Mexican labs set to pour meth into Ariz.

CULIACÁN, SINALOA — The meth lab by the seminary was exceptional, even by narco-trafficker standards.

Equipped with cylinders of acetone, ethanol and oxygen tanks, principal ingredients of meth production, the superlab was capable of producing at least 12 pounds of crystal methamphetamine — nearly 18,000 quarter-gram doses — a day, investigators estimate.

Its discovery surprised investigtors in Sinaloa, where a dose of crystal sells on the streets for 30 pesos, about $2.50.

But across the border, federal and state officials believe a much more lucrative market has opened its doors: Arizona.

Arizona has long been a distribution point for Mexican meth into the rest of the country. The state has had a law since Nov. 1 limiting the purchase of pseudoephedrine to 9 grams and placing medicines containing pseudoephedrine behind the counter, to crack down on local labs that use the ingredient to "cook" meth.

But few believe the restrictions will keep the drug out of Arizona, particularly when meth smuggling is growing along the border. Officials fear the state may see what happened when Oklahoma passed a pseudoephedrine crackdown: an increase in Mexican meth.

In Sinaloa, drug cartels have already begun adding meth to their illicit product line.

A good chunk of that could end up in Tucson, where meth sells for about $50 a gram, and where local police acknowledge that users will be looking for new ways to get the drug.

Detectives are anticipating stepped-up investigations of traffickers who move drugs from Mexico, said Capt. David Neri, who leads the Counter Narcotics Alliance.

Once meth gets to Tucson, it can be linked to more than half of local property crimes, including most fraud and identity-theft cases, police say.

Meth harms local kids, too. Arizona leads the nation in meth use by children between 12 and 17, according to the Arizona Attorney General's Office. And last year about 600 children in Pima County were taken from their homes and put in foster care because of their parents' meth addictions.

"The legislation isn't going to stop someone who is addicted to an illegal drug. What we were looking at is something that we have some control over," said Andrea Esquer, spokeswoman for Arizona's attorney general.

The United States and Canada began restricting pseudoephedrine shipments from sources including Hong Kong and the Czech Republic about five years ago, said Ramona Sanchez, spokeswoman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Phoenix office.

The restrictions have helped slash the number of so-called superlabs, which can produce 10 pounds of meth in one day. More primitive mom-and-pop operations churn out, at most, a few ounces. In 2001, 264 superlabs were seized in the United States. By 2004, the number dropped to 55.

"The large-scale methamphetamine production in the U.S. is declining. That is why you see a proliferation in Mexico and along our borders," Sanchez said.

In 2002, Oklahoma became the first state to restrict over-the-counter sales of pseudoephedrine. Twenty-three states have followed.

The result for Oklahoma has been fewer meth labs and dumping sites — 20 per month now compared with 120. But there has been a marked increase in the influx of meth from Mexico, said Mark Woodward, spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics.

That result was not unexpected. Nobody believed the restrictions on cold medicine would win the war on meth, he said.

"But we do not have to respond to meth labs now. It frees us up to start working larger drug investigations," he said.

Meanwhile, the demand for the drug elsewhere doesn't seem to have wavered, and large amounts of meth keep flowing across the border.

Seizures in Texas increased from 14 pounds in 1992 to 3,820 pounds in 2003, the Brownsville Herald reported last summer.

At the Arizona border with Sonora, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers seized 1,781 pounds of meth last year. Three years ago they seized only 320 pounds, said agency spokesman Brian Levin.

On Thanksgiving Day, customs inspectors in Douglas found 14 pounds stashed in the camper of a pickup truck coming in from Agua Prieta, Sonora, Levin said.

Anecdotally, U.S. Attorney Anne Mosher, who assigns drug cases in Tucson, has seen increases in raw poundage carried by individuals crossing into Arizona.

Mexico began restricting the movement of pseudoephedrine earlier this year, requiring shipments to move only by armored car equipped with GPS-tracking devices and escorted by police, according to the Associated Press.

But pseudoephedrine and other chemicals used to make meth are readily available in Mexico, said Anthony Coulson, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Tucson office.

Phosphorus and acetone are diverted from Asia and Germany to Mexico, where they ultimately are used by criminal organizations, he said.

And in Sinaloa, home to Mexico's most powerful drug lords, the cartels have already begun shifting gears to add meth to the traditional business of supplying marijuana and cocaine, he said.

In Culiacán, that's meant an increase in synthetic drugs like crystal meth, said Miguel Angel Campos Ortiz, the Sinaloa delegate for the Mexico Attorney General's Office.

It was his federal investigators who discovered the meth lab by the seminary in October, he said. It was the fourth well-equipped lab found this year.

"What we've been seeing is grams, but it's turning into mass production," he said.

Ismael Bojórquez, publisher of Rio Doce, a weekly newspaper in Culiacán, sees the evidence of that in the narco-basureros, narcotics garbage dumps where hundreds of blister packs from cold medicine containing pseudoephedrine are discarded.

Three weeks ago, a pile of the blister packs appeared on a street corner. "We weren't seeing these even three years ago," he said.

The existence of established smuggling corridors is a big advantage for the drug traffickers, and Mexico is poorly prepared for the battle ahead, said Comandante Apolo, head of the Sinaloa Special Forces Unit, who identified himself only by his undercover code name due to death threats from traffickers.

"Mexico's trying, I think, but they're still in their infancy to come up with a strong enforcement counterattack," said the DEA's Coulson. "They weren't accustomed to attacking this type of manufacturing."

The truth is that the vast majority of the meth was always coming from "superlabs" out west and in Mexico. Some of the little meth labs were producing ounces in a day but most were producing just a few grams in a day and most of what they were producing was being used by the people cooking it and those helping them out. Really though, getting rid of most of the little meth labs is a good thing for communities. These little labs were supplying a lot of the users who were the biggest problem to communities and were creating a lot of new hardcore addicts. These people cooking it and those helping them were getting free or close to free dope. Instead of having to pay $25 for a quarter gram, what it costs here, they could trade just a a couple of boxes of pseudoephedrine tablets for that. There were always several people involved. Some would be driving from store to store buying up or stealing pseudoephedrine. Others were out getting iodine, red phosphorous, and other supplies. They'd help out by doing things like sitting around scraping the red phosphorous off of matchbook strikepads, a labor intensive process. They'd be messing with this day in and day out cooking batch after batch of dope and doing huge quantities of it. They'd build up tolerances to it and several grams a day in some cases.

Usually, the guy cooking it was already a hardcore addict. The people helping him out were not always hardcore addicts though. They'd be friends or family getting sucked into this, and they'd be doing getting a lot of free dope they would have had to pay good money for but for the fact they were helping cook it. A lot of these people probably never would have done enough to become addicted had they not had a steady supply of free or dirt cheap dope. I think a lot of addicts were being created, and I know that easy access to so much cheap dope was causing a lot of the kinds of problems you only see from meth users who do lots of the stuff for days and days on end without sleeping. That's when they really go crazy. Sleep deprivation coupled with tweaking so hard they are climbing the walls makes these people lose their minds.

Our laws putting the pseudoephedrine behind pharmacy counters came into effect a few months ago. Things have changed dramatically around here. We used to get several new meth lab cases or possession of paraphernalia with intent to manufacture meth cases every month at the public defender office where I work. Now we hardly ever get any and the cases we do get are even more rinky-dink than the ones before where these guys are cooking even smaller batches and they aren't able to keep it going all the time because they are so limited in the amount of pseudoephedrine they used to get. Also, the number of crazy incidents involving meth users is dropping off. We used to get cases all the time where these guys had been acting out just crazy paranoid tweaker behavior. People would be chasing each other around with guns when they decided their buddy they'd been doing dope with for days on end without sleeping had all the sudden turned into a cop. We'd get cases where people would run up to a cop car to report that aliens were spawning in their yard killing people or that Salvadorians were chasing them with laser guns, all sorts of crazy crap. What was happening was these people were cooking dope or helping out in the cook and doing so much for so long without sleep that they'd start hallucinating and losing their minds. Now that they have to pay for it we're seeing a lot less of that. That's means less of these guys and less innocent people are getting hurt by all this craziness.

And of course there are a lot of other benefits. We were spending a fortune on these cases with all the investigations and prosecutions, prison sentences, and clean up of toxic waste, not to mention what we were spending on all the collateral damage to children caught up in all this mess. So many kids were becoming wards of the state and many had health and mental problems as result of living in meth lab homes and being around their seriously screwed up parents. There's less of that now. Oklahoma estimated that on an average meth lab bust was costing them well over $300,000 by the time they calculated in all the costs of the investigation, prosecution, prison, clean up costs, family services costs and so on. They were spending something like $10,000,000 a month on meth lab busts and have now reduced the number of meth labs by around 80% with their new laws. There are all sorts of benefits.

I'm not normally for new laws prohibiting things, but I'm really glad we've passed the laws putting the pseudoephedrine tablets pharmacy counters. I know it will be a somewhat of burden to some people with asthma or sinus problems who use the stuff all the time, but not that much of a burden. And it really isn't that big of a deal at all for the rest of us. My family, wife, kids and all, hardly use any pseudoephedrine. Cold medicine for young kids comes in liquid form and it isn't required to be kept behind pharmacy counters in most states. There are still liquid gel caps at just about every store if you need some in a pinch and other over the counter drugs that work just about as well. And we have to go to the pharmacy all the time anyway for medicine so it's no big deal to pick up pseudoephedrine tablets if we need to. And if we didn't need to go to the pharmacy for something else, we could always just pick some up at the WalMart pharmacy while we are their picking up groceries or other household supplies. It's just not that big of a deal. These are laws that cost almost nothing to implement and they actually save states a ton of money and reduce the problems cased by meth in a fairly substantial way. Laws that actually work, wow. Laws that actually save us money, amazing.

A quarter gram isn't generally a one dose amount, although some addicts with a high tolerance will do that much or more in one shot. I've heard of people doing a gram in one sitting. The quarter gram amount is a typical amount for a casual user to consume in a night of partying though.

As for purity, it varies considerably. Working as a public defender I see crime lab reports all the time that report the purity of meth seized from our clients. Sometimes it is as high as 99% pure, and there was a guy who went to trial a few weeks back who had been caught with a couple of pounds of crap that was only 12.5% pure. He's going to spend the rest of his life in prison. Purity around here probably averages in the the neighborhood of 65% though, give or take a few points. The "ice," meth that has gone through an additional process to "glass it up," making it look similar to shards of glass or broken pieces of translucent sugar candy, is generally a little stronger than standard meth, but not always. Ice is the kind preferred for smoking and it's the stuff most often law enforcement claims is 99% pure. That's hysterical nonsense though, as are many government claims about drugs. Ice and regular meth are really the same stuff. Crappy meth glassed up is still crappy meth and it can be cut after being converted to ice. It's easier for people to stick some white powder in with regular meth to cut it than it is for them to find something that looks like ice though, although many use Epsom salts. Some know how to break it down and reconstitute it with cut to so buyers don't get mad when they put a piece of Epsom salts in their pipe and smoke it and know right away it isn't meth.

Overall though, the meth people get today is the same as the stuff they used to get. When supply is up, purity tends to go up as people compete for business. If you got meth thirty years ago that was 99% pure though, it isn't any better or worse than meth people might get today that pure. The same goes for 12.5% meth. It may very well be though that since meth is a little more widely used than meth in the old days that police are finding many more samples to test and are seeing more that is more pure than before. Also, a lot more is being seized in large quantities. Large quantity seizures are almost always going to be more pure than little seizures of a gram or less, because usually most of the cutting is done at the retail sales level. The two pound load that was only 12.5% pure was an anomaly. Whoever bought that stuff either got really screwed or somebody stole a bunch of it and replaced it with cut after the bust (it happens). I did a plea on a case a couple of months ago where my client had close to five pounds and each bundle of it was between 95% and 99% pure. He also had nearly sixty pounds of coke and 570 Ocycontin tablets, but that's off topic. The big loads are generally pretty strong and the small user amounts seized are rarely over 70% pure or so, with most probably being in the 40% to 65% or so range. I've heard that what they used to seize twenty or thirty years ago tended to be in the 20% range. That may be bs or maybe that's what they found on the streets back then. Surely some of the truckers and bikers who did most of the meth back in those days were getting stuff that wasn't cut nearly so much.

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