July 13, 2006 - Contra Costa Times (CA) Meth Metamorphosis 'Cranksters' Adapt Despite Crackdown On Home Labs By John Simerman

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Back when he started cooking crank five years ago, Ryan Spencer had little trouble shopping for ingredients.

He bought or stole pseudoephedrine pills by the boxful. He would hop from pharmacy to pharmacy, gathering enough of the cold and allergy medicine for a decent batch of methamphetamine. For iodine he would drop by the local feed store. Red phosphorous proved harder to find, so Spencer would soak matchbook strike pads in acetone and scrape it off.

That was until lawmakers and police clamped down on bulk sales of pseudoephedrine and a host of volatile chemicals used to make the potent stimulant known as "meth," "zip," "Tina" and "hillbilly crack."

Spencer, 27, who started smoking meth when he was 13, responded like any sensible crankster might. He stopped cooking and bought from dealers, selling some off to subsidize an $80 to $110 a day habit.

"The way it is now, it just seems they'll catch you (cooking)," said Spencer, who lives in Antioch and recently completed a 90-day treatment program. "There's very little payoff. Meth, especially in Antioch, is way easy to get."

State crime data suggest that meth cooks like Spencer have quit in droves. And Contra Costa County, once the Bay Area's notorious hotbed for meth labs, has seen the sharpest drop in lab seizures of any California county that recorded 15 or more lab busts in 2000, a Times analysis of the data shows.

The crackdown on precursor chemicals is one factor. But a bigger one, say authorities, may be the flood of cheap and stronger meth coming north from "superlabs" in the Central Valley and Mexico.

And from those labs comes "Ice," a purer, crystallized form that resembles shards of glass. Ice is most often smoked, a method that fuels worse meth addiction problems, meth researchers say.

"Ice has taken over across the whole country," said Jackie Long, special agent supervisor of the clandestine lab program at the state Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement.

"Part of the decrease in lab seizures is in the fact, why get caught making meth when you can wait for your Ice to come in from your dealer?"

The drop in lab activity locally means fewer contaminated homes and less dumping of toxic chemicals in streams and creeks. But meth remains wildly available, and if anything, the problem has only grown worse, say drug agents, prosecutors, treatment providers and health officials.

Now, 35 percent of people admitted to Contra Costa County-funded addiction treatment programs cite meth as their primary problem, up from 17 percent in 2000, county health data show. Meth is by far the leading drug for people who undergo treatment in the county, whether by choice or under court order.

"The only thing that's changed is where they're manufacturing it," said John George, special agent in charge of the San Francisco regional office for the state agency.

"We still have the meth problem, but at least somebody's neighbor doesn't have some big, volatile lab in the house next door. And we don't have all the dump sites, either."

Steep Drop

From Richmond to San Ramon to Bethel Island, police in the late 1990s would turn up scores of labs in motel rooms, storage sheds and homes. Much of the activity was centered in East Contra Costa County.

Neighbors would sometimes catch a whiff of vapor and call police. Now and then, a botched cooking job would ignite a house.

Back then, a Contra Costa County hazardous materials specialist Eric Jonsson counted on a meth lab call every other night.

"It was by far our most common incident response," said Jonsson. "Now it's fallen to background level."

The number of clandestine labs seized in California fell 86 percent from 2000 to 2005, according to the Western States Information Network, a national database.

Contra Costa saw a 92 percent decline during the same period, recording just six meth lab busts last year, according to state Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement data.

Police and prosecutors credit laws placing limits on the amount people can buy and retailers helping track sales of common chemicals used in making meth.

They also cite the 2001 shutdown of Alpha Chemical, a Concord company they say knowingly sold bulk red phosphorous and iodine to meth cooks across the region.

"I would say more than half of these small capacity labs were getting their chemicals from them," said Cmdr. Steve Ladeck of WestNET, a drug task force in West Contra Costa. "That was the clearinghouse grocery store for these small lab guys."

A federal judge last year convicted owners David and Carol Conkey of San Ramon on charges of drug conspiracy and possession and distribution of chemicals used to make meth.

David Conkey, 60, received a one-year state prison sentence and three years supervised release. Carol Conkey, 62, was sentenced to three years probation.

"The common guy who could go down to the store and buy everything a few years back can't do that anymore," said Cmdr. Norm Wielsch of the Contra Costa Narcotic Enforcement Team, or CNET, which works in central county.

"It's very difficult for Joe Crankster to go to Mexico and get five pounds of red phosphorous."

State narcotics agents also shut down a Hayward chemical supply company that supplied materials to larger meth lab operators, Ladeck said.

Skepticism

But Long, who oversees the state program, doubts that the drop means meth cooks have up and quit.

A shift in priorities after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the state budget crisis gutted the state agency's staff from 75 agents to just 15, he said.

Only in the new state budget have many of those positions been restored, he said. Regional task forces, such as CNET, also lost manpower as local agencies pull back under budget pressure.

"The simple fact is we have less people," he said.

One indication that meth labs continue to thrive in California, said Long, is that lab seizures fell by nearly 50 percent from 2004 to 2005, but the number of lab dump sites slid by only 11 percent.

"If we saw the decrease in the lab dumps as we did with the lab sites, I'd say yeah (it's dropping)," said Long. "But we're not."

Also, while seizures at the Mexican border increased by 54 percent, indicating a supply shift to Mexican cartels, the amount of meth seized in the state rose by 118 percent, said Long.

A strong federal push to halt bulk shipments of pseudoephedrine from Canada has helped, he said. But superlabs have found other sources for their chemicals, from Mexico and abroad.

The state limit on pseudoephedrine sales have had a limited impact, he said. It's common for meth cooks to make repeated trips to several pharmacies or send runners to horde pseudoephedrine in a tactic known as "smurfing."

A new federal law could make that more difficult by further tightening limits and requiring retailers to log the identity of those buying it.

California, long the nation's meth capital, ranked seventh last year in lab seizures, but tops in the number of big labs. The production capacity from seized California labs equaled that of the next seven states combined, according to statistics from the federal El Paso Intelligence Center.

But in Contra Costa County, the drop in lab sites is real, said Ladeck of WestNET. In the late 1990s, he said, they would respond several times a week to calls from local police who came across a lab. Now, it's once every few months.

"In Antioch it seemed like three times a week we'd go. They'd investigate a domestic violence report and there was a lab in the house. There'd be a car stop and a lab in the trunk," said Ladeck.

"We're just not getting those calls anymore."

Bigger, Stronger

With the shift from small, homespun labs to bigger operations, meth busts now tend to turn up more of the drug, said Jose Marin, a deputy district attorney who supervises Contra Costa County's drug prosecution team.

Prosecutions involving more than a half pound of meth have risen, he said. In the past three years, 142 pounds of meth were seized in those cases.

Contra Costa has become a major trans-shipment point between San Francisco, Oakland and the Sacramento area, Marin said.

"Based on quantities, I think this is as bad as I've ever seen it," said Marin.

The purity of the meth also has increased. According to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, tested drug samples show the average purity level of meth rose from 39 percent to 60 percent from 2001 to 2005.

"We have, over the past year, purchased Ice with a 92 to 95 percent purity," said Ladeck of WestNET. "That's rocket fuel."

With the shift in the supply chain has come another difference: Of the 89 major meth cases prosecuted in Contra Costa County since 2001, more than 70 percent of suspects were Hispanic.

"Ten years ago, you hardly ever saw Hispanics involved in that," said Marin. "Meth was more of a Caucasian-type crime."

Meth addiction, too, is up among Latinos, accounting for 12 percent of county-funded treatment clients, from six percent in 1999, health department figures show.

Rising Addiction Rates

"People will use what they can get their hands on, and meth is so cheap," said Alan Stein, executive director of New Connections, a social services agency with outpatient programs in Contra Costa.

The result: A growing portion of the treatment clients that county-funded agencies see are meth addicts.

Meth use now accounts for 60 percent of cases in Contra Costa County under Proposition 36, the state initiative requiring treatment instead of jail for first- and second-time nonviolent drug offenders.

In Solano County, 57 percent of Prop. 36 cases are related to meth. In Alameda County, which historically has seen fewer meth-related crimes, it's 28 percent, according to the state Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs.

Meth clients also tend to arrive "still pretty toxic," with psychosis, paranoia and behavioral problems that can complicate treatment, said Terri Whitney, executive director of Sunrise House, an alcohol and drug treatment center in Concord.

Smoking meth only adds to the problem, said one researcher.

"You see more severe rates of addiction, more rapid rates, more profound addiction. Everything is worse if you start smoking, and if you start injecting, everything is worse again," said Richard Rawson, associate director of the UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs.

Researchers have found a link between meth use and HIV infection. The drug, they say, can lead to more risky sexual behavior.

Though links between meth use and high crime rates are most often anecdotal, a study published this year by UCLA researchers, based on interviews with more than 600 California parolees, found a correlation to violent criminal behavior and recidivism.

"We're not sure if there's something about how the drug affects the brain, or the fact that the gangs involved in meth use are just the more violent groups of people," said Rawson.

Colby Quinn knows from experience. The 27-year-old Martinez man was dealing and using cocaine three years ago when he switched to meth, he said.

Until he entered a Prop. 36 program six months ago, he said he was in and out of jail for possession of drugs or stolen property.

Quinn said he also stole cars and burglarized houses, robbed drug dealers and assaulted people for money to survive and feed his addiction.

"Some of that I might do before," he said of beating up people, "but only if people owed me money."

On meth, Quinn heard voices and "just kind of slowly lost everything," he said. "I don't think I was ever off of meth. That's just the way it is. If you fall asleep, you wake up and you get high."

A few times, he helped out meth cooks. Quinn said he doubts reports of a severe drop in meth labs, noting that many labs are mobile and can be hidden in portable coolers like those used for camping.

Just as cooks switched to pseudoephedrine when lawmakers cracked down on ephedrine, they are coming up with new chemicals and tactics to stay ahead of the law, he said.

The crackdown on red phosphorous, experts say, has cooks changing to hyrdophosphorous acid.

"There's a million different ways to make it," said Quinn. "Law enforcement saying that is a pretty cocky statement. (The labs) are obviously out there. It's just they aren't finding them."

While drug treatment experts applaud changes to the law that have made communities safer from the perils of labs, they say federal drug policy has largely ignored prevention and treatment in its overriding push to stanch supply.

The federal Office of National Drug Control Policy last month issued its first-ever strategy for synthetic drugs such as meth. Though it calls for new ads and treatment research, the plan focuses heavily on working with Mexico and other countries to control the supply of chemicals and attack major traffickers.

"We really need good, solid prevention and more treatment, and that's really where we're getting stuck," said Luciano Colonna, executive director of the Harm Reduction Project, a Utah-based drug policy reform advocacy group.

"(They) come up with their new strategy -- we're going to join forces with Mexico -- like that's ever made a difference before."

A lack of education is one reason that meth addiction crosses socio-economic lines, said Rawson of UCLA.

He said he's heard from hundreds of users who said they were clueless to meth's dangers, treating it at first as a weight loss tool or a way to work longer.

Unlike heroin or cocaine, where men dominate in seeking treatment, women are almost as likely as men to end up in treatment for meth, he said.

"Obviously, labs are not a good thing to have around in your community. They poison policemen, they expose children. Your neighbor could blow up your house," said Rawson.

"But everybody I've talked to has said they don't think eliminating the labs is a particularly robust or meaningful way of getting rid of the meth problem."

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