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THE WAR ON METH

A DEA Special Agent Describes Nearly 20 Years Of Life On The Front Lines In
A Battle Against A Corrosive Drug

One of the first cases I worked after joining the Drug Enforcement
Administration in 1987 was a methamphetamine lab in southern Missouri. I
still remember walking into the farmhouse where manufacturers were cooking
the drug. The chemicals looked like flour and rock salt. And then there was
all the intricate glassware and tubing: if it hadn't been for the
surrounding trash and filth--and if the whole place hadn't smelled like a
roomful of urine-soaked diapers on a hot summer day--it would have been a
scene out of a college biology class.

Back then, when we raided meth labs, we would just hold our breath. None of
us knew to wear protective gear to guard against the chemicals that could
have easily seared our lungs or blinded us for life. We just didn't know
the full extent of the dangers in those early days.

Our chemists told us that there were 30 different ways of making meth,
using everything from a pressure cooker to ethyl ether. But when we went
into a meth house, there were four things we could always expect to find:
bottles and bottles of Mountain Dew (a drink that, because of its high
sugar content, is craved by meth addicts); pornography; "The Poor Man's
James Bond" Vol. One and Two (books that detail how to make your own bombs
and booby traps); and at least a dozen guns. Meth makes its users paranoid,
and its cooks hardly ever come without a fight.

Between 1993 and 1995, regulation of meth-manufacturing equipment and
ingredient chemicals like ephedrine and pseudoephedrine was stepped up.
That action, along with DEA's enforcement against bulk precursor-chemicals
and the prohibition of "box labs" sold by rogue chemical companies that
contained everything you needed to produce meth, began to make an impact.
We saw a steady decline in meth cases and, eventually, the 30 different
ways of making the drug were reduced to two.

But then just as suddenly, we saw the number of cases spike back up. Cooks
had guarded their meth recipes with their lives, but with the Internet, the
recipes and techniques were now accessible to anyone. Now meth "super
labs"--which produced massive quantities of the drug--were no longer the
only sources of meth. Cooks started to become younger, too--and many of
them had their children in the labs with them. These small labs offered new
ways to concoct the same destruction.

When we first started busting down this new breed of lab, we found that
instead of using bulk chemicals, the cooks were using pills containing
ephedrine or pseudoephedrine that they'd bought at retail stores. If you
had told me 15 years ago that cooks would be making meth in that way, I
never would guessed they'd sink so low.

I remember one meth trafficker I arrested in southern Missouri who made a
point of thanking me after he was convicted. He would be spending the next
17 years of his life behind bars, away from his wife and young children.
But he knew he needed help, and prison was the only place he could stay
clean. He was sick of the hallucinations of spiders crawling out of his
skin, sick of the fact that he hardly had any teeth left from the corrosive
effects of meth and sick of the person meth had turned him into.

Meth is worse than we could have ever imagined in the early days of this
fight, but the lessons we have learned about its rapid growth and rabid
devastation have only pushed us to act smarter and harder against this
monster. We have made progress in this battle, but we still have a long way
to go.