It's killing us, this Mexican ice," said Mr. Van Haaften, a former
sheriff. "I'm not sure we can control it as well as we can the meth
labs in your community."

The influx of the more potent drug shows the fierce hold of
methamphetamine, which has devastated many towns once far removed
from violent crime or drugs. As Congress prepares to restrict the
sale of pseudoephedrine, the cold medicine ingredient that is used to
make methamphetamine, officials here and in other states that have
recently imposed similar restrictions caution that they fall far
short of a solution.

"You can't legislate away demand," said Betty Oldenkamp, secretary of
human services in South Dakota, where the governor this month
proposed tightening a law that last year restricted customers to two
packs of pseudoephedrine per store. "The law enforcement aspects are
tremendously important, but we also have to do something to address
the demand."

Here, officials boast that their law restricting pseudoephedrine,
which took effect in May, has been faster than any other state's in
reducing methamphetamine laboratories. Still, when Mr. Van Haaften,
director of the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy, surveyed
the local police, 74 percent said that the law had not changed
demand, and 61 percent said supply had remained steady or increased.

In a survey of treatment professionals, 92 percent said they had seen
as many or more methamphetamine addicts; the state treated 6,000 in
2005 and expects to treat more than 7,000 this year, based on current
trends. Some health officials said abuse among women, typically the
biggest users of methamphetamine, was rising particularly fast.

While seizures of powdered methamphetamine declined to 4,572 in 2005
from 6,488 in 2001, seizures of crystal methamphetamine increased, to
2,025 from one.

Federal drug agents tend to describe ice as methamphetamine that is
at least 90 percent pure. Officials here say much of their crystal
methamphetamine is less pure - "dirty ice," they call it. But either
is far more potent than homemade powdered methamphetamine; a "good
cook" yields a drug that is about 42 percent pure, but around 25
percent is more common. And in the first four months after the law
took effect here, average purity went to 80 percent from 47 percent.

Other states have seen the same.

"The Mexican drug cartels were right there to feed that demand," said
Tom Cunningham, the drug task force coordinator for the district
attorneys council for Oklahoma, the first state to put
pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters, in 2004. "They have always
supplied marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. When we took away the local
meth lab, they simply added methamphetamine to the truck."

A methamphetamine cook could make an ounce for $50 on a stovetop or
in a lab in a car; that same amount now costs $800 to $1,500 on the
street, the police say.

"Our burglaries have just skyrocketed," said Jerry Furness, who
represents Buchanan County, 150 miles northeast of Des Moines, on the
Iowa drug task force. "The state asks how the decrease in meth labs
has reduced danger to citizens, and it has, as far as potential
explosions. But we've had a lot of burglaries where the occupants are
home at the time, and that's probably more of a risk. So it's kind of
evening out."

When the state surveyed the children in state protection in
southeastern Iowa four months after the law took effect, it found
that 49 percent were taken from parents who had been using
methamphetamine, the same percentage as two years earlier, even as
police said they were removing fewer children from homes with laboratories.

Some law enforcement officials say that addicts may find the crystal
form more desirable. "If they don't have to mess with precursor
chemicals, it's actually a bit easier on them, and safer," said Kevin
Glaser, a drug task force supervisor for the state highway patrol in
Missouri, which last year led the nation in methamphetamine lab seizures.

But the switch has also increased the risks. "People are overdosing;
they're not expecting it to do this much," said Darcy Jensen,
director of Prairie View Prevention Services in South Dakota. "They
don't realize that that fourth of a gram they're used to using is
double or triple in potency."

Federal officials say there are 1.4 million methamphetamine addicts
in the United States, concentrated in the West, where the drug began
to take hold in the late 1980's, and the Midwest and South, where it
moved in the mid- and late 1990's.

Drug enforcement officials have always said that 80 percent of the
nation's supply comes from so-called super labs, those able to make
10 pounds or more. But in some counties here, officials say that all
the methamphetamine came from mom-and-pop labs that made the drug by
cooking pseudoephedrine with toxic farm and household chemicals.

Law enforcement focused on the laboratories because they were so
destructive: the police found children who had drunk lye thinking it
was water, or went without food as parents went through the long
binge-and-sleep cycles of using. Laboratories in homes, motels,
abandoned farm buildings or cars frequently exploded, or dumped their
toxic chemicals into drains or soil. Small police departments spent
much of their time attending to contaminated sites.

More than 30 states have restricted pseudoephedrine in some way. Nine
have put it behind pharmacy counters, and Oregon now requires a
prescription to obtain it.

Addicts and cookers have proved to be skilled at getting around the
restrictions; as one state imposes a law, bordering states see an
increase in laboratories. Oklahoma recently linked its pharmacies by
a computer database to track sales after discovering that cooks were
going county-to-county buying from several pharmacies a day.

Iowa's law passed unanimously. As in other states, officials say the
number of laboratories had already begun to decline, most likely
because cooks feared they would be caught because there was so much
public attention on the problem.

The law resulted in a decline of at least 80 percent. Police found
138 laboratories from June to December, down from 673 for the same
period the year before. The state had hit a high of 1,500 lab busts
in 2004, but with the law, had 731 for 2005, and expects just 257
this year. Law enforcement says the costs of policing and cleaning up
labs will drop to $528,000 next year from $2.6 million in 2004.

But here and in many of the states with recent pseudoephedrine
restrictions, frustration with the stubborn rate of addiction has
moved the discussion from enforcement to treatment and demand reduction.

That discussion, officials say, will be much tougher.

After listening to Mr. Van Haaften's report on the effects of the law
this week, State Representative Clel Baudler, a former state trooper
who now heads the public safety committee for the Iowa General
Assembly, charged his committee to come back to the next meeting with
strategies to reduce demand.

"My fear is, when I ask what they think we should do, they'll say 'I
don't know,' " Mr. Baudler said in an interview afterward. "We've
increased penalties, we've increased prison time, we're still not
getting in front of it."

Officials say they never advertised the law as one that would reduce
methamphetamine addiction. Still, they are surprised at how the drug
has hung on.

"Things that are highly destructive, including diseases, tend to be
self-limiting," said Arthur Schut, president of the Mid-Eastern
Council on Chemical Abuse in Iowa City, and a member of the state's
drug policy advisory council. "This has been devastating. It's
remarkable how quickly people are damaged by it."

Mr. Van Haaften, too, knows that it was too much to hope that the law
would reduce demand. Still, he says, "I had a little hope."

"I knew of the addictive nature, but in my heart, I believed people
didn't want to deal with dealers," he said. "They have guns, it's
dangerous, if you make your own it's safer. I hoped for a dip, but
the availability did not allow that to happen."