Dying Before Our Eyes:

METHAMPHETAMINE, THE CRAZE THAT WON'T GO AWAY

Nobody has to look far to find signs of a methamphetamine epidemic in
San Diego County.

Retirees and young families see the evidence in their local city
parks where addicts waste away. Paramedics and emergency-room doctors
see the evidence in overdoses and meth-related accidents.

Special Report

Employers see its effects in unreliable workers, foster-care homes
see the drug's handiwork in displaced families and courts see its
evidence in a backlog of criminal cases.

In the last 20 years, methamphetamine has gnawed indiscriminately at
both the inner city and the heartland, infecting the affluent and
devastating the impoverished. It has contributed significantly to
crime rates, increased hospital costs, caused auto accidents and even
exploded houses in its risky production, generally making cities more
unsafe in many ways.

What It Is

Methamphetamine -- also called "speed," "crank" and "ice," among
other names -- is a central nervous system stimulant that is
swallowed, smoked or injected. Users of the drug find it increases
mental alertness, eliminates fatigue and reduces appetite.

The drug is derived from chemicals commonly found in decongestants
such as Sudafed, Actifed and Benadryl Allergy and Cold Relief, and
the ample supply of ingredients allows dealers to make it in a pure
form. Studies have shown that purer drugs last longer and create
greater cravings.

Making the craving even more pronounced is the depressive crash that
follows the eight-to 24-hour high. To counter the crash, which is
accompanied often by paranoia or fits of violence, users often turn
to more meth. With a supply that is relatively cheap and plentiful,
the cycle of highs and crashes often grows into addiction.

In the Beginning

While methamphetamine seemed to have come from nowhere just two
decades ago, the drug actually dates to the 1890s, when a Japanese
chemist first synthesized it. German pilots were given meth in World
War II to keep them alert, and even Adolf Hitler is said to have been
given the drug to treat depression. In the 1950s, it was prescribed
legally to treat conditions ranging from narcolepsy to obesity.
Illicit production of the drug began in the 1960s.

Meth became a favorite of some California motorcycle gangs in the
1970s, and when one of the drug's main ingredients was controlled by
the federal government, the bikers replaced it with ephedrine, which
had been used as an asthma medication.

The new recipe made the drug twice as potent, and its exhilarating
rush soon attracted new converts. The demand was met with a burst of
amateur labs in Southern California, and in the 1980s San Diego
County became known as the meth capital of North America.

"Between '83 and '87, there was so much meth in North County San
Diego that you couldn't give it away," said Oceanside resident Robert
Church, 39, who began using the drug as a teenager in Carlsbad. "I
remember having ounces of it, and you couldn't even sell it because
everybody had it."

A Hollow Promise

Church said the drug's stimulating effect hooked him immediately.

"I became instantly smart," he said about his first hit of meth. "I
had the energy to do whatever. Things that were mundane and boring
were all of a sudden exciting."

But the excitement exacted its toll. Church lost more than a decade
of his life chasing the drug. Homeless for stretches and in and out
of jail, he lost teeth as well as weight. He survived while people
close to him, including his pregnant girlfriend, died from the drug.

While Church found treatment and pulled himself out of his addiction,
more than 1 million people in the nation are believed to still use the drug.

Some can successfully hide their use - for a while, at least - but
many are revealed by their own bodies.

Toxins in their blood blotch their skin with red sores, "meth mouth"
leaves their teeth discolored or cracked and a nervous and paranoid
restlessness leaves them jittery. Meth addicts are called tweakers
because of the condition.

Meth is by no means the only local problem. Alcoholism, gambling
addiction and even illegal street-racing all are responsible for
their share of heartbreaking stories of ravished lives and ruined careers.

Methamphetamine, however, is in its own grim category.

Everybody Pays

In the tight grip of a highly addictive drug, addicts often place
their next hit of meth above their family, friends, jobs and own
safety. Unable to work and unable to shake their dependency, the
incessant demand for more meth sometimes is met through burglary,
prostitution and robbery.

An extraordinarily high number of crimes, including an increasing
number of murders, is related to meth use throughout the nation.

- - Seventy-five percent of all identity thefts in San Diego and other
counties throughout the state are related to meth abuse, San Diego
District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis has reported.

. Thirty-nine percent of all adults and 10 percent of juveniles
arrested for any reason in San Diego county last year tested positive for meth.

. In all, 7,370 people in the county were arrested for possessing or
selling meth in 2006, more than enough to fill all the beds at San
Diego Central Jail and all other county detention facilities combined.

In addition to their predilection to crime, meth abusers have flooded
treatment centers and emergency rooms.

. Meth was linked to 175 deaths in San Diego County last year and to
1,000 deaths in all since 2002.

. Meth has been linked to 134 deaths in Riverside County since June of 2005.

. Almost half of all admissions to treatment centers in San Diego
County were for meth in the past two years. Last year, 5,600
admissions were for meth treatment, 300 less than the number of
admissions for heroin, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol treatment
combined. In 2005, about 5,200 admissions were for meth treatment and
5,800 admissions were for all other substances.

. Nationwide, 56 percent of hospitals reported cost increases because
of meth-related patient care.

. Meth abusers are more likely to attempt suicide, be shot, stabbed,
injured in a fight with law enforcement and be involved in domestic
violence, a three-year study at a county trauma center has found.

In short, if there were no meth, our cities would be safer. You would
be less likely to be burglarized or to lose your identity or car to a
thief. There probably would be fewer people in prison, a shorter wait
in emergency rooms and fewer children in foster care.

Signs of Hope

Meth addiction is not a death sentence. Private and publicly funded
treatment centers have responded to the epidemic, and many former
users have beaten the drug and regained their health, their weight,
their families and their lives.

The number of meth-related deaths in the county decreased from 245 in
2005 to 174 in 2006. Since the 1996 formation of the county Meth
Strike Force - a collaboration of more than 70 local, state and
federal agencies - San Diego County is no longer is the meth capital
of the country.

In the wake of recent international cooperation and new restrictions
on precursors, the purity of meth and the availablity of the drug is
down, according to law enforcement officials.

In another encouraging trend, the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use
and Health showed a decrease in meth use between 2002 and 2005, the
most recent data available from the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy.

Stats and the Story

The survey showed the number of people who used meth at least once in
their lifetime decreasing from 12 million in 2002 to 10 million in
2005. The number of people who said they had used it in the past year
decreased from 1.5 million to about 1.3 million in the survey.

The same survey also showed that meth is far from the most-used
illicit drug in the nation. While 10 million Americans reported using
meth at least once in their life, the survey reported that 97.5
million had tried marijuana, 48.7 million had abused prescription
drugs, 33.7 million had tried hallucinogens, 33.7 million had snorted
cocaine, 22.7 million had used inhalants and 11.5 million had tried
ecstasy. (The survey also found that 7.9 million had tried crack
cocaine and 3.5 million had tried heroin.)

Rick Rawson, associate director of UCLA's integrated substance abuse
programs, said he believes the White House figures for meth use may be low.

"The national household survey is notoriously inaccurate for hard
drugs," Rawson said.

The survey is conducted by questioning households about drug use, and
people are not always forthcoming when answering such queries, Rawson said.

"In meth, there's a particular problem, because the drug makes you
paranoid," Rawson said about another reason why people may not answer
truthfully about their drug use.

Rawson said the survey's figures on meth use could be off by a factor
of four. If that were true, then 40 million Americans would have
tried meth at least once, placing it just below prescription-drug abuse.

A new study also suggests meth use in young adults is higher than
previously reported.

A survey published in the July issue of the journal Addiction and
funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the National
Institutes of Health, reported that 2.8 percent of adults ages 18 to
26 had used meth in the previous year. The survey was conducted in
2001 and 2002.

An earlier Monitoring the Future Survey conducted by the National
Institute on Drug Abuse reported only 1.4 percent of young adults had
used in the past year.

The low national figures for meth use also are not proportional to
the number of people seeking treatment for it in California.

One explanation for the discrepancy is simply that more people use
meth in California than in most other states, Rawson said.

Demand for Treatment

According to 2004 figures from the California Department of Drug and
Alcohol Programs, the number of people seeking treatment for meth
abuse in publicly funded centers is even greater than those seeking
treatment for alcoholism.

Meth already was a problem in 1995 for California's southwest, where
it accounted for about 25 percent of treatment admissions in San
Diego County and 28 percent of treatment admissions in Riverside
County. But heroin was a greater problem that year for those two
counties, where about 38 percent of all treatment admissions were for the drug.

One year later, meth had become the drug of choice in Riverside
County, where 33 percent of admissions were for the drug and 25
percent of admissions were for heroin. The meth problem continued to
grow in Riverside County until it accounted for 56 percent of all
treatment admissions in 2005.

Hostile Takeover

Meth overtook heroin as the illegal drug of choice in San Diego
County in 2001, when 33 percent of admissions were for its treatment,
compared to 22 percent for heroin and 19 for alcohol. By 2005, meth
accounted for 38 percent of admissions to treatment centers, compared
to 20 percent for heroin and 20 percent for alcohol.

The entire state saw a swift and dramatic shift in its drug of choice
after 2001, the last year centers treated more people for alcoholism
than any other substance. In 2001, meth was the drug of choice in
only the Central Valley and the southwest counties of San Diego,
Riverside, San Bernadino and Kern. Four years later, it was the
biggest problem in treatment centers in almost every county in the state.

In all, 60,000 people sought treatment for meth abuse in California
in 2004, the latest figures available, compared to 145,000
nationally. Second to California was Washington state, where 9,300
people sought treatment for meth.

The Law

Lawmakers also have fought the drug, with limited success, through
legislation aimed at keeping chemicals used to make meth away from dealers.

In the latest effort, authorities are tracking consumers' purchases
of medicines containing pseudoephedrine, ephedrine and
phenylpropanolamine, all used to make meth.

Under the 2006 Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act authored by U.S.
Sens. Jim Talent, R-Mo., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., products
containing those chemicals have been relocated behind the counter at
pharmacies, and consumers are required to show identification and
sign a logbook. The act was seen as a way to allow consumers to buy
the medicine they need while stopping illicit labs from buying the
products in bulk and using them to make meth.

Incentives

The law allows consumers to buy 9 grams a month and 3.6 grams in a
single day. The bill was modeled after a similar law in Oklahoma,
where meth-lab busts reportedly decreased by 80 percent after its passage.

Another bill proposed by Feinstein would grant $80 million to local
law enforcement specifically for meth and $20 million to the federal
Drug Enforcement Agency to reimburse local law enforcement for the
removal and disposal of hazardous waste created by meth labs.

In another approach to fighting the problem, California voters in
2000 passed Proposition 36, which required treatment rather than jail
time for nonviolent drug offenders. The California Society of
Addiction Medicine last year recommended increasing funding for the initiative.

State Assemblyman Paul Krekorian, D-Glendale, has proposed a bill, AB
1461, that would create a pilot project for confidential screening
for meth and other drugs in emergency rooms.

The Producers

The bill also would change a part of the state's insurance provision
that allows insurers to deny payment for treating someone under the
influence of a narcotic. Because of the clause, emergency-room
physicians often are reluctant to order toxicology screening,
according to Krekorian's office.

Legislators also are getting tougher on meth producers.

Feinstein has proposed a bill that would increase the penalty for
selling candy-flavored meth. Dealers caught with such meth would
automatically face the same penalty as those caught specifically
selling to anyone younger than 21, explained Feinstein's press
secretary Scott Gerber.

Existing law doubles -- and triples for repeat-offenders -- the
penalty for selling the drug to anyone younger than 21.

Minimum Time

In another step, the state Assembly in May passed AB 411, proposed by
Assemblymember Nicole Parra, D-Hanford, to establish a minimum
120-day jail term for anyone convicted of the sale of methamphetamine
and sentenced to probation.

Jail terms sometimes do more than just keep streets safe. Some
addicts say their time locked up was a wake-up call to get them off
drugs. Others take the first step because of an intervention from
family or friends.

Then there are those like Church, who said he quit not because of
jail, intervention or the shock of losing friends, but because the
drug no longer worked for him, and he one day realized he hated the
people in his life.

Now clean, Church is a recovery specialist with San Diego Juvenile
Drug Court and lives his life as an example that the drug with a high
potential for fatality can be beaten.

"I actually got clean relatively young," Church said. "Most of my
friends I grew up with are in prison or dead."

[sidebars]

(Editor's Note: Today, the North County Times begins a series of
stories examining the deadly epidemic of methamphetamine abuse in our
communities. It will spell out the costs to society and the successes
and failures of attempts to curb the drug's use and to heal its
victims. It will have all the statistics and numbers you can handle.
Most important, the series will tell you about the addicts themselves
- -- men and women who are dying before our eyes.)

HAVE A STORY TO TELL?

If methamphetamine has touched your life, the North County Times
wants to hear your story. Please e-mail or call with thoughts,
stories and anything you think we should know about how this drug has
affected your life -- and our community. E-mails should be sent to
methstories@nctimes.com. Calls should go to reporter Gary Warth at
(760) 740-5410.