NIGHTMARISH METH SPILLS INTO STATE

Highly Addictive Drug Inflicts Heavy Brain Damage

Six years ago, the first prominent alarms sounded in Wisconsin about a
cheaply made stimulant with terrible addictive powers.

[Sidebar: By The Numbers: 83 -- Number of methamphetamine cases reported
statewide in 1999; 314 -- Number reported in 2003 Wisconsin ]

In short order, users could be rendered into a broken and phantom version
of their former selves. Rotted teeth, a wasted face, paranoid delusions.

The drug - snorted, smoked or injected - would bore holes in the brain, and
the attending paranoia had the potential to stir unpredictable violence.
Treatment almost always ended in failure. Houses where the drug was made,
in some cases with a brew of battery acid, lantern fuel, red phosphorus and
brake cleaner, would become toxic waste sites, and the process itself was
volatile enough to cause fiery explosions.

Methamphetamine, or meth, already had migrated in the 1980s and 1990s from
the West Coast to scar rural communities in neighboring Iowa and Minnesota,
and it was only a matter of time, law enforcement officials said, before it
infected Wisconsin.

Then-attorney general Jim Doyle and Peg Lautenschlager, then the U.S.
attorney for western Wisconsin, held meetings around the state to highlight
the problem. New money was found to pay for education and enforcement, with
departments along the Mississippi and points east mobilizing to shut down
the labs where meth was produced, and to disrupt the lines of traffic for a
drug that with the right recipe and legal ingredients can be home-brewed in
a matter of hours.

Did those efforts pay off?

By some measures yes; Wisconsin still has a much smaller meth problem than
neighboring states. But the drug has established a beachhead, and sharp
rises in other indicators of its presence have prompted new calls for
action in Madison, such as a legislative task force and proposed laws to
restrict legal ingredients for meth.

The number of meth incidents reported by state drug task forces to the
Justice Department rose from 83 in 1999 to 314 in 2003. Meth samples sent
for testing to the State Crime Laboratory grew from 101 in 2000 to 545 last
year. According to the Department of Health and Family Services,
involuntary placements to treatment facilities for meth use grew from 194
in 2001 to 347 in 2003.

Still, Wisconsin rests at a comparatively low level when it comes to other
evidence used to determine the prevalence of abuse of meth. These include
the discovery of clandestine "laboratories" and prosecutions for possession
and manufacture of the drug. For instance, the Drug Enforcement
Administration counted 74 meth labs discovered in Wisconsin in 2004. That's
compared with 165 in Minnesota, 926 in Illinois and 1,300 in Iowa.

Indeed, other drugs such as marijuana and cocaine still loom larger as a
cause for concern, according to surveys of Wisconsin police conducted by
the U.S. Justice Department.

"We saw (meth) coming down the road . . . and we've been relatively
successful," said U.S. Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), who helped to secure early
funding in response to the problem.

"It's important to note that the problem remains one that is primarily a
Twin Cities problem that spills into Wisconsin, primarily an Iowa problem
that spills over into Wisconsin," said Doyle, who wishes law enforcement
had enjoyed the same foresight with the wave of crack cocaine that broke in
Milwaukee and other metro areas in the late 1980s and early '90s.

Lost Battles

But if there are some hopeful chords about anticipating and disrupting an
illicit drug's incursion, the news is not all good. That's because in some
communities, the battle with meth isn't being joined. It already has been
decided.

St. Croix County, bounding the Twin Cities, has over recent years led the
state in all things meth. According to Justice Department figures, the
county, with a population of some 71,000, submitted 300 cases to the State
Crime Laboratory between 1998 and 2004. In Milwaukee County, with 933,000,
that number was 39.

The St. Croix jail, which only five years ago was pulling in $1.7 million
in profit renting space to other authorities, now is filled to the brim
with home-grown inmates whose alleged crimes are almost exclusively
meth-related, at a cost of $1.6 million last year.

"Up here, meth really has taken over everything," said Dan Breymeier, head
of the St. Croix County Sheriff's Department drug unit. "Quite frankly, if
I get a coke case, or a heroin case, I'm happy."

And law enforcement officials say if the cartels that have allowed cocaine
and heroin to flow into the Milwaukee area so decide, meth will soon make
its presence felt here, too.

"The meth is out in the rural areas right now, where people can't get
crack," said Milwaukee County prosecutor Steven Licata, head of the drug
unit. "Meth is cheap and extremely dangerous. It's hideous. I just hope
that we do not see it established here."

That sentiment is behind a recent push in the Legislature to create new
restrictions and penalties to buttress the state's defenses against meth,
though the trend is taking place at a time when federal money for drug
prevention is being slashed and local governments are strapped for cash.

Investigators such as Breymeier treat the drug, with long-lasting highs and
low prices, as a sort of inevitability. "I don't know how you stop it," he
said. "In 25 years in law enforcement, I have never seen a drug simply take
over people like this."

As testimony to the mindlessness of the thing, above Breymeier's desk is
the license plate of a woman his department arrested within sight of his
office, driving to a set-up meth buy.

"It's the best high you'll ever have," said Shawna Kovach, director of the
Libertas Center, a treatment facility affiliated with St. Joseph's Hospital
in Chippewa Falls, where her number of patients treated for meth has
doubled in recent years. "If you use it once, you'll become an addict."

Cold Medicine Base

The meth now in the market, known commonly as "crank," "ice" or "speed," is
more powerful than its antecedent versions that were popular with West
Coast outlaw motorcycle gangs in the 1970s. After a federal crackdown on
one chemical used in meth in the 1980s, the "cooks" turned to ephedra and
to pseudoephedrine, the active ingredient in popular decongestant
medications, for production and the drug gained in potency, the high
lasting several times longer than that provided by cocaine.

Users can buy a couple of hits for $20, according to investigators, and an
ounce on the street can sell from about $1,200 to $1,600. It bears some
resemblance to powder cocaine, but some of the more potent versions are
more crystalline.

The focus of law enforcement has been on the so-called "tabletop labs," but
the Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that 80% of the meth used in
this country comes from "super labs" controlled by Mexican cartels that
produce the drug in bulk.

Meth works, in effect, by causing a flood of dopamine into the brain,
creating intense euphoria but with a laundry list of other physiological
effects. Clifford Bowe, called an "addictionologist" and a physician on the
staff at St. Joseph's Hospital treatment center in Chippewa Falls since
1976, says the problems occur when the flood ends and a steep depression
sets in, "unless they can get more of the drug."

Real treatment can't begin until the patient has detoxified, he said, and
in some cases that can take more than a month. Some studies have put the
success rate for treatment in the single digits.

A woman being treated at the center after 11 years of abuse, and four
months off meth, twitched and fidgeted and slurred her words. Her teeth
were gapped, and her face was skeletal. She described to a reporter her and
her ex-husband's paranoia after days on end of meth use: "He would go out
and shoot at the stars with his rifle because he thought they were
helicopters." She agreed to an interview only if her name was not used.

Kovach, the center's director, said the woman's behavior, which mimicked
mental retardation, would likely be permanent.

"The drug changes your brain. Many of them will never recover," she said,
echoing studies suggesting that, unlike other drugs, meth causes
irreversible physical changes. Beyond the health effects and crime that
come with meth addiction, there are other unwelcome byproducts.

Cleanup costs at lab sites can range into the hundreds of thousands of
dollars. So-called "drug-endangered children" taken from the homes of
addled meth users have strained social service agencies.

Crystal meth, a variant popular in a subset of the gay community, is being
blamed for an uptick in AIDS cases because of its inhibition-lowering
quality. And last month, health officials in New York City announced that
the drug contributed to the case of a man who may have had sex with
hundreds of others, contracting a rare and resistant strain of the disease
(though this determination has been accepted cautiously by some in the
research world).

One of the few active meth cases in southeastern Wisconsin involves a
Wauwatosa man who is accused of setting up a meth lab in 2003 on his quiet
residential block.

Kevin Donnelly, a 33-year-old actuary, was arrested after a traffic stop,
and police found meth and dozens of packages of cold medication in his trunk.

According to Milwaukee County Circuit Court records, Donnelly, who also is
facing a three-count federal indictment related to that stop, told
investigators at the time that he was addicted to meth and, having tired of
his trips to Iowa to purchase the drug, he decided to construct his own lab
in Wisconsin. Wauwatosa police working with state investigators entered the
residence and found what they say was a working meth lab.

Donnelly still is awaiting trial and declined comment outside a recent hearing.

Wauwatosa Sgt. Patrick Clarey, one of the supervisors on the scene, said
several of the men were overcome by the toxic fumes. Even the next day, his
lungs burned when he surveyed the scene, Kleary said.

"It would be a nightmare if there were more like this," Kleary said. "We do
not want to be dealing with this."