Posted on 04/05/2005 12:06:43 PM PDT by Travis McGee
FRESNO, Calif. A cross the West and Great Plains, small-town residents blame the arrival of meth abuse in their communities on the influx of local meth labs.
They are mistaken.
The reality is that 80 percent of meth comes from Mexican drug cartels operating here, in the rural expanses of Central and Southern California. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, only 20 percent of the supply is made by local users themselves.
A decade ago, the cartels in California pioneered a technique for industrial-scale production of meth that police dubbed the "superlab."
Built with commercial-grade lab equipment and fueled by hundreds of pounds of chemicals, a single superlab can churn out 100,000 or even 1 million doses of meth in a two-day production run. A typical "user" meth lab can make a maximum of 280 doses at a time.
The cartels' prodigious supply of methamphetamine, sent out across the Plains as far east as North Carolina, created a demand where none existed before. Many of the supply lines lead back to the nation's agricultural powerhouse: the Central Valley of California.
"This," said Carl M. Faller Jr., a Fresno federal prosecutor, "is Colombia for meth."
The influence of the superlabs is overlooked because although they account for the bulk of the drug's production, they represent only 4 percent of the labs. The vast majority of meth labs nationally -- 8,000 of the 8,300 seized in 2001 -- are home-user labs.
Home labs can become an obsessive outlet for users on the multiday runs without sleep known as "tweaking." The designs are primitive and vary widely. They consist of a jumble of over-the-counter pseudoephedrine, household lye and scraped-away matchbook covers. The reaction vessel usually is a jelly jar. The output might provide a cook $250 to $500 worth of meth to sell, with two weeks' worth left over for personal use.
Although tweaker labs are costly to clean up when they explode or spill, their role in supplying meth to U.S. users is minor. The main culprit is the superlab.
Bubbling glass globes
California superlabs achieve a level of sophistication, uniformity and efficiency seldom seen in tweaker labs.
The superlab's signature is a globe-shaped piece of glassware that drug agents call a "22." Designed for scientific research, the 22-liter reaction vessel could hold the contents of 11 two-liter soda bottles. The 22 sits in an aluminum cradle lined with heating coils. The cradle and globe together sell for $3,000 to $4,000.
Inside the glass ball, a blood-red brew of pseudoephedrine, red phosphorus and hydriodic acid reacts to form meth. The temperature dial is turned up to set the mixture bubbling, then down to cook. Orange hoses stretch like octopus arms from the neck of each 22 to a box filled with cat litter, which absorbs reaction gases.
Jerry Massetti, a chemist with the California Bureau of Forensic Services, recalled the first rumors of such monster labs in San Diego in the early 1990s.
"You'd wonder whether it was an exaggeration," Massetti said. "Then you'd hear similar stories of labs in Riverside, Orange County, Los Angeles."
Then the monster headed north, he said, "like a shadow passing over the landscape."
In the Central Valley, the highly standardized superlabs arrived en masse one week in July 1992, according to Massetti's notes and a journal article he wrote at the time. The labs, he wrote, "corroborated rumors about multiple tons of ephedrine being processed in this way."
The biggest Massetti ever saw came eight months later, in a Tulare County fruit-packing shed. The lab was so enormous that operators used a forklift to crush all the cans of Freon emptied during manufacturing. Twelve glass 22s were strung together, creating a capacity of 144 pounds of pure meth per batch. Cut to street purity, that could keep 21,000 serious addicts high for a week.
The labs are so standardized that the first time police found high-thread-count Martha Stewart sheets -- used to filter solid meth from surrounding liquids -- in one lab, identical sheets were discovered the next day in a lab 100 miles away. The smallest detail, down to the way in which hoses are duct-taped together, is replicated from one superlab to the next.
Police say the cookie-cutter approach reflects the guiding hand of Mexico-based drug cartels, which run the labs in California and distribute the finished product across the country.
Labor comes from migrant workers. California drug agents call these lab operators "mopes" -- police lingo for low-level henchmen.
The mopes don't use meth but hire themselves out in standing crews of four or five, available for a weekend's hard work cooking the drug. From the Central Valley, a typical crew of mopes could travel across Pacheco Pass through the Coast Range on a Friday night to the Bay Area. They'd pick up a stash of chemicals from a San Jose storage locker, then return to a small valley town such as Merced, where their employer would secure a secluded barn or farmhouse by bribing a ranch foreman.
After laying in a supply of groceries, the mopes would work for two days without sleep to monitor the delicate reaction. A misstep could cost $50,000. Some are told their families in Mexico will be killed if they speak to the police. At times, drug agents have come upon mopes in a lab padlocked from the outside.
At the end, a supervisor arrives to haul away the finished meth for delivery.
In Medford, Ore., police say 15 major dealers ferry the drugs regularly from the Central Valley. In Woodburn, Ore., police once seized 30 pounds of meth shipped directly by a top member of the Amezcua cartel in Southern California. The local dealers had customers up and down Interstate 5, from the Portland suburbs to the Grants Pass area of Southern Oregon.
Patron saint of traffickers
The Central Valley offers a perfect locale for the mopes to hide their work.
Blinding dust billows across county roads. Derelict outbuildings, rusting farm implements and 100-foot stacks of wooden pallets dot mile after mile.
Through long experience, the 20-member Fresno Methamphetamine Task Force has learned the routine of catching mopes in the act.
Team members cull junk mail at lab waste dumps for addresses. They watch abandoned farmhouses where the occasional car has been seen to come and go. On a stakeout, they'll ask permission to park in a rancher's yard by saying they're investigating the theft of farm implements.
If they're lucky, they'll sneak up on what Fresno Sgt. Don Mitchell calls a "real nice lab" -- 22s bubbling, surrounded by a smell some liken to rotting citrus.
Agents tell of moonlit "low crawls" with camouflage and automatic weapons through rows of grapevines; of the leg broken in a fall through a rotting barn roof; of mopes who ran, or "leg bailed," and ones who slowed down long enough to be deported.
Whether the mopes get caught or get away, they often leave behind relics of Jesus Malverde -- the mustachioed 19th-century bandit whom Mexican traffickers have made their patron saint. The relics offer prayers like this one, printed on a container of incense:
"You that dwell in heaven near God, hear the sufferings of this humble sinner.
"Oh Miraculous Malverde, Oh Malverde my Savior, grant me this favor and fill my heart with joy.
"Grant me good health, Lord, give me peace, give me comfort, and I will rejoice."
I told him he was a hostile SOB.
Damn! I thought it might have been something racey..
That is a long story. Suffice to say that the system worked and this innocent bystander who was in the wrong place at the wrong time was never charged with anything. No harm, no foul.
But you'll excuse American gangs from doing so?
Just trying to be clear. Are you in favor of the WOD, or just jumping on a story because of your strong feelings against illegal immigration? Honest question.
As a low residue solvent is my guess.
Like the War on Some Drugs isn't a real mess now?
The controlled substance laws make illicit drug manufacturing highly lucrative.
The controlled substance laws also empower goverrnment to grant medical monopolies, which is the exact reason we find ourselves in a medical cost crisis today.
I worked for a company that is the only legal manufacturer of bulk codeine, morphine, fentanyl, etc. during the eighties and nineties. During the mid-eighties to early nineties they multiplied their prices by 4 each year, for no reason other than that they are a monopoly.
Guess who paid that X4?
I plugged a particular term from this article into Google and got a white-paper-style instruction guide for assembly and operation of a superlab. I shouldn't be surprised, but I am.
I can't argue drug laws with you. Assume that I believe that drugs are bad and that the current laws should be enforced. However, painful experience has taught me that I'd rather go to Williamburg Brooklyn and argue bible verse with the Hasidim than drug laws with someone seeking descrimnalization.
Let me say this -- I have seen junkies up close. I've seen crack heads at their worst. I've seen folks in the midst of cocaine psychosis. And I've seen meth addicts. And in my opinion, meth addicts are the worst and most dangerous of the lot.
From a single term? I'm a little surprised.
Everything I have seen would confirm that, but the good news is they don't live very long once their teeth start to disintegrate from the battery acid they use to extract the pseudophedrine.
Anybody who would knowingly ingest anything manufactured with battery acid deserves whatever they get.
It's an addiction. The chemicals re-wire their brains in ways that it's not possible for someone on the outside to understand. During the crack days of the early 90s addicts (both male and female) would trade their children for the drug.
Alcohol is the true gateway drug.
Most substance abusers start off with alcohol, and most substance abusers will abuse alcohol when they cannot obtain their substance of abuse of choice.
Was the repeal of Prohibition a mistake?
It's an honest question.
The underlying question is, is it ultimately possible to protect people from themselves?
I don't think it is. Evidently you do.
An honest disagreement, but the terms should at least be accurately defined.
I understand that, but my statement that they get what they deserve stands.
Making excuses for addicts is enabling behavior.
Oh no you don't -- you're not sucking me into that swamp. I'd rather go on one of the Terri Schiavo or Evolution threads and take an opposing view... :)
My opinions, such as they are, I base on personal experience. I've lost many good friends to drugs and have a lot of friends who were never the same once they got through with re-hab.
A red x? No.
No doubt the FROBLs/SOILs/CALs will find the solution for us.
No, no, no -- I don't make excuses. I try to understand the thing.
This is one of the critical misunderstandings of our age --people confuse trying to understand a thing with making excuses for the thing.
Happens to me all the time.
Like earlier in this thread when Mr. McGee accused my of supporting meth manufacturing merely because I noted that these "superlabs" are hardly high-technology and just about anybody with two brain cells in a row and some glass-blowing expericence could set one up if they were so inclined.
You can understand addiction all you want, but the fact of the matter is that it boils down to human choice, the foundations of which are laid down long before the actual choice is made.
I have no expertise or knowledege of this subject, even though last week I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express..but one thing makes me question the premise of the article. If, as is stated, the Mexican cartels control 90+% of the meth production, it seems to me it would be far easier, cheaper, and safer ( from from law enforcement) to manufacture it in Mexico and smuggle the finished product into the US
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