COOKING UP PLAN TO BUST METH LABS

Hungry? Here, have some "ice." If you're like me, you didn't know that
"ice" is slang for methamphetamine, a.k.a. "crank," "speed" or "glass."

This combustible and highly addictive brew is cooking up in labs big
and small all across this great land of ours, using common household
items like cold and asthma tablets containing pseudoephedrine and
ephedrine, acetone, rubbing and isopropyl alcohol, iodine, starter
fluid (ether), gas additives (methanol), drain cleaner (sulfuric
acid), muriatic acid, brake cleaner, lithium batteries, rock salt,
matchbooks (red phosphorus), lye and paint thinner - yum!

Frankly, I have no idea which of these ingredients you actually ingest
and which you use to cook it. For all I know, starter fluid tastes
like candy when you heat it up with paint thinner over a red
phosphorus flame.

Don Lincoln doesn't know what it tastes like, either, but says you're
basically ingesting or shooting up everything, and its distinctive and
intense odor is "very much like cat urine."

Yum, again.

Lincoln is supervisory special agent in the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration's Norfolk office. He's worked drug enforcement for 25
years, including in Roanoke, where dopers installed big meth labs in
those rural mountains long before they hit Hampton Roads.

Back in the day, it took a big lab to produce meth, until somebody
discovered that ephedrine could shortcut the process, kickstarting the
era of small toxic labs, or STLs.

Puckish drug agents like to refer to these as B&Bs, or Beavis and
Butthead labs, for the mentality of the people involved.

Just imagine, if you will, all those people out there in their
kitchens or garages, huddling over rubber hoses, coffee filters, Mason
jars and propane tanks, desperate for that special urine-flavored
chemical jolt you can only get from drain cleaner products. Imagine
the manpower being expended to keep these idiots from their darker
angels.

For years now, Virginia has watched the national map as meth blazed
our way from the West Coast like wildfire. It crossed our southwestern
border a few years ago and became such a problem that, last year, for
instance, Smyth County enacted a special grand jury that does nothing
but investigate and bring charges in meth-related cases.

Then last month, police busted a suspected meth lab in Norfolk. Last
week in New Kent County, police arrested others suspected of running a
meth lab in our own neck of the woods. Lincoln helped with both.

It took the quick-thinking owner of Hobby Horse 'N' Hound in
Providence Forge to recognize that the new customers who kept popping
in to buy iodine tincture by the gallon were up to something other
than first aid for massive amounts of livestock. Jill Byers says she
normally sells four or five pints of it a year.

"They were very desperate for this stuff," Byers told me
Wednesday.

Suspicious, Byers googled "iodine" on the Internet, saw all those
references to meth labs, "and found we maybe had a problem."

So she called police.

The state would like more merchants and retailers to do exactly what
Byers did. To that end, last summer Virginia enacted its voluntary
Meth Watch program (http://www.oag.state.va.us/Protecting/Meth_Watch/meth_welcome.htm) to educate merchants and their employees about
suspicious customer activity.

"A customer buying some cold medicine is normal," reads the Meth Watch
page. "A customer buying a case of it in addition to drain cleaner,
coffee filters and road flares should be a signal to that clerk that
something is amiss."

Indeed. Several retailers have signed on, says Emily Lucier,
spokeswoman with the state attorney general's office. They're hoping
for more.

Urged by former Attorney General Jerry Kilgore, the General Assembly
passed laws this last session to, among other things, double the
minimum sentence for operating a meth lab (from five years to 10), and
make it a separate crime to cook meth around kids (10 to 40 years).

One law that Lincoln would like to see here models one in Oklahoma,
which requires customers to offer photo ID and a signature to buy cold
remedies containing pseudoephedrine or ephedrine. That law cut
Oklahoma's meth labs in half almost overnight and subsequently herded
B&Bs further east, toward us.

Normally, I'd hate Big Brother nosing into my shopping list. But if it
keeps people from blowing up the neighborhood, here's my Harris Teeter
card.

By the way, for my own odyssey into the wonderful world of meth
production, which may or may not have the DEA banging on my door any
minute now, stay tuned for Saturday's column.