THE MIGRATION OF METH

Reports Show Illicit Labs Spreading To The Northeast

With formulas for "poor man's cocaine" as easy to follow as a Betty Crocker
recipe, authorities fear there may be little to prevent methamphetamine
from making inroads in Connecticut and the rest of New England.

The compounds used to make meth are readily available in hardware stores
and pharmacies and the recipes for mixing them can be obtained over the
Internet.

"If you can make fudge brownies, you can make methamphetamine," said Mark
T. Peterson, a supervisory special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration in Buffalo, N.Y.

The DEA says thousands of illicit meth labs operate in rural sections of
the Southeast and Midwest, posing a daunting test for police there, but
they have been rare among the North Atlantic states. In New England, heroin
and cocaine seem the vices of choice among addicts and are connected with
the most crimes, the DEA says. Drug users here typically have found it
easier to buy dope or crack on the street than to cook up their own meth at
home.

But with the discovery of a meth lab in an upstate New York barbershop last
April, the delivery of chemicals used to make meth to the Enfield police
last month, and a police arrest Wednesday of an alleged meth operator in
Rhode Island, it's clear that some bootleggers have begun exploring the
Northeast.

Authorities in Richmond, R.I., near the Connecticut border, on Monday
turned up a small quantity of meth worth about $2,000 and large amounts of
the ingredients and equipment used to make it, said Rhode Island State
Police Capt. Brendan P. Douherty. The alleged operator of the lab, Loren
Masog Jr., 35, was arrested at a West Greenwich, R.I., motel early Wednesday.

In Connecticut, methamphetamine made in clandestine labs "is certainly not
as prevalent as cocaine, crack cocaine and heroin, but who knows what the
future holds?" said Sgt. Craig Larson with the state police narcotics task
force's north central field office. "Everything seems to move from the West
Coast to the East Coast. Maybe it's finally starting to arrive here."

It was last April, when police raided Sam's Barbershop in Jamestown, N.Y.,
a city near Buffalo. After making undercover marijuana buys, police
arrested shop owner Richard A. Zanetta. In addition to marijuana, police
found an array of potentially explosive chemicals used to make methamphetamine.

Zanetta apparently used a recipe he found in an underground drug cookbook
written under the penname Uncle Fester. Fester was a ghoulish member of
television's fictitious "Addams Family" who was forever mixing chemicals
that frequently blew up. The book is available online. Zanetta pleaded
guilty to making meth, said the federal prosecutor on the case, Thomas S.
Duszkiewicz.

Now the Connecticut state police are exploring how Aaron Chambers, a
University of Connecticut junior, acquired the materials needed to make
meth. He allegedly stored the ingredients at the Enfield home of his
girlfriend, Lisa Pennell. Her parents discovered the suspicious looking
chemicals and took them to the Enfield police Feb. 17. The lab apparently
operated out of East Hartford, police said.

Chambers and Pennell haven't been arrested and are cooperating with
investigators, but they face state and federal charges in connection with
the lab, Enfield Deputy Police Chief Raymond Bouchard said.

Chambers has taken courses in chemistry, something he has in common with
Steven Johnson, a 25-year-old North Stonington man arrested last spring in
connection with a lab police say he was running in a shack outside his
mother's house. Investigators seized dozens of compounds that were being
used to manufacture Ecstasy, an illegal designer drug similar to meth, said
Sgt. Jeffrey Hotsky of the narcotics task force's eastern office. Johnson's
case is pending in New London Superior Court.

Methamphetamine, a highly addictive central nervous system stimulant that
can be swallowed, injected, or smoked, is known on the street as speed,
ice, and crystal. The euphoria and energy boost associated with it can
quickly turn into paranoia and confusion that may lead to violent behavior.

Federal officials say that while criminal gangs from Mexico have long
trafficked in meth, the substance is easily made by amateurs. "Aside from
marijuana, methamphetamine is the most widely abused illegal drug that is
capable of being readily manufactured by the abuser," said the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration's operations chief, Joseph D. Keefe.

Connecticut police haven't described the chemicals that were turned over to
police in Enfield, but methamphetamines are commonly cooked up by using
acetone, battery acid, Coleman lantern fuel, and other substances to treat
colds, such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

Cooking these caustic mixtures creates toxic waste. They can also explode.
Meth lab fires nationwide have killed drug makers and their neighbors. In
January, one such fire killed two women in a central Denver house.

"You're talking about lye and camp fuel. It's an incredible hodgepodge of
not just very flammable things but poisonous stuff. When you find out what
goes into this stuff it's amazing that anyone puts it into [his or her]
body. It's nothing but industrial chemicals," said Clyde R. W. Garrigan, a
federal prosecutor in Concord, N.H.

Garrigan negotiated an agreement last August under which a man accused of
running a meth lab in Manchester, N.H., Michael S. Gonnion, pleaded guilty
to two federal charges and received a 37-month prison sentence. Gonnion was
living in a dormitory run by a local mental health agency and was making
the drug in his room, Garrigan said.

Many of the people who have been caught running meth labs in the Northeast
picked up the trade out west. Gonnion was being sought by police in a Los
Angeles suburb for making meth there when he was arrested in New Hampshire.
Rhode Island police said Masog, the alleged meth lab operator in Richmond,
also spent time in the west.

And Albert DeMoss, a Maine man who pleaded guilty last July to trafficking
in meth, "used his own skills that he honed out in Arizona" to make the
drug at a home garage, when he was arrested, said Stephen M. Borst, a
police detective in the coastal town of Wells, Maine.

But it's unclear how much of a threat meth labs pose to the Northeast,
where other drugs dominate.

"Clandestine laboratories in California continue to produce more
methamphetamine than any other region, but the smaller laboratories ... are
found in large numbers in the Midwest and growing numbers in the southeast
United States," the DEA's Keefe told Congress. He didn't mention the Northeast.

Still, George J. Connick, a supervisory special agent with the Maine Drug
Enforcement Agency, said the danger from meth labs may be increasing.
"They're actually not very common in Maine, but becoming more frequent.
They pretty much were sort of unheard of," before the last two years or so.