METH REIGNS AS TOP DRUG IN NORTHEAST ALABAMA

JACKSONVILLE - Methamphetamine occupies a place in the drug world of
Northeast Alabama where crack, Oxycontin and marijuana once staked claim.

Meth quickly became the drug of choice for this area, Mark Hopwood, of the
Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences, said.

Hopwood is the drug chemistry section head for the Jacksonville laboratory
of the DFS.

"It's meth everywhere you look," he said of drug cases worked though the
state agency in the Times' seven-county coverage area.

Hopwood said 75 percent of drug cases from Blount, Calhoun, Cherokee,
DeKalb, Etowah, Marshall and St. Clair counties that are investigated
through state labs involve methamphetamine.

"That means there's meth in there somewhere," he said, adding it is either
the sole drug or is in combination with other drugs.

"We get excited if we get crack, because you can work a crack case in no time."

Hopwood attributes part of meth's popularity to being a drug which has
components readily obtained and easily crafted into a final product.

"You can make it at home," he said. "You can buy everything you need, go
home and in a couple of hours be ready to go."

The remaining component in meth's rise to drug stardom, Hopwood said, is
"the fact you can make it for little or nothing."

A more potent form of methamphetamine - ice or crystal meth - is quickly
gaining a name for itself in this area.

"We are seeing more ice in all of our counties," Hopwood said. "It's just a
more potent form of meth, crystallizing like rock salt, and it's a more
pure form."

Hopwood traces the appearance of meth in Alabama along a southeastern
migration route dating back about six years and beginning on the West Coast.

"Out there," he said indicating West Coast states and southeast to Texas,
"they were getting hammered. We were seeing meth, as far as clandestine
labs, long before Georgia."

Judging from some of the stories drug agents hear from those cornered for
manufacturing meth, one might think too much product sampling was taking
place by the drug chefs.

One resident claimed a fire started while she was cooking a meal, though
agents with the Etowah County Drug and Major Crime Task Force found a meth
cooking operation at the residence.

"It ended up burning her legs really badly, and she went to the hospital,"
Task Force Commander Randall Johnson said. "She said she was cooking hot
dogs, and we ended up getting a meth lab."

Another man told Etowah drug agents the lab he was caught with amounted to
him having no choice in the matter because he was held at gunpoint and
forced to cook the batch.

This story came from a man who, along with another, ran from agents when
they arrived in a wooded area near where the lab was located.

"I guess the guys were geeked up on it all night," Johnson joked,
explaining one man wandered out of the woods about four hours after agents
began disassembling the lab.

The man told agents he also ran from them because he was forced to at gunpoint.

Two hours later, another man wandered from the woods. He told investigators
he'd been lost there all night.

People go to extremes to hide meth, as evidenced in a case in DeKalb County
a few years ago when agents found finished product inside a baby bottle.

These examples are indications of the human element agents deal with while
working in dangerous situations.

"You've got people who never set foot in a high school chemistry lab, and
they're getting something off the shelf and mixing various chemicals,"
Hopwood said. "You can't expect the average police officer or deputy to
respond to that."

It takes personnel certified in the break down of methamphetamine labs to
work such cases.

"You need a minimum of five, and it costs money to get certified people and
buy equipment."

Hopwood and one other employee in the Jacksonville office have the needed
certification.

"In our world, we have to borrow people and equipment from other agencies,"
he noted.

When working meth labs in Etowah County where Johnson is the lone agent
certified, Hopwood calls on the assistance of a couple of agents from the
Alabama Bureau of Investigation and Joey Hester, Cherokee County's chief
deputy over narcotics.

"We try to help each other out," Johnson agreed.

Hester is the only full-time drug agent for Cherokee County.

"We probably did close to 600 cases last year," Hester said, explaining
that includes all drug cases, of which "90 percent" involve meth.

Last year there were three people working full time on drug cases in
Cherokee County.

In Etowah County, the task force worked more than 300 drug cases the past
year, with about two thirds involving meth, Johnson said.

Hester and Johnson rely somewhat on informant tips about who buys the
products used to make meth.

Community drug classes where Hester tells people what common purchases
indicate someone is making meth have led to increased awareness and more of
the drug being confiscated.

Johnson said good cases have been made from people simply giving agents a
license plate number for the vehicle of someone they saw buying precursor
chemicals such as cold and sinus medicine, Coleman fuel, coffee filters and
aquarium tubing.

If items such as ephedrine products and Coleman fuel are purchased
together, "chances are they're cooking meth," Johnson said.

Hopwood explained because of the volatility of chemicals used in homemade
labs, a minimum of two officers with air packs are needed outside a
structure where agents work to segregate the drug's components. The outside
officers can quickly respond to help inside agents during emergency
situations that could arise.

The different components used in cooking meth mean the cases take more time
and work than ones involving crack and other drugs.

A recipe for meth that alters one ingredient leads to a different chemical
fingerprint, Hopwood said, which signifies lab personnel must spend more
time in analyzing and identifying the product.

"Recipes are changing every day," he said. "We see different ways of doing
things, and we're seeing things we've never seen before as far as the
chemicals being used and the methods of cooking."

In Etowah and Cherokee counties, most meth is found to be red phosphorous
and iodine based, though agents there occasionally find ammonia-based labs
more typically found in counties to the south.

"It's like they've drawn a line in the sand," Hopwood said, referring to
meth labs in counties north and south of Jacksonville. "It all gets back to
that word-of-mouth thing and who taught whom how to cook it."

Working meth cases taxes local and state agencies.

Johnson said one lab typically involves the better part of a day from the
time it is found, analyzed on site and the clean-up is completed.

Hopwood said a recent DFS analysis estimated it costs the state $95 to work
a single-item meth case.

"That's one little baggy," he said, explaining it was a conservative
estimate based on one hour's pay for an employee, equipment use at half the
fee private labs charge and the chemicals needed for analysis.

He said the estimate related to DeKalb County officials wanting to know the
cost of breaking down a meth lab.

"We pulled one of their cases at random," Hopwood said, adding it was
determined the cost of working one meth lab was $1,100.

It takes 17 minutes to run one sample of meth through the Jacksonville
lab's identification machine, which was bought last year for about $80,000
with federal grant money. The piece of equipment replaced a decade-old one.

"You can work a single-item crack case in 15 minutes, and that's getting it
out of the locker, sampling it, analyzing it and completing the report,"
Hopwood said.

A different machine is used to identify crack and other drugs, including
marijuana. It cost about $25,000 and also was bought last year with federal
grant money and replaced one that was of similar age to the out-dated
machine for identifying meth.

"Our biggest problem is money," Hopwood said.

The Jacksonville lab oversees a nine-county area, he said, and all of the
nine DFS labs in the state analyze drugs along with other evidence categories.

"We're a very small agency, but we're involved in almost everything that
goes through a courtroom," he said.