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."
......fyi....
Does the supply of methamphetamine really create its own demand?
I suspect that there is something about addicts themselves that attracts them to their addiction of choice, and not the mere availability of the drug. (Even if a meth superlab were to open up next door, most people would not be tempted to use the stuff.) If that is so, then the problem is not likely to be solve by arresting the suppliers.
It got VERY close to home a few years ago when I lived in Pismo Beach. I noticed a newspaper story about a local man who was arrested in San Diego for buying "precursors to methamphetamine manufacture." It turned out the address was the house just behind mine.
The perp had enough volatiles stored there to level an entire city block if they'd exploded, police said. It turned out the guy was a former Cal Poly, SLO chemistry major. I think he's still doing time, but he's one of the few that was caught. Every week or two we'd read about raids on farms around Santa Maria, Paso Robles, etc. where the Mopes were arrested but never the masterminds.
Ain't it grand.
"But you'll excuse American gangs from doing so?"
When did I say that? If an epidemic of ADDED crime occurs, and it is caused by illegal alien criminals, it's worth noting.
Or do you think all of the criminals in the world should get a free pass into America, because there are already American criminals?
Herein lies the $64,000 question. With laws on the books everywhere restricting tweaker / cookers from procuring the necessary reagents, how are the super labs obtaining hundreds of pounds of chemicals for their production runs?
If they aren't themselves being smuggled in, some suits in the chemical & pharmaceutical industries have some 'splaining to do.
They're just as guilty as are the Mexican gangs.
Fresno ping!
Now you are an expert on parenting. Kids will try anything - even your perfectly raised kids. The problem with meth is they can get hooked on one try. It is insidious stuff, not to be blown off with a damnable statement like the meth users will die etc...I'm no perfect parent but I also have yet to find one. Yet my kid was trapped into this stuff by scum in a government school. Don't drop your trip on bad parenting or unhappy kids. It can happen in your own family and you not know it until it is too late. By the way, the first hit can kill. It is worse than heroin, much cheaper, and in your next door neighbor's house.
I think we should wall off Central California. Obviously, that is where the problem lies. Hmmm... might as well wall off Northern California too. I hear their main cash crop is weed. Oh, shucks. Southern California is no slouch when it comes to drugs. Let the walling begin. Mr Gorbachev, Put Up Those Walls!
General question: Is meth sometimes called "ice?" I watch Dog, (the bounty hunter) talking about "ice" ruining people's lives and wondered if this the same stuff.
I'm sure the bribes to up a lot higher than ranch foreman to allow this continue.
Two of the largest meth labs busts in US history have occured here in Georgia in the past 4 months. Both were found in otherwise law-abiding neighborhoods made up of families and children.
Both were operated by what the local papers called "Mexican Nationals". I suppose calling them "Undocumented Workers" or "Migrants" or "Immigrants" just didnt seem appropriate considering the circumstances, yet they couldn't manage to call them what they really were -- illegal aliens, here to cook up the Meth that Americans don't want to make.
Our soldiers should not be dying in Iraq. They should be protecting our borders and deporting illegals.
The addiction thing is a process. I agree that the first steps are a choice, the kind of thing that sneaks up on people. I consider myself lucky to have avoided drugs/addiction in my youth since so many people smarter than me fell to them...
Wonder why they run them in California instead of the northern states of Mexico. Surely it's easier to bribe Mexican officials, and the locals who object are much less likely to be armed to the teeth, or armed at all for that matter.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
