MOBILE METH LAB TREND ON THE RISE

Move Endangers Motorists, Officers

OAK GROVE, Ky. - Meth on wheels.

Driven from homes and motels, methamphetamine makers are increasingly
taking to America's roadways, mixing their bubbling brew in drug labs
inside tractor-trailers, rental trucks, cars -- even on motorcycles.

To police, the roving labs are toxic time bombs that shut down interstates,
injure police officers and send motorists to the hospital when they
explode. Meth cooks see them as a way to avoid detection. Trucking down the
highway allows them to disperse the rotten-egg smell the labs produce and
keep the lab waste out of their own homes.

In southern Indiana, a man was arrested recently for making meth on his
motorcycle. "Instead of beakers and Bunsen burners, they're using pop
bottles and Igloo coolers," said Brad Ellsworth, sheriff for Vanderburgh
County, Ind.

Part of the lure of the roaming meth lab is the ease of production and
cleanup that makes it easy to conceal, said Lt. William Sparks, spokesman
for the Oak Grove Police Department. "If they're moving," he said, "it's
easier to hide."

Earlier this year, police in Oak Grove said they arrested two men and two
women who were getting high in a motel room near the Tennessee state line
after cooking meth in the cab of a nearby tractor trailer.

"They were making the meth in the cab then taking it into the room to snort
it or smoke it," Sparks said. The trailer, minus the food usually hauled in
it, was found later at a truckstop, meth lab gear still inside, Sparks said.

Typically, truckers hauling the meth labs or chemicals used to make the
drug are hauling the illegal items along with legal cargo, said Cheyenne
Albro, director of the Pennyrile Narcotics Task Force in Hopkinsville.

Nationally, the number of labs found in vehicles increased from 869 in 1999
to 1,307 in 2001, and the number of vehicles found with chemicals or
equipment used to make meth increased from 30 in 1999 to 624 in 2001,
according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. But because there is no
mandatory reporting requirement, it is difficult to gauge the total number
of roving labs.

Last November, a container of stolen anhydrous ammonium, a farm fertilizer
often used to make meth, exploded in a car in Oak Grove on Interstate 24.

Traffic backed up for miles as all four lanes of interstate were closed for
nearly an hour, and one lane in each direction was shut down for another
three hours during clean-up, Detective Jody Lenave said.

"When they're moving it, with the fumes, you couldn't have people driving
through it," Lenave said. "They could be overcome also."

It's the volatile nature of the chemicals used to prepare drugs that makes
the labs so dangerous. Nationally, one of every five meth labs is
discovered because of an explosion, Albro said.

Of the 2,000 chemicals available to make the drug, at least half are
explosive, Albro said. He estimates in western Kentucky, up to 20 percent
of the meth labs are mobile.

Drug Enforcement Administration chief Asa Hutchinson, during a recent stop
in Lexington, said meth producers are being forced to come up with more
innovative ways to hide their labs because law enforcement agencies are
more aggressive in making arrests.

"That includes keeping them in the trunks of their cars, or in trucks or
vans so they are more mobile and less easy to track," Hutchinson said.

Other meth makers do not want to contaminate their own homes with
meth-making residue and fumes.

"The chemicals are so dangerous, it gets into the walls and the curtains,
and people have poisoned their own families just to make a buck -- if they
don't blow themselves up in the first place," said Sparks of the Oak Grove
police.

About 20 students and staff members were evacuated in April from Westwood
Elementary School in New Castle, Ind., after officers stopped a pickup
truck driven by a suspected meth maker.

Anhydrous ammonium was found in the back, and officers reported strong
ammonia fumes.

And in September in Utica, a small community in western Kentucky, 50 people
were evacuated from their homes in the middle of the night and seven people
hospitalized after anhydrous ammonium leaked into the air during a botched
attempt to steal a tank from a farm supply store.

Most meth cooks don't appear to know how to store the chemicals they steal
to make their drugs and they don't know how to use them, Sheriff Ellsworth
said. He added: "They've got the high school chemistry 101 class and think
they are chemists."