MORE METH MAKERS GETTING BURNED

Patients Running Up Huge Hospital Bills

MOBILE (AP)- Doctors and nurses are seeing the fallout from a surge in
methamphetamine use: People severely burned while making the drug.

Already this year the University of South Alabama Burn Center has treated
six patients who were scorched when highly volatile chemicals exploded or
caught fire in home meth laboratories, USA burn specialists said.

That is almost one meth patient a month, far more than were treated for
such injuries last year, said Rigg Curtis, a senior burn nurse at South
Alabama.

"That's how we usually find out what happened to them, because the police
show up," Curtis said.

Users generally inject or smoke meth, a powdery stimulant that is produced
by heating about a dozen chemicals. Government records show law enforcement
officials raided more than 7,400 meth labs in 2001, up from 6,400 two years
earlier.

Police and defense attorneys say fiery accidents are almost inevitable with
the labs because the people running them are not trained chemists and are
often handling volatile compounds to make the drug.

A severely burned meth patient can spend as long as three months in the
hospital, running up mostly unpaid bills of more than $100,000, said Kelly
Johnston, manager at the burn center. Treatment takes so long because so
many steps are involved in growing new skin and avoiding infection and scars.

Meth burn victims can be particularly difficult to treat, workers say,
because they frequently are in terrible health to begin with. Some are
addicts who have gone without food for days and have handled the dangerous
chemicals for months.

On top of that, they sometimes have two different kinds of burns: freeze or
chemical burns from anhydrous ammonia or other compounds used in the
brewing process, and heat burns from when the chemicals catch fire.

Most victims also have inhalation injuries from breathing the smoke or
toxic fumes, Curtis said.

While hospital burn units elsewhere, particularly in the Northwest, have
dealt with the plague of severely burned meth cookers for more than a
decade, the phenomenon is spreading across Alabama.

"The trend has finally moved South," Curtis said.