Pubdate: Thu, 27 Sep 2001
Source: Anchorage Daily News (AK)
Copyright: 2001 The Anchorage Daily News
Contact:  http://www.adn.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/18
Author: Jeff St. John

MOVING AGAINST METH

Alaska Law-Enforcement Officers Confront A Growing Market For Methamphetamine

Matt Lauchart lost everything to methamphetamine.

Last summer, when the 35-year-old carpenter tried his first line of meth, 
provided by a neighbor, he weighed a healthy 195 pounds. He was working 
regularly and lived in his Wasilla home with his wife and 13- year-old 
daughter.

Five months later, when he was arrested while preparing to cook up a batch 
of meth with two other users in his home, Lauchart weighed 145 pounds. His 
arms were covered with infected needle tracks. His wife and daughter had 
left him. His life had become a hellish cycle of weeks without sleep, 
stealing the ingredients to make meth, "cooking" the drug out of a fuming 
mix of allergy pills, Coleman fuel and Red Devil lye, and injecting the 
noxious, chemical-soaked end product into his veins.

Lauchart was eventually sentenced to 30 months in prison for attempting to 
manufacture methamphetamine. The night he was arrested, someone -- he 
suspects one of his meth-running partners -- burned his house to the ground.

Lauchart considers himself lucky. If he hadn't been arrested, he'd probably 
be dead by now, he said in a telephone interview from Wildwood Therapautic 
Community, a prison drug rehab program.

"I just want people to know it's an evil drug," Lauchart said. "That you 
can make it yourself makes it more evil."

Meth In Alaska

Methamphetamine -- also known as meth, speed, crank, crystal and ice -- is 
a central nervous system stimulant that causes alertness and elation 
followed by depression, paranoia and psychosis. It has a far longer-lasting 
high than cocaine and is even more damaging to users' minds and bodies, 
medical studies indicate.

Meth labs like the one Lauchart was operating can ignite deadly fires and 
leave behind a stew of toxic chemicals that can do untold environmental damage.

Meth's low cost -- it's known as "the poor man's cocaine" -- and its ease 
of manufacture have helped it spread across the Lower 48 over the past 
decade. Now it's spreading in Alaska.

"We've had a real upsurge of methamphetamine," said Lt. Al Storey, 
commander of the Alaska State Troopers' statewide drug enforcement unit.

Last weekend, Anchorage police arrested a man at his trailer in the 
Hillside On Gambell Motel and RV Park. Among items they found in his 
trailer: materials for cooking meth.

Storey said 50 meth labs were seized in Alaska in 2000, double the number 
seized in 1999. Arrests for possession and sale of meth have gone up as 
well, he said.

This increase has forced local, state and federal law-enforcement agencies 
in Alaska to develop new tactics. Until five years ago, Storey said, most 
of the small amounts of meth seized in Alaska came from outside the state.

Now officers are seeing a proliferation of meth labs across the state. 
Since first appearing in Anchorage and Fairbanks, labs have been discovered 
in Kenai, Nikiski, Kodiak, Juneau, Valdez and throughout Mat-Su.

It's easy to see why. Recipes are widely available over the Internet and by 
word-of-mouth. The ingredients are easily bought or stolen. An ounce of 
meth that costs $200 to manufacture has a street value of around $2,000.

But the dangers are great. Most meth cooks are also meth users. Strung-out 
addicts and dangerous chemicals make a deadly mix.

Bad Chemistry

Meth cooks use ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, common in over-the- counter 
cold and allergy pills, as a starting ingredient. Mixing the pills with 
iodine and red phosphorus, found in matchbook striker plates, creates 
methamphetamine. Organic solvents like Coleman fuel and bases like lye 
allow the cooks to extract the meth from solution.

Many of these chemicals are highly flammable or caustic on their own. 
Mixing them for a heat-producing chemical reaction can cause fires, 
explosions and releases of poison gas. Drug officers must wear full- body 
protective suits with face masks and breathing gear when entering labs. 
Cleaning up a house polluted by a meth lab can cost up to $10,000, Storey 
said, and sometimes houses are so polluted they must be demolished.

Because a meth lab can render a home unlivable, meth cooks often set up 
labs in rented motel rooms and apartments. Often, the resulting fires are 
the first clues to tracking down meth users.

A fire that started in a meth lab in a Nikiski hotel room in November 1999 
led to the arrest of the biggest group of meth cooks and users ever 
prosecuted in Alaska. Known as Operation Arctic Chef, the joint federal, 
state and local law-enforcement effort eventually implicated 27 people, 
some of whom are allegedly responsible for starting a half- dozen fires 
over a one-year period. One fire in a South Anchorage four-plex injured two 
people and caused $75,000 in damage, and another fire in a Midtown mobile 
home almost burned down a day care center next door.

Lt. Audie Halloway, head of the Anchorage Police Department's metro drug 
unit, said meth lab activity in Anchorage has dropped off over the past 
year. The unfortunate upshot, he said, is that meth cooks have moved from 
Anchorage to the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and the Kenai Peninsula, where 
there is less police pressure.

One way meth cooks avoid police is by setting up labs in trucks or vans. In 
Kenai, troopers seized three such mobile "box labs" last year and 
discovered a meth lab in a Nikiski home in July 2000.

The big loser in this relocation, however, seems to be Mat-Su.

"Meth has never been more prominent here than it is today," said Doug 
Sonerholm, a Wasilla police officer who served the last three years with 
the Alaska State Troopers' drug-enforcement task force.

Before 1999, he said, he had never busted a lab in Mat-Su. In 1999, three 
labs were seized, and in 2000, 13 were seized. This year, seven labs were 
seized in January alone.

One of the meth cooks Sonerholm arrested in January was Matt Lauchart.

Harm To Users

Cocaine is still the hard drug of choice in Alaska, but that in itself is a 
worry. Law-enforcement officials agree that almost all meth users start out 
as cocaine users and switch to meth because of its longer- lasting high.

Unfortunately, the physical effects of meth are worse than cocaine. 
Hard-core users go for days or weeks without sleep and experience paranoia, 
hallucinations and other intense psychotic symptoms that can persist long 
after they've stopped using meth. And recent medical studies indicate 
chronic meth use permanently impairs memory and coordination, and destroys 
the brain's transmitters of dopamine, a chemical that allows people to feel 
pleasure and well-being.

This may explain the high rate of relapse among meth addicts. Figures from 
the state Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse show that 172 people sought 
treatment for meth addiction in Alaska hospitals in 2000, up from 44 people 
in 1993. But studies done for the National Institute of Drug Abuse show 
that 93 percent of meth addicts who undergo traditional 28-day inpatient 
treatment programs return to the drug.

"Meth addiction is treatable," said Dr. Alex Stalcup, medical director in a 
Concord, Calif.-based 12-month outpatient treatment program for meth 
addicts. "But I don't think I've had a single patient who didn't go through 
two or three periods of relapse before they got sober."

Meth's utilitarian appeal -- a quarter-gram that costs $20 to $40 is enough 
to keep a beginning user high for days without food or sleep -- means that 
people can get hooked before they learn of the drug's dreadful long-term 
effects.

"The user profile is more of a mainstream person now," Sonerholm said. 
"Housewives who are trying to lose weight, teens looking for a cheap 
thrill, long-haul truckers and commercial fishermen who want to stay awake 
for long drives or fishing openings -- these are normal people."

People like Lauchart.

"I feel like I was recruited," Lauchart said of the neighbors who 
introduced him to meth. "They were nice to me at first," and they even 
offered him the drug for free. But soon enough, he said, "they turned me 
into an all-out worker," first helping to cook the drug, then shoplifting 
ingredients.

"I felt like a pawn," Lauchart said, "but by then it was too late. I was 
already addicted."

Now he fears meth is being spread in his community by the same kind of 
people who gave him his first taste of it.

"They were getting young people involved too," he said. "All of a sudden it 
seems to have spread like wildfire."

And, he said, "it seemed like everyone who touched it came back for more."

Harm To Others

The paranoia and psychosis methamphetamine abuse causes can put addicts' 
families and neighbors in danger. In June, troopers raided the Wasilla home 
of 25-year-old Jeremiah Sanders. Court documents indicate Sanders made 
threats to take his girlfriend and child hostage if his house was raided.

Besides a meth lab, troopers said, they found a video surveillance system, 
several high-powered rifles and two bulletproof vests in Sanders' house. 
(Sanders, in custody awaiting trial, declined to comment for this story.)

Meth can do terrible harm to users' families and children. One such 
situation came to light in Wasilla last November after a 13-year-old boy 
reported to state troopers that his parents, Fred and Amy Esguerra, were 
forcing him to help them make meth in their apartment. Trooper Sgt. Patrick 
Davis was one of the officers who arrested the couple.

"They had four children, three of whom were under the age of 5," Davis 
said. "When we came through the door, the 18-month old was sitting on 
Daddy's lap, and there was a syringe filled with what was believed to be 
meth oil right underneath the baby. They were actually cooking meth on the 
kitchen stove, and the whole family was breathing the fumes."

The children were taken by the state Division of Family and Youth Services 
and are living with out-of-state relatives, Davis said. (The Esguerras, who 
are in custody, declined to comment for this story.)

DFYS cannot release information about children in its care and does not 
track cases of meth-related child abuse and neglect. But Tim Fox, intake 
supervisor at the DFYS Mat-Su office in Palmer, said his office has been 
getting one to three reports per week of children being harmed or neglected 
in connection with methamphetamine.

"We're seeing an increase in kids exposed to meth labs," said Dr. Cathy 
Baldwin-Johnson, a Wasilla family physician who works with maltreated 
children. "I've had kids describe odors in the air making them feel dizzy 
and bothering their lungs and eyes. If you look at the list of ingredients 
and what's left over, it's scary."

Once meth has a foothold in a community, it's hard to get rid of. While 
Anchorage police have seen meth lab seizures drop, meth-related drug 
arrests have remained stable, indicating that meth made in Mat-Su and Kenai 
is still reaching Anchorage streets.

And as the market for meth grows, cooks become more sophisticated. A raid 
at the Wasilla home of Donald Wares in January turned up an active, 
commercial-size lab housed in a Ford van buried in his back yard. Court 
records indicate that the two people arrested with Lauchart were known to 
Wares, who said they had been selling meth from Wasilla to Homer.

Countermoves

Tony Grootens, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, came to Alaska 
last year after 13 years fighting drugs in parts of Missouri and Illinois. 
Meth hit those areas around 1992, he said, and brought a host of problems 
with it.

"Homicides skyrocketed, police-involved shootings skyrocketed, overdoses 
related to methamphetamine skyrocketed, suicides skyrocketed" in Missouri 
after meth hit, he said. "Everything went through the roof."

In 1997, his first year working in Illinois, about 20 meth labs were seized 
by law-enforcement officers. In 1999, 246 labs were seized.

Grootens, now the DEA's resident agent-in-charge in Alaska, is trying to 
prevent what happened in southern Illinois from happening here. His biggest 
handicap so far has been a lack of officers trained to handle meth labs. A 
weeklong training session in August helped alleviate this shortage by 
certifying 50 local, state and federal officers in the use of protective 
gear and chemical testing equipment.

Another advance is on the legal front. A bill sponsored by Rep. Tom Brice, 
D-Fairbanks, and passed into law by the Legislature in May 2000 made it a 
felony offense to possess certain chemicals used in meth labs and increased 
the penalty for manufacturing meth.

Before the law passed, most big meth cases in Alaska were federally 
prosecuted. The new law has allowed state prosecution of several cases, 
including one in Anchorage involving 10 defendants in Operation Arctic Chef.

The Division of Family and Youth Services in Anchorage has brought in 
police officers to teach caseworkers how to identify meth labs in people's 
homes. A similar education program for caseworkers and home health care 
workers took place this week in Wasilla. Retailers also can help catch meth 
cooks by reporting suspiciously large purchases or thefts of ingredients 
like cold pills and matchbooks.

But the most important step in fighting the spread of meth, Grootens said, 
is educating the community about its dangers. In August, he and other 
law-enforcement officials addressed the subject at a meeting of the Alaska 
Conference of Mayors. In response, the mayors present drafted a resolution 
supporting anti-meth education and urging legislators to increase criminal 
penalties for operating a meth lab where children are present.

"Hopefully we're ahead of the curve" on fighting meth, Grootens told the 
mayors. "I don't know that we are, and we won't know for some time."

Those who have already succumbed to meth addiction face a long and 
difficult recovery. Lauchart, for one, vows to stay clean for his family. 
Since enrolling in one of the few long-term treatment programs available to 
prisoners in Alaska, "I'm getting to be a lot healthier; I can think 
straight," he said.

Still, he knows the drug will be outside waiting for him.

"I never thought in my life I'd put a needle in my arm," he said. "My wife 
told me, Either you're going to die, go insane, go to jail or straighten up.' "

"I'm not dead or insane, but I'm in jail," he said. "I wish I had listened 
to her."
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