Pubdate: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 Source: Des Moines Register (IA) Section: Crime & Courts Copyright: 2003 The Des Moines Register. Contact: http://DesMoinesRegister.com/help/letter.html Website: http://desmoinesregister.com/index.html Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/123 Author: Lee Rood Register, Staff Writer Note: Part of a series on methamphetamine - see http://www.mapinc.org/source/Des+Moines+Register CALIFORNIA SCARRED BY METH COMBAT he three children slept outside the ramshackle desert home in a broken-down school bus. Mice fed off piles of unwashed dishes. Sheriff's deputies, some gagging as they entered the secluded dwelling, might never have made their discovery but for the 12-year-old whose life they saved. The child had a bullet lodged in her head. "The family tried to say the girl fell from a tree," remembered Sgt. Dave Williams, who stumbled upon the huge methamphetamine laboratory this summer. "We learned later she was actually shot by robbers who came to steal the meth cooking in the basement." Such are the everyday horrors in San Bernardino County, long the methamphetamine-production capital of the United States and, along with Mexico, the biggest exporter of meth to Iowa. In this drug-drenched area, meth-lab catastrophes are so frequent that stories of local "cookers" burned alive no longer surprise police and rescue workers. Increasingly common are tales of desperate addicts storing urine or mining toxic dirt at abandoned drug-lab sites, hoping to recycle the drug within. For years, 70 percent to 90 percent of the largest meth-production operations in the United States - the so-called superlabs that help feed meth-hungry states such as Iowa, Missouri and Arkansas - have been discovered in California. Ground zero for most of those labs has been San Bernardino, the nation's largest county. "It's just been a horrible, horrible problem, an incredible drain," said Shirley Lessiak, who works in the state's Department of Justice in nearby Los Angeles. "It's really hard to put into words." Lessiak and her multitude of partners in local, state and federal drug task forces would like to believe they've dealt crippling blows in the past year to their enemies, the Mexican drug cartels controlling 90 percent of California meth production. Armed with Black Hawk helicopters, infrared cameras, global positioning systems and other state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, state and federal drug agents seized 207 laboratories in San Bernardino County and neighboring Riverside County last year - confiscating more meth and toxic waste than any other area in the nation. Agents also broke up perhaps the biggest illicit pseudoephedrine operation in history. The ring of 36 people is accused of smuggling 40 million cold and allergy tablets from Canada into Southern California. The amount would have been enough to make some 3,300 pounds of meth. Yet authorities know through intelligence that southern and central California harbor more meth traffickers than they can track. An evolving list of suppliers ships the highly addictive drug along interstates and highways to established independent drug contacts in the Midwest, Southwest and, increasingly, the East Coast. "Once one trafficking route is discovered, a new route is identified," said Lessiak, who works in the Department of Justice's narcotics division. "We're sure trying, but there is no end to it in sight." Narcotics officers say the profits from the meth seized last year in San Bernardino and Riverside counties - estimated at $26.6 million - pale next to the area's total drug profits. However, the sum was 15 times greater than the annual budget of the two-county area's regional meth task force. Highly Profitable, Highly Hazardous State and federal narcotics agents are convinced that meth demand is growing nationally. "It's a homegrown drug," said Jose Martinez, an agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Los Angeles. Border controls make it harder to import drugs such as cocaine and heroin, so meth is growing in popularity, he said. San Bernardino County, a tapestry of desert, mountains, farmland and patches of suburbia, long has been fertile territory for meth production. Eighty percent of the county is unpopulated, making superlabs difficult to detect. As agents have begun to comb the swaths of desert hills, however, the most hazardous operations have moved into cities, suburbs and rural towns - often in poor, largely Hispanic neighborhoods. "The drug organizations make the money so good, the family can't turn them away," said Police Lt. Lee Hamblin, a longtime San Bernardino narcotics agent. Most meth labs across the country produce small amounts of the drug, but superlabs are capable of manufacturing 10 pounds or more at a time. Those found in California often produce several tons over a few months. In June 2000, agents discovered 400 pounds of meth - one of the largest caches in history - a half-hour from San Bernardino in Riverside County. The cleanup cost $60,000, a common price tag. For every pound of manufactured drug, 7 pounds of toxic sludge is left behind. Of roughly 2,000 lab sites found yearly in California, the average cleanup cost is $2,450. Remediation of surrounding buildings and the environment costs much more and can take years. Police say Southern California has so many contaminated lab sites that hazardous-waste cleanup is a growth industry. Homes containing longtime superlabs must be razed. Chemicals from large sites are so toxic, they have destroyed large trees, contaminated streams and killed surrounding vegetation. Stories abound among drug agents of pets and livestock who drank water runoff outside the labs, grew sick and died. Knowing the hazards, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department has turned to seizing ingredients used to make meth, such as pseudoephedrine tablets, iodine and red phosphorous. Seizures of superlabs dropped off slightly this year in San Bernardino and Riverside - in part, agents believe, because of their tactics. Canada Puts Controls on Ingredients Until this year, huge quantities of meth ingredients flowed freely into the United States from Canada. A growing number of Middle Eastern entrepreneurs purchased kegs of Canadian drug companies' cold and allergy tablets that were bound for California. But Canadian legislation this year clamped controls on ephedrine, pseudoephedrine and other ingredients. The new law frees Canadian authorities to investigate pharmaceutical companies suspected of selling ingredients to illegal drug organizations. Since January, seizures of meth tablets have dropped to about 9 million from roughly 22 million last year, according to the DEA and Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Three major pharmaceutical companies are under inves- tigation. "There's always room for improvement, but this definitely has had an impact," said Doug Culver, head of the Mounted Police's chemical diversion program. In California, drug organizations create whole businesses to extract ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from cold and allergy tablets. Late last month, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa co-sponsored national legislation aimed at preventing cartels from purchasing large quantities of pseudoephedrine in small blister packs intended for personal use. Tragic Toll No Longer Shocks Large-scale meth manufacturing has affected California's economy and stretched law enforcement. The human toll, Hamblin and other narcotics agents said, is frightful. On Sept. 9, a 31-year-old Riverside County mother was found guilty of second-degree murder and child endangerment after her infant son apparently ingested lethal doses of methamphetamine from her breast milk. After a 12-year-old was shot this summer in San Bernardino County, her parents waited 12 hours to report the wound - long enough for them to mask the smell of the meth lab beneath a false living room floor. By then, said Williams, the county law enforcement officer, the girl was nearly dead. Yet, in an area inundated with meth, the story of the young girl blinded for life by gun-toting meth bandits didn't make headlines. "It's sad but true," he said. [sidebar] SAN BERNARDINO AND RIVERSIDE COUNTIES Square Miles: 27,260 Labs and Dump Sites in 2002: 394 Superlabs in 2002: 22 Percentage of All Superlabs Nationally: 14 percent Tons Produced by the Superlabs: 17.4 Value of All Finished, Uncut Meth in the Labs: $154.4 million Arrests at Lab Sites: 685 Children Found at Lab Sites: 140 [sidebar] CALIFORNIA'S METH PROBLEM* Regular Labs: 1,290 Superlabs Discovered: 202 Annual Treatment Admissions: 47,703 Deaths: Statewide statistics were unavailable, but there were 155 in Los Angeles, 112 in San Diego and 45 in San Francisco in 2001 Top Five Markets: Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, and a group of central states that includes Iowa, Arkansas and Missouri *2001 statistics, the most recent statewide data available - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake