Pubdate: Sun, 26 Aug 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Rene Sanchez
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?136 (Methadone)

METH PRODUCTION REACHES 'EPIDEMIC' LEVEL ON COAST SPECIAL REPORT

LOS ANGELES - They stormed in after midnight, kicking down doors of 
homes and businesses around this county's desert fringe. More than 
100 federal agents and local detectives took part in the raids, and 
by the time the sun came up they had nabbed yet another gang of 
suspected methamphetamine traffickers.

The raids this week culminated an 18-month investigation dubbed 
"Operation Silent Thunder" that led to the arrest of nearly 300 
people on drug or weapons charges. Hundreds of firearms and 
explosives have been seized. More than a dozen large makeshift 
laboratories for manufacturing methamphetamine have been closed and 
quantities of the drug worth more than $2 million worth of the drug - 
usually sold on the street in small cheap quantities amounts of 
powder or rock - have been confiscated.

Law enforcement authorities acknowledge that the results are another 
sign of just how pervasive and sophisticated the illicit 
methamphetamine trade has become in many parts of the state. Once 
casually run, mostly by outlaw biker gangs, methamphetamine 
production is now a tightly managed big business, concentrated in 
California's hills and deserts and its vast, rural Central Valley.

So much methamphetamine is produced in California that federal 
officials now consider the state a "source nation" for the highly 
addictive drug, which is also known as speed, ice or crystal. Meth 
labs are flourishing more than ever in other western states such as 
Arizona, Nevada and Washington.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration statistics, about 
2,700 meth labs were discovered in California in 1999. The state with 
the second-highest total, Washington, had about 600. Arizona had 
nearly 400.

After this week's raids, authorities said they were confident that 
they had crushed the last remnants of an elaborate criminal 
enterprise. But they said there would be many more to contend with.

"We think we've put a huge dent in this organization," Lt. Ron 
Shreeves of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said after 
the raids. "But is someone else going to fill its shoes? Absolutely. 
There's too much money involved."

Federal narcotics officials say that use of the drug across the 
country has doubled in the past seven years. Much of the market, they 
say, is controlled by criminal groups based in Mexico that use 
California migrant workers to cook and transport the drug from shacks 
and trailers in the desert or barns in the farm fields of the state's 
agricultural midsection.

As the operations have become more organized - some meth labs operate 
every day, authorities say - production of the drug has greatly 
increased.

Ron Gravitt, the clandestine laboratory coordinator for the 
California Department of Justice, calls the state's methamphetamine 
problem "an epidemic." Law enforcement agencies in California are 
shutting down more than 2,000 meth labs each year, he said. And in 
some parts of the state, the tally has doubled or tripled over the 
past decade.

"Right now, we're just inundated with meth," Gravitt said.

California will spend $30 million this year to crack down on the 
methamphetamine trade, but just finding meth labs, some of which 
produce 50 pounds of the drug a week, is often difficult because of 
their remote locations because they are remote.

Jose Martinez, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration 
DEA's office in Los Angeles, said that those sparsely populated areas 
are ideal places for drug organizations to set up operations. 
"Because it's wide open space, a person can go out there and cook and 
it's not easy to detect," he said.

When law enforcement agents make a bust, they usually catch only 
front-line workers in the trade who know little about the larger 
criminal operation for which they work. Those workers, and the labs, 
are often quickly replaced.

Officials say the proliferation of meth labs is also creating serious 
environmental problems. The state is spending millions of dollars to 
clean up the toxic chemical waste dumped in water or spilled on soil 
during or after the often-crude manufacture of the drug.

The raids this week followed months of undercover investigation and 
targeted methamphetamine trafficking in the Antelope Valley on the 
eastern end of Los Angeles County, a high desert region that long has 
been a hub of the meth trade.

At a news conference this week, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca 
said the suspects are members of a drug ring that distributed 
methamphetamine primarily in the West. He also said the organization 
is linked to Mexican drug traffickers and white supremacist groups in 
Southern California.

Agents seized a half-million dollars in cash and more than 100 
high-powered weapons in the early morning raids, which took place at 
nearly two dozen homes and small businesses in the area. The arsenal 
included assault rifles with bayonets and a grenade launcher.

Authorities said that some suspects had tattoos of Nazi swastikas 
insignias and belong to a local gang called the "Untouchables."

"They were stockpiling a huge cache of weapons along with drugs," 
Shreeves said. "This was a sophisticated organization."

He said that investigators believe that nearly all of those arrested 
this week belonged to one of six drug distribution "cells" that are 
part of a large methamphetamine trafficking group. The other five 
cells, he said, also have been dismantled by the undercover operation.

"We think this was the last and most dangerous one," Shreeves said.

To avoid capture, some members of the alleged drug ring installed 
video surveillance equipment outside of their homes, spoke in code on 
telephones, and stayed in constant contact with each other about 
police activity in their neighborhood, authorities said.

"We knew we had to go after them all at once," Shreeves said. Most of 
the methamphetamine seized in the raids was pure, he said, and would 
have been quite addictive had it been sold on the street.

bybio Special correspondent Jeff Adler contributed to this report.
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