LAW LEAVES QUESTIONS

What Exactly Constitutes A Meth Lab? Jurors Stumped

When police found methamphetamine, more than 150 cold pills, a glass
flask and a butane torch in Robert E. Dickerson's truck in December,
they declared that they had uncovered a budding drug lab.

That was news to Dickerson, a 48-year-old methamphetamine user from
Nitro who says he was just carrying around his drug
paraphernalia.

And thanks to the vagaries of the state's year-old meth lab law, even
the courts aren't sure whether Dickerson was carrying around a drug
factory. The problem: State law doesn't say what constitutes a meth
lab.

So at Dickerson's trial this week in Kanawha Circuit Court, jurors
were asked to decide for themselves. Prosecutors claimed that he
violated the law because he had enough cold pills to make meth, while
Dickerson's lawyer argued that the law didn't apply to his client
because he didn't have everything he needed to make the drug.

The debate left the 12-person jury split, forcing Judge Irene Berger
to declare a mistrial Thursday.

The hung jury gave Dickerson a temporary victory. But with Kanawha
County prosecutors vowing to take the case to trial again, the charge
is still hanging over his head.

Although Dickerson denied making methamphetamine, he repeatedly told
jurors Wednesday that he smoked the stimulant on a regular basis.

Dressed in a green suit, Dickerson said that he smoked meth about 20
minutes before Kanawha County sheriff's deputies began searching his
car on Dec. 29. "I was blasted," he said.

He said that most of the items the deputies found in his car, from the
butane torch to the digital scale to the glass flask he nicknamed
"grandpa," came out of the shaving bag he filled with the items he
needed to smoke meth.

The only things he refused to claim were the cold pills. He said they
belonged to a friend.

In many ways, those six boxes of cold pills and baggie containing 120
Sudafed tablets were the reason Dickerson was on trial for running a
meth lab.

Prosecutors said that by having those pills in his truck, Dickerson
ran afoul of state law that makes it illegal to assemble "any chemical
or equipment or combination thereof for the purpose of manufacturing
methamphetamine."

"Was he ready to begin making meth right away? No," Assistant
Prosecutor Ben Freeman said during Wednesday's closing arguments. "But
he had what he needed to do it in the future."

Dickerson's lawyer, public defender Gene Dickinson, said catching his
client with cold pills simply isn't enough to prove an attempt to make
meth. He suggested that a drug lab should have, at the least, the two
other necessary meth-making chemicals, iodine and red phosphorus.

"It would be ridiculous," Dickinson said, "if the Legislature had
meant merely getting the ingredients was a crime."