TURNING UP HEAT HASN'T STOPPED METH PRODUCERS

Treatment Centers See Increase In Drug Abuse Even While Police Report
Decline In Lab Busts

It can be smoked, snorted or shot. It's known on the streets as speed,
crank or crystal.

It's methamphetamine, the poor man's cocaine, and Las Vegas police say they
have been successful in cracking down on local meth production.

But local treatment centers say meth use is spiraling out of control in Las
Vegas, with some treatment programs reporting as many as 75 percent of
their clients are addicted to the drug.

"Crack went down, PCP went down, meth went up," said Joe Krieger, a drug
and alcohol counselor at the Las Vegas Indian Center Inc., referring to the
trend he has seen play out over the past five years. "It's cheaper and more
available. You get more bang for your buck."

For about $20, Krieger said, addicts can keep that bang for two to three
days straight. With crack, that kind of money will buy only enough of the
drug to stay high for a few hours.

But local meth lab busts are at a low. Las Vegas police report that they
have broken up 95 labs so far this year, compared with more than 100 by
this time last year and 257 for all of 2001. And the number of busts has
dropped each year since 1999, when police seized 362 labs.

Narcotics officer Sgt. Jeff Hammack said the numbers reflect the
department's success in battling methamphetamine producers.

In recent years, police officers have been tracking chemicals used to
produce meth, such as pseudoephedrine, and have trained motel security
guards, casino workers and Health Department employees on how to recognize
indicators of meth labs, he said.

"It took law enforcement a while to catch up with the meth industry,"
Hammack said. "The availability of chemicals that are used to produce meth
has been seriously affected by our efforts."

But some suspect the decrease in lab busts reflects more than just police
efficiency. They say meth producers are getting more creative and are
harder to track.

"The number of drug labs has gone up, but the size of them has gone down,"
said Steve Strawn, a consultant for H20 Environmental, a local company that
cleans up drug labs.

H20's jobs come from a combination of police referrals and property owners
who discover a meth lab in a unit after a tenant moves out. Strawn says H20
hasn't seen a drop in lab cleanups in recent years.

Kelly Bryant, a technician at Nevada Crime Cleaners, said his company
averages about two cleanups per month. But in recent years, he has seen
labs begin to pop up in a variety of places.

"We're doing everything from residences to weekly-monthly motels to storage
sheds," Bryant said, adding that many producers have set up in rural areas.
"They've moved out into the Pahrump area and out to the outback."

Meth labs traditionally have been found in trailers and cheap motel rooms,
but police now are finding them in residential neighborhoods and in
middle-class homes, Hammack said.

According to the Drug Enforcement Agency, police last year found at least
33 meth labs set up in the trunks of cars in Nevada.

Krieger said he hears the stories of more creative and brazen producers.
Boulder City police officers told him recently of one producer who was
"cold cooking a batch out of the back of his car in broad daylight in an
Albertson's parking lot." He said it's a technique commonly used to
chemically produce meth without heat.

Hammack insists that meth addicts aren't getting as much of the drug
locally as they once did. He says much of the meth in Southern Nevada comes
from "superlabs" in California and Mexico where producers can make up to 10
pounds in one cook.

Still, he admits that local producers have gotten craftier. He attributes
that, in part, to the Police Department's recent successes with busting
producers.

"Every time we arrest them, we educate them; they learn something new about
the way we operate," Hammack said. "Now you can fit everything you need to
produce meth into a gym bag."

Krieger said that, although he supports police efforts to shut down labs,
it's not an effective way to stop the problem.

"What they do is like the little boy who tried to plug the hole in the dike
with his finger," Krieger said. "You plug one hole and it comes out in
Arizona. You plug that hole and it comes out in Utah. You plug that hole
and it comes out in Beatty."

With increased mobility comes increased risk, experts say, and meth
producers have begun cutting corners on an already dangerous process to
produce the drug.

Modern-day meth labs often are no more than sloppy disarrays of Pyrex, hot
plates and household chemicals, Strawn said. That's a far cry from the labs
of old, which often depended on chemists and expensive equipment to produce
the drug.

"I call them coffee pot labs, because now everyone and their brother can
pretty much make drugs in their coffee pot," Strawn said.

Hammack said 10 percent to 15 percent of what he calls "Beavis and
Butt-head labs" explode. But those coffee pot labs, which can make only an
ounce or two at a time, are producing some of the purest meth around,
Hammack said.

"Their dope can be 80 to 90 percent pure," Hammack said, adding that the
meth coming out of the superlabs usually is only 20 to 40 percent pure.

But whether it is produced locally or out of state, pure or not, the
results are the same. Treatment facilities say they see no signs of
addiction being on the wane.

"How many of our patients are meth abusers?" asked Julie Valle of ABC
Therapy. "A lot. More than last year."