Pubdate: Mon, 23 Jan 2006
Source: New York Sunday Times Magazine (NY)
Copyright: 2006 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/index.html
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/297
Author: Kate Zernike
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)

POTENT MEXICAN METH FLOODS IN AS STATES CURB DOMESTIC VARIETY

DES MOINES -- In the seven months since Iowa passed a law restricting 
the sale of cold medicines used to make methamphetamine, seizures of 
homemade methamphetamine laboratories have dropped to just 20 a month 
from 120. People once terrified about the neighbor's house blowing up 
now walk up to the state's drug policy director, Marvin Van Haaften, 
at his local Wal-Mart to thank him for making them safer.

But Mr. Van Haaften, like officials in other states with similar 
restrictions, is now worried about a new problem: the drop in 
home-cooked methamphetamine has been met by a new flood of crystal 
methamphetamine coming largely from Mexico.

Sometimes called ice, crystal methamphetamine is far purer, and 
therefore even more highly addictive, than powdered home-cooked 
methamphetamine, a change that health officials say has led to 
greater risk of overdose. And because crystal methamphetamine costs 
more, the police say thefts are increasing, as people who once cooked 
at home now have to buy it.

The University of Iowa Burn Center, which in 2004 spent $2.8 million 
treating people whose skin had been scorched off by the toxic 
chemicals used to make methamphetamine at home, says it now sees 
hardly any cases of that sort. Drug treatment centers, on the other 
hand, say they are treating just as many or more methamphetamine addicts.

And although child welfare officials say they are removing fewer 
children from homes where parents are cooking the drug, the number of 
children being removed from homes where parents are using it has more 
than made up the difference.

"It's killing us, this Mexican ice," said Mr. Van Haaften, a former 
sheriff. "I'm not sure we can control it as well as we can the meth 
labs in your community."

The influx of the more potent drug shows the fierce hold of 
methamphetamine, which has devastated many towns once far removed 
from violent crime or drugs. As Congress prepares to restrict the 
sale of pseudoephedrine, the cold medicine ingredient that is used to 
make methamphetamine, officials here and in other states that have 
recently imposed similar restrictions caution that they fall far 
short of a solution.

"You can't legislate away demand," said Betty Oldenkamp, secretary of 
human services in South Dakota, where the governor this month 
proposed tightening a law that last year restricted customers to two 
packs of pseudoephedrine per store. "The law enforcement aspects are 
tremendously important, but we also have to do something to address 
the demand."

Here, officials boast that their law restricting pseudoephedrine, 
which took effect in May, has been faster than any other state's in 
reducing methamphetamine laboratories. Still, when Mr. Van Haaften, 
director of the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy, surveyed 
the local police, 74 percent said that the law had not changed 
demand, and 61 percent said supply had remained steady or increased.

In a survey of treatment professionals, 92 percent said they had seen 
as many or more methamphetamine addicts; the state treated 6,000 in 
2005 and expects to treat more than 7,000 this year, based on current 
trends. Some health officials said abuse among women, typically the 
biggest users of methamphetamine, was rising particularly fast.

While seizures of powdered methamphetamine declined to 4,572 in 2005 
from 6,488 in 2001, seizures of crystal methamphetamine increased, to 
2,025 from one.

Federal drug agents tend to describe ice as methamphetamine that is 
at least 90 percent pure. Officials here say much of their crystal 
methamphetamine is less pure - "dirty ice," they call it. But either 
is far more potent than homemade powdered methamphetamine; a "good 
cook" yields a drug that is about 42 percent pure, but around 25 
percent is more common. And in the first four months after the law 
took effect here, average purity went to 80 percent from 47 percent.

Other states have seen the same.

"The Mexican drug cartels were right there to feed that demand," said 
Tom Cunningham, the drug task force coordinator for the district 
attorneys council for Oklahoma, the first state to put 
pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters, in 2004. "They have always 
supplied marijuana, cocaine, and heroin. When we took away the local 
meth lab, they simply added methamphetamine to the truck."

A methamphetamine cook could make an ounce for $50 on a stovetop or 
in a lab in a car; that same amount now costs $800 to $1,500 on the 
street, the police say.

"Our burglaries have just skyrocketed," said Jerry Furness, who 
represents Buchanan County, 150 miles northeast of Des Moines, on the 
Iowa drug task force. "The state asks how the decrease in meth labs 
has reduced danger to citizens, and it has, as far as potential 
explosions. But we've had a lot of burglaries where the occupants are 
home at the time, and that's probably more of a risk. So it's kind of 
evening out."

When the state surveyed the children in state protection in 
southeastern Iowa four months after the law took effect, it found 
that 49 percent were taken from parents who had been using 
methamphetamine, the same percentage as two years earlier, even as 
police said they were removing fewer children from homes with laboratories.

Some law enforcement officials say that addicts may find the crystal 
form more desirable. "If they don't have to mess with precursor 
chemicals, it's actually a bit easier on them, and safer," said Kevin 
Glaser, a drug task force supervisor for the state highway patrol in 
Missouri, which last year led the nation in methamphetamine lab seizures.

But the switch has also increased the risks. "People are overdosing; 
they're not expecting it to do this much," said Darcy Jensen, 
director of Prairie View Prevention Services in South Dakota. "They 
don't realize that that fourth of a gram they're used to using is 
double or triple in potency."

Federal officials say there are 1.4 million methamphetamine addicts 
in the United States, concentrated in the West, where the drug began 
to take hold in the late 1980's, and the Midwest and South, where it 
moved in the mid- and late 1990's.

Drug enforcement officials have always said that 80 percent of the 
nation's supply comes from so-called super labs, those able to make 
10 pounds or more. But in some counties here, officials say that all 
the methamphetamine came from mom-and-pop labs that made the drug by 
cooking pseudoephedrine with toxic farm and household chemicals.

Law enforcement focused on the laboratories because they were so 
destructive: the police found children who had drunk lye thinking it 
was water, or went without food as parents went through the long 
binge-and-sleep cycles of using. Laboratories in homes, motels, 
abandoned farm buildings or cars frequently exploded, or dumped their 
toxic chemicals into drains or soil. Small police departments spent 
much of their time attending to contaminated sites.

More than 30 states have restricted pseudoephedrine in some way. Nine 
have put it behind pharmacy counters, and Oregon now requires a 
prescription to obtain it.

Addicts and cookers have proved to be skilled at getting around the 
restrictions; as one state imposes a law, bordering states see an 
increase in laboratories. Oklahoma recently linked its pharmacies by 
a computer database to track sales after discovering that cooks were 
going county-to-county buying from several pharmacies a day.

Iowa's law passed unanimously. As in other states, officials say the 
number of laboratories had already begun to decline, most likely 
because cooks feared they would be caught because there was so much 
public attention on the problem.

The law resulted in a decline of at least 80 percent. Police found 
138 laboratories from June to December, down from 673 for the same 
period the year before. The state had hit a high of 1,500 lab busts 
in 2004, but with the law, had 731 for 2005, and expects just 257 
this year. Law enforcement says the costs of policing and cleaning up 
labs will drop to $528,000 next year from $2.6 million in 2004.

But here and in many of the states with recent pseudoephedrine 
restrictions, frustration with the stubborn rate of addiction has 
moved the discussion from enforcement to treatment and demand reduction.

That discussion, officials say, will be much tougher.

After listening to Mr. Van Haaften's report on the effects of the law 
this week, State Representative Clel Baudler, a former state trooper 
who now heads the public safety committee for the Iowa General 
Assembly, charged his committee to come back to the next meeting with 
strategies to reduce demand.

"My fear is, when I ask what they think we should do, they'll say 'I 
don't know,' " Mr. Baudler said in an interview afterward. "We've 
increased penalties, we've increased prison time, we're still not 
getting in front of it."

Officials say they never advertised the law as one that would reduce 
methamphetamine addiction. Still, they are surprised at how the drug 
has hung on.

"Things that are highly destructive, including diseases, tend to be 
self-limiting," said Arthur Schut, president of the Mid-Eastern 
Council on Chemical Abuse in Iowa City, and a member of the state's 
drug policy advisory council. "This has been devastating. It's 
remarkable how quickly people are damaged by it."

Mr. Van Haaften, too, knows that it was too much to hope that the law 
would reduce demand. Still, he says, "I had a little hope."

"I knew of the addictive nature, but in my heart, I believed people 
didn't want to deal with dealers," he said. "They have guns, it's 
dangerous, if you make your own it's safer. I hoped for a dip, but 
the availability did not allow that to happen."
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