New laws help crush meth labs

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By Thomas Geyer | Sunday, May 11, 2008 9:51 PM CDT | () comments

Two members of a Quad-City drug response team examine bottles and canisters after finding a small methamphetamine lab in Bettendorf, Iowa, Monday, July 28, 2003. (FILE PHOTO) Buy this Photo

The Quad-City area saw a virtual explosion of methamphetamine labs from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s.

The makeshift labs, using whatever tubing or glass containers were available, popped up in places from out-of-the-way fields and woods, to trailer parks, homes in quiet neighborhoods, apartment complexes and hotel rooms in busy urban areas. The labs also were literally explosive, because addicts put getting the drug above safety.

“Meth is a life-consuming drug,” said Chris Endress, director of the Quad-City Metropolitan Enforcement Group, or MEG. “When you start using meth, your entire life is consumed by using meth and getting more meth.”

But the number of meth labs and dump sites has gone done precipitously. Police point to Iowa and Illinois now mandating restrictions on the sale of pseudoephedrine, a common decongestant found in many over-the-counter cold medicines and a key ingredient to making meth, and a program to educate farmers on how to protect their anhydrous ammonia fertilizer.

Meth heyday

In 1999, methamphetamine labs and dump sites totaled 352 in Iowa, and 124 in Illinois, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Over the next five years, the number of labs and dump sites proliferated.

In 2004, Iowa dealt with 1,335 meth labs and dump sites, while Illinois authorities were fighting with 1,058. The scope of the problem took its toll on police.

“We had Division of Narcotics Enforcement agents that were traversing the entire state going from meth lab, to meth lab, to meth lab,” said special agent in charge James Saunders, spokesman for the Iowa State Patrol.

“We’d have agents in a Sioux City office drive to Burlington because it was so busy,” he said.

The ease of gathering the ingredients to cook methamphetamine was a big part of the huge number of labs, he said. Meth makers stole anhydrous ammonia from farms and bought bulk quantities of pseudoephedrine from drug, discount and grocery stores.

The yield potential of most of those methamphetamine labs was so small, Saunders said. “They generally yielded only enough meth for personal use. So we were spending roughly 80 to 85 percent of our time responding to less than 10 percent of the problem.”

Laws that went into effect in Iowa in 2005 and in Illinois in 2006 made getting meth-making ingredients more difficult. Endress also credits stiffer penalties for cooking and distributing methamphetamine and better outreach and community education programs to reduce the number of labs, Endress said.

By 2007, the number of labs and dump sites in Iowa fell to 138 and in Illinois to 342.

New ways to make meth

Still, meth labs pop up, he said, such as two related labs discovered this spring in Moline and Illinois City.

“That was the biggest lab we’d had in a while,” Endress said.

This time, instead of an anhydrous lab, red phosphorous was used. Endress said meth cookers constantly experiment with ingredients. Also being used was iodine tincture and lithium from batteries.

Red phosphorous is gotten from the striker plates on match boxes, he said.

“It takes a lot of work to get the red phosphorous, Endress said. “If you see someone buying 10 cases of matchbooks at a time, that’s a clue.”

The red phosphorous labs are just as dangerous and potentially deadly as the anhydrous labs, he added.

The chemical reaction of red phosphorous and iodine results in phosphine gas, Endress said, “which will kill you instantly. It’s an extremely bad inhalation hazard as well as an explosive hazard.”

Still addictive

Getting rid of the labs has not gotten rid of the addiction, said Steve Mange, executive director of the Illinois Meth Project.

“It is the most addictive, destructive substance you can think of,” Mange said.

The labs were burning and blowing up in many rural communities, he said. “It made all the sense in the world to get a handle on the labs and the chaos they were inflicting on communities.”

Still, teenagers are getting hooked, and more education is needed, Mange said.

It is the job of the Illinois Meth Project, an offshoot of the highly successful Montana Meth Project started by businessman and Montana rancher Thomas M. Siebel, to inform teens about the dangers of methamphetamine use. Begun in February, the Illinois Meth project targets teens ages 12-17.

“We’re trying to stop the supply of addicts, to keep young people from getting hooked in the first place,” Mange said.

Thomas Geyer can be contacted at (563) 383-2328 or tgeyer@qctimes.com.