PUBLIC HELPING IN METH RAIDS

More People Reporting Possible Labs

In the early morning hours of Feb. 17, a group of firefighters from Kanawha
County dug through the rubble of a house that had just burned to the ground.

One by one, the firefighters picked out camp stoves, matchbooks without
their striker pads and empty boxes of cold pills.

Dunbar firefighter Mike Hoffman knew what that meant. Another
methamphetamine lab had burned down. In an interview a few weeks later, he
said he was not surprised.

"Nowadays, just about every house fire you tend to wonder, 'Is this a meth
lab?'" the 37-year-old Poca resident said. "Seems like the majority of them
are."

In Kanawha County, the meth lab capital of West Virginia, firefighters like
Hoffman have become meth lab scouts for the police. So have county workers,
garbage men and concerned neighbors.

Police searching for meth labs in Kanawha County are receiving tips from
the general public on a scale never seen before by drug investigators. When
Kanawha County Sheriff Mike Rutherford opened a meth lab tip line last
week, 67 people called 357-4693 and left a message. On Thursday, police say
they uncovered a meth lab using information gathered from the tip line.

Average citizens are helping because they have seen over the last few years
that meth labs can explode and expose neighbors to potentially harmful
chemical fumes.

"I think there's a lot of people who are concerned about their
neighborhoods," said Chief Deputy Johnny Rutherford of the Sheriff's
Department.

Methamphetamine is an illegal stimulant that contains the same chemical
compound as ephedra, the herb used for years to make convenience store pep
pills. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned ephedra in 2003.

People have been abusing methamphetamine for more than 60 years. At first,
people bought it in over-the-counter pep pills and inhalers. Then, as the
government limited the sale of meth in the 1960s and '70s, criminal groups,
particularly motorcycle gangs, began setting up labs to synthesize the drugs.

Meth cooks have been in West Virginia for decades. But before the
mid-1990s, meth labs were few and far between because few people knew how
to make the drug.

When people began posting recipes for the drug on the Internet in the
mid-1990s, the entire market for the drug changed, said Jeff Wallenstrom,
agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's Charleston office.

Users saw that they could make meth using Sudafed, matchbook strike pads
and other ingredients available at their local grocery store and began to
try to cook it themselves, he said.

The state's first rash of mom-and-pop meth labs was reported in Wood County
in 1998. Then, the cooks spread.

Now, Kanawha and Putnam counties are where most of the state's meth labs
are found, Wallenstrom said.

Kanawha County is the state's meth lab capital. Between October 2003 and
September 2004, 60 percent of the 222 meth lab cleanups in West Virginia
were in Kanawha County, according to the DEA. In the past five months,
Kanawha County has accounted for 65 percent of state's 129 meth lab cleanups.

Police in Kanawha County credit tipsters for helping them uncover many of
these labs.

They point to people like a Kanawha County woman, who called police last
March and said her sister was going home to destroy or move her meth lab,
according to court records.

When the Kanawha County sheriff's deputies showed up at the sister's house,
they said they found the remnants of a large meth-making operation,
including a 55-gallon drum filled with matchbooks with their striker pads
ripped off.

The sister's call was just the tip of the iceberg. By summer, Sgt. Eric
Drennan was buried by meth lab leads.

"I had so many tips I couldn't keep up with them," he said.

Police say the tips have continued to roll in.

In the past few weeks, for example, one woman was arrested for operating a
clandestine drug lab after her mother found a jar full of blue liquid in
her microwave and took it to the Nitro Police Department.

Another man was arrested and accused of making meth when Charleston police
knocked on his door soon after his lab exploded in his face, according to
police. The police say they showed up at his door on Feb. 3 after getting
an anonymous tip that he was cooking methamphetamine.

Even county workers are starting to stumble across meth labs.

On Feb. 25, process servers Harry Carpenter and Tony Keller found one while
evicting a man and woman from their St. Albans trailer, according to court
documents.

Carpenter, the head of the county's legal process division, said he became
suspicious when he saw a bulletproof vest on the kitchen counter and empty
packs of generic Sudafed on the floor.

In the coming months, police hope to get even more people to help them spot
meth labs. The Kanawha County sheriff's office is training process servers
and other county workers on how to spot a meth lab.

They plan to train private-sector workers, as well. Their first students
will be road workers from West Virginia Paving Inc. They occasionally ran
across meth dumps on the side of the road, said Sheriff Rutherford.

"They want their people to know what to look for," Rutherford said. "And
they want to keep them safe."