NEW DRUG SEEPING INTO CALIFORNIA COMMUNITIES

SACRAMENTO -(AP)- The newest thing to hit the underground club scene in
California is a sweet, colorful little pill that can keep someone dancing
all night long.

But what may seem as harmless as candy is a new form of methamphetamine
called ya ba, a Thai name meaning "crazy drug." It is said to be
significantly more powerful -- and dangerous -- than the current club drug
of choice, Ecstasy.

Last month, federal agents in Sacramento made the largest bust of ya ba
smugglers since the drug first appeared in the United States three years
ago. The arrests of 10 people in Sacramento for allegedly smuggling 75,000
pills from Thailand and Laos came after U.S. Customs seized 46 shipments of
ya ba in Oakland, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Honolulu, which were
destined for Sacramento addresses.

So far, ya ba has appeared mainly in Southeast Asian communities around
California, but law enforcement's efforts have been hampered. "We're talking
about a pretty closed community, so it's pretty hard to get information
about that," said Daniel Lane, the lead U.S. Customs official in Sacramento.

Some drugs have started out in a niche market and gradually spread into the
mainstream community. Oxycontin, a prescription painkiller that has also
shown up on the underground club scene, first gained a following in poor,
rural areas, gaining the nickname "hillbilly heroin."

An activist in Sacramento's Southeast Asian community, who asked not to be
named, said she first started hearing about ya ba three or fours years ago.
Ya ba use has been "causing dysfunctional families," she said, in the Mien,
Hmong and Laotian communities, which have large concentrations in the
Sacramento area.

"We've reported it, but I think the federal authorities didn't think it was
that much of a problem," she said.

Will Glaspy, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, said
the drug has mostly remained in the Southeast Asian community. "Many of them
are just keeping it to themselves. They're not distributing it."

More recently, however, unidentified meth tablets have begun to show up at
raves. They could be ya ba pills, Glaspy said, although they were simply
categorized as methamphetamines.

"The scary thing about these is that they are adding color to them and
adding flavor, which could give the perception that these drugs are less
dangerous than they really are," he said.

A potent mix of methamphetamine and caffeine, ya ba allows its users to stay
awake for days. A meth high also brings hallucinogenic effects, during which
users sometimes believe they have bugs crawling under their skin and scratch
themselves violently to get them out. Other common side effects include
increased heart rate, dehydration, paranoia and depression.

Ya ba has become a vague label for any type of meth in pill form, although
it specifically refers to the brand produced in Southeast Asia. Meth more
commonly comes in powder form, allowing users to snort it through their
nostrils or inhale its fumes when heated.

In its pill form, ya ba is sometimes passed off at raves as Ecstasy, another
popular stimulant, Glaspy said. But the added danger with meth compared with
Ecstasy is that there is no set recipe for it, so its purity is often
questionable.

"One person who's manufacturing ya ba could come up with something that's a
little different than the next guy," Glaspy said.

Ya ba is produced mainly in Burma by the United Wa State Army, a group of
ethnic tribespeople allied with the country's ruling junta and known to be
one of the world's largest and most well-armed drug-dealing organizations,
law enforcement officials said.

The pills are then smuggled across the border into Thailand by the millions.
The drug has caused what officials have called a national epidemic, with the
Thai Health Ministry estimating that as much as 5 percent of the population,
or 3 million people, regularly use ya ba.

When the drug first began showing up in Thailand more than 30 years ago, it
was sold legally at gas stations, where truckers would pop a pill to stay
alert through long-distance drives. The government declared it illegal in
1970, but the drug has since managed to enter all segments of Thai society,
with reports of widespread drug use by manual laborers, college students and
even five-year-old schoolchildren.

The drug already has spread outside Southeast Asia, where ya ba has
reportedly shown up on the underground club scene throughout Europe and
Australia.

In the United States, ya ba has shown up only in California, which is
already the nation's main meth maker. Mexican criminal groups still dominate
the meth production, according to the DEA, although the Southeast Asian
variety has been gaining ground.

Sacramento was the scene of the first mainland seizure of ya ba in 1999,
when police found a few hundred pills during an investigation of a local
Southeast Asian gambling house. Before that, drug officials had only heard
of ya ba from seizures in Guam and Hawaii, said Sacramento Police Department
detective Thomas Little, who was involved in that investigation.

The arrests in Sacramento last month stemmed from four different
investigations, three involving attempts to mail boxes of ya ba into the
country and one involving an attempt to smuggle both opium and ya ba in a
shipment of furniture.

But smugglers have gotten much more creative than that, Lane said. He's seen
ya ba stuffed into CD cases, chopsticks and even dead insects.

The 10 arrested, who are originally from Laos, are awaiting trial.

Still, local authorities in Sacramento and Los Angeles said they haven't
encountered it much because the communities have so far been keeping it to
themselves.