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Law enforcement braces for meth comeback

PHOENIX — Arizona police are preparing for what may be the largest rise in methamphethamine labs the Valley has seen as a result of Mexico banning the sales of pseudoephedrine.

Pseudoephedrine, the key ingredient in meth, can be found in cold medicines such as Sudafed. The last day that pseudoephedrine was legal to buy in bulk in Mexico was August 31, 2008. Since then, there has already been a steady rise in meth lab activity locally, police say.

Maricopa County Sheriff’s Sgt. Tim Lockwood, a special investigator for the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, says there were 26 lab raids so far this year. But the number is increasing.

“Mexico has been the source of the majority of methamphetamines in the United States, they have labs that produce more then 100 pounds a day,” says Maricopa County Sheriff’s Sgt. Don Sherrard, HIDTA supervisor.

With pseudoephedrine now illegal in Mexico, Mexican drug dealers and producers will have to come into border-states to purchase the ingredient or buy large quantities of meth.

“The demand is the same, but the supply has changed,” Sherrard says.

The U.S. has tried to regulate pseudoephedrine by making Sudafed an over the counter drug, according to the 2005 Combat Meth Effort Act (CMEA). Sudafed can be purchased in weights of 3.6 grams a visit or 9 grams a month. It takes 8,000 grams of pseudoephedrine to make one pound of meth.

Although the regulations are there, Lockwood says, it is not stopping the production of meth.

“People will go from store to store and buy the limit of Sudafed at each one,” he says, a practice he called “smurfing.”

Amy Rex, project director for the Arizona Meth Project, says, “There needs to be more information shared along with databases to help prevent these purchases.”

Methamphetamine is a highly toxic and addictive drug, made with acetone, Drano, pool acid and brake cleaner, along with other dangerous chemicals.

“You can have every ingredient, but without pseudoephedrine you can’t do it,” Sherrard says.

In 2007, a survey done by Roper for the Arizona Meth Project found that 1 in 6 young adults aged 18 to 24 years had tried meth. Among teens aged 12 to 17 years, the rate was 1 in 25.

Meth costs about $1,800 per pound to make and sells on the streets for about $17,000 to $21,000 per pound.

“It’s not a very difficult process to make meth. If you can follow instructions and read, you can do it,” Sherrard says.

What used to be considered a rural drug is now making its way into the city and there are warning signs if your community may have a Meth lab. Be aware of abnormal traffic to houses, especially at night, discoloration of pavement or soil from chemicals and odors resembling cat urine.

Sherrard said there are 6 to 7 pounds of solid and liquid waste after a batch of meth is produced, so be observant to toxic and chemical waste.

“This is a drug that cuts across all social classes. With the economy down meth may become a drug of choice,” Rex says.

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.

Confessions of an Arizona meth addict

[Editor's note: TZR correspondent Cyndy Hardy wanted to share her personal experiences in reporting this story to help put it into context. Some of the content includes foul language.]

VERDE VALLEY — Not content to write another standard piece on methamphetamine abuse, I walked into a Verde Valley bar and announced I wanted to dispel any meth myths propagated by users, law enforcement and the media.

I perched myself at an outdoor table and waited. I knew most of the faces that eyed me suspiciously but, I don’t know their private lives. They know I’m a journalist – and a fairly aggressive one, at that. I wasn’t sure what would happen.

Over the course of two weeks, I did this exercise several times. Each time, people sat to talk with varying degrees of honesty and credibility. All demanded anonymity – a death trap for journalistic credibility. But, this story can’t happen if sources think the law will trace it back to them.

One man – a quiet man who generally keeps to himself – sat next to me. “I’ll talk if you swear not to use my name,” he said.

Nick is a 43-year-old recovering meth addict who has used the drug for nearly 25 years. Nick’s teeth often clenched and his jaw ground from side to side as he spoke. His soft voice and chiseled features nearly escaped my observation because I was searching for dramatic signs of meth use, like open wounds on his face or arms.

Nick rolled a cigarette from a can of Bugler tobacco and allowed me to take several photographs – inexplicably unconcerned that his image would accompany the article in which he didn’t want his name exposed.

“You want the truth,” he said. “I’ll give it to you.” What follows is the truth as Nick sees it. His story, corroborated by others who spoke to me, seemed credible enough and representative of a side of meth the public rarely hears.

LIFE ON THE DARK SIDE

As a teen, cocaine was Nick’s drug of choice. He would sell anything to get it – CDs, cars, tools and stereos. “I once sold a $5,000 stereo for $1,000,” he said.

Like many in the drug culture, Nick used what he wanted and shared some with his friends and associates. Still, he had so much left over that he began selling the surplus. Dealing cocaine became Nick’s occupation.

But after literally blowing through $67,000 in six months, he switched from cocaine to methamphetamine. It was 1985 and Nick was 20 years old.

“Speed [a street name for meth] was cheaper than cocaine,” Nick said. He priced it at about $30 per gram 20 years ago compared to $80 to $100 per gram today.

Meth was a “cleaner” high, too. He could get by on four hours of sleep, wake up with no hangover and “be fine.” Meth gave him a productive high at first. “You can’t sit for a movie – you want to do things,” Nick says.

Meth can be ingested many ways including pills and injections. Nick preferred to smoke it.

A mechanic by trade, Nick first used about a quarter of a gram per day. “All I wanted was to tweak in the garage and play with nuts and bolts.” As he got older, he would use about nearly two grams per day, usually shared with one or two people.

The drug changed Nick. It changes the way the brain works, he said. “All I could think about was sex,” he says. By age 23, Nick’s mother forced him into rehab for the first time.

“I guess I wasn’t looking too good,” he says. Nick had entered the U.S. Army weighing 167 pounds. Within three years of using meth, he had dropped to 117 pounds.

Nick walked out of rehab after a few days and was soon using again. The California court system forced him into rehab again at age 27. He walked out again after a week.

Nick’s third and final stint in rehab to date was at age 30. Nick and his girlfriend, Beth, used meth together while living in California. Her father had committed suicide, and she drank large amounts of tequila to numb the pain. Nick said the alcohol contributed to frequent fights that ruined their relationship.

Nick was charged with internal possession of methamphetamine during one of the couple’s fights. The court sent him to rehab again. This time Nick stayed for the three-week duration.

“My lovely girlfriend met me at the door with a gram of meth,” Nick says. “There’s no saying no when somebody’s got it in their hand.”

Nick had had enough and tried to leave his past to start a new life. He took a $500 loan on a $10,000 tool box and bought a one-way train ticket to Flagstaff. He moved into a trailer park in the Verde Valley and went back to “wrenching.”

Someone, friend or family, eventually gave Beth Nick’s telephone number. Nick refused her calls for a long time, but eventually gave in and told her where he was. Beth said she had gotten into legal trouble in California and was running to Texas. All she wanted was to stop by and see him on her way through.

Once again, Beth showed up with a bag of meth. Once again, they fought. This time Nick spent two years in an Arizona prison for aggravated assault.

Today, tired of feeling nervous, jittery and “not being able to talk,” Nick says he wants to be clean. “I’m tired of the bullshit,” he says.

And he was clean for about six months. A stranger approached Nick two days before the interview and offered to share a “teener,” which is one-sixteenth of a gram – a fraction of the amount that originally hooked Nick. He indulged.

“The addiction is still there. I don’t ask for it; I don’t look for it; but I can’t say I wouldn’t do it if it was in my face. I can’t say ‘no,” he says, a tinge of remorse peeking through many layers of denial and defiance.

METH MYTH NO. 1: TREATMENT

Nick will not seek professional help to overcome his addiction. “Twelve thousand dollars
for fucking help?” he asks, saying that is what treatment costs.

Nick says he feels caught in a paradox where the only way he could afford treatment is to get arrested again. “They make it easy if you get busted.”

Local authorities generally disagreed, but when questioned without reference to Nick’s claims, their responses painted a confusing picture.

MATForce leads the war against meth in the Verde Valley through advocacy and education. It is an organization comprised of representatives from regional civic and public agencies in Yavapai County, and in 2006, a MATForce subcommittee found that “a substantial and rapidly expanding network of programs and facilities” exists in the Verde Valley to adequately meet current demands for treatment.

That means there are enough private places to help users kick the habit. But there are more and more meth users in rural central Arizona, the committee found.

“Treatment availability, waiting lists and funding always have been issues in rural Yavapai County,” says Brian Gray, deputy chief of Yavapai County’s adult probation department. “There are less than 30 residential treatment bed spaces shared by Yavapai and Mohave Counties for publicly funded clients.”

The MATForce report also found that community-based outpatient services provide the best chance of success, especially when children are part of the user’s big picture

But, getting help often means a person must be wealthy enough to afford treatment or destitute enough to qualify for state financial aid. Sedona City Councilman Rob Adams, who is a MATForce committee member, agrees many addicts are probably caught in the gap.

METH MYTH NO. 2: ADDICTION

Nick criticized the way media and law enforcement focus on the most dramatic images of meth abuse without telling the public how prolific the use really is. Most users can function fine if they use the drug in moderation, he said.

“It’s like anything: You take a couple of bad seeds out of hundreds of thousands using meth and the media is all over it,” he says.

A person cannot overdose on meth, he said. Too much of the drug causes the body to reject it and “nullifies” the effects, he says.

“I’ve known lots of people who have died from cocaine, but never meth,” Nick says. “The medical profession would probably never tell you that.”

In the worst cases, Nick said too much meth causes a person to lose eyesight for a short time while they are high. “Their eyes roll rapidly in their head – it’s not a pretty sight – but I’ve never seen it kill anybody,” he says.

Still, meth is a bigger social problem than most people realize, Nick says. Most of the public is not aware that they may know many people who are users. But, in Nick’s opinion, they are not all bad people.

“I never ripped anyone off. Maybe I was just a good drug addict,” he says sarcastically.

Those who use meth frequently – about one in 10, according to Nick – spiral out of control quickly. “It catches up to you. You can use for six months and be OK. Then your tolerance goes up and you need three times as much to get high,” he said.

And even though he preferred high-end buyers, Nick’s drug clientele crossed every imaginable social demographic. “Everybody uses,” he generalized. “I sold to people who made $100,000 per year and to people who made $1,000 per month.”

METH MYTH NO. 3: “STREET VALUE”

Nick says law enforcement over-inflates the value of meth taken off the streets to make a better impression on the public. “They’ll say a pound is worth $500,000.”

TZR found published accounts of meth seizures with varying reported street values. In February 2007, the Arizona Department of Public Safety reported 16 pounds of meth was seized with a street value of $120,000 – or $7,500 per pound. A report in the July 2002 issue of U.S. Customs Today priced meth at about $11,200 per pound in Phoenix and about $16,000 in Nogales. In 2006, federal officials seized 187 pounds of meth near Atlanta, Ga., worth at least $133,690 per pound, according to an Associated Press report.

There are about 453.6 grams in a pound. Using Nick’s highest estimate, a pound of meth would hypothetically retail for about $45,000. But the calculation omits basic drug dealer economics, Nick says.
“A pound is really worth about $16,000 to a dealer,” he says.

Meth is rarely sold by the gram; most people buy an ounce or half ounce, Nick says. The price a dealer gets depends on the transaction. Even the drug-dealer world has frequent-flyer miles.

A first-time meth buyer pays street value, he said, but regular clients can get a better deal. A significant amount of ‘product’ is given away – some to attract new clients, most to keep low-end users from snitching the dealer out to police.

Less affluent users may buy every week or every day – increasing the risk to both the buyer and the dealer, Nick says. It might seem a dealer could get a better price for the higher risk, but frequent buyers are usually the ones who get arrested, he says. “They know how to work it. You end up giving a lot of meth away just to stay out of trouble,” Nick says.

The law gets informants from the pool of low-end users, Nick says. Agencies put public funds in their hands to buy drugs. “About 90 percent of the drug busts come from these snitches,” he says. Informants often blackmail dealers for free drugs and the ones who cross the informants get busted.

Rich users buy larger quantities for personal consumption to reduce their risk of being caught. Those buyers can get a wholesale price because they are buying in bulk, which cuts the dealer’s profit margin.

Nick said he stuck to these “high class” clients and was never arrested for selling drugs. “First of all, the cops don’t look at them (rich clients). Second, they buy in bulk; and a guy who shows up every night is seven times the risk,” he says.

METH MYTH NO. 4: “WINNING THE WAR”

Whether local data contradicts Nick’s beliefs is hard to establish. Authorities did not provide, and TZR could not find, a common thread in the data to accurately portray meth trends in Arizona’s Verde Valley.

Essentially, there are three main fronts by which communities fight meth: education, enforcement and treatment. Agencies collect data with various criteria that can’t easily be compared side-by-side.

Clinic officials count the number of patient contacts and categorize substance abuse, but they do not specifically track methamphetamine.

At a Verde Valley Guidance Clinic, for example, patients treated for all drug addictions increased from 120 in 2000 to 320 in 2005. About 107 patients were treated for amphetamine abuse, which includes meth. Although data for 2006 and 2007 was not immediately available, a snap shot of clinic activity in February 2008 showed 288 of 1,106 patient contacts were meth-related.

TASC is an agency that monitors and drug-tests offenders in Yavapai County for several agencies, including Yavapai Drug Treatment Diversion Program, Yavapai County Adult Drug Court and Yavapai County Adult Probation.

In 2006, a leading screening center for Verde Valley clinics collected 7,071 samples from new clients, of which 381 tested positive for drugs or alcohol. In that group, 165 tested positive for amphetamines.

In 2007, the same sampling showed a higher ratio of meth use. About 301 samples tested positive for drugs, of which 160 samples contained amphetamines, according to the Treatment Assessment Screening Center.

Three years ago, meth was a serious problem in the Verde Valley, but it is improving, says Cottonwood City manager Doug Bartosh, a MATForce committee member and former Scottsdale police chief.

“We are seeing a decrease in the number of [meth-related] contacts. Some of that is due to diligent enforcement. Some is because of tighter borders,” Bartosh says.

Verde Valley communities passed psuedoephedrine ordinances after the state lawmakers failed to enact similar legislation. Bartosh says controlling psuedoephedrine at the drugstores works because most of it was being stolen from the shelves – not purchased.

“Since our communities enacted ordinances, we hardly ever see a lab anymore,” he says.

Sedona police Chief Joe Vernier says meth-related incidents in Sedona declined after the city enacted its psuedoephedrine ordinance in 2005. Since then, the state and the federal government have enacted stricter laws to curb meth production.

But Nick, who says he once cooked meth for a Mexican cartel, disputes their rosy outlook. He says putting psuedoephedrine behind the counter did little to curb meth production in Arizona.

“You can’t cook meth and expect to get it over the border,” Nick says. But its main ingredient is coming across the border abundantly in 50-gallon drums because drug-sniffing dogs can’t detect it, he says.

Bartosh disagrees. He says police dogs can be trained to detect nearly anything.

Even though authorities say they are winning the war on meth, several pointed out a disturbing fact: Meth, and other homemade drugs, aren’t going away soon. According to client surveys and other data from Verde Valley clinics, drug users are shifting to other drugs more readily available.

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com .

Anti-drug campaign targets meth users

PHOENIX — Danika was one of the lucky ones. She got out alive. Unfortunately, many never make it that far.

“I first tried meth when I was 14. Within a month I was using everyday. My addiction progressed really fast,” says Danika, a recovering methamphetamine addict who agreed to speak with TZR as long her last name was withheld.

Phoenix police Commander Chris Crockett says the average age of the first-time user is 14, and nearly 90 percent of those who try the drug for a first time eventually become addicted.

Methamphetamine is creeping into the lives of Arizona children and families at an alarming rate. It follows a tragic national trend that indicates 1 in 33 teenagers have tried the drug.
As a result, Valley officials and media have partnered in the fight to protect youth by launching the Crystal Darkness campaign.

The collaboration brings members of the law enforcement, government, media, education, and recovery industries to support the production of Crystal Darkness , a sobering 30-minute documentary on the dangers of methamphetamine, commonly known as meth.

The program targets youth and their families and exposes the devastating meth problem in the United States.

“We’ve done a good job of locking up the bad guys, but we still need to do a better job on the prevention side,” Crockett says.

The mini-documentary, which airs April 15, will reach residents across the state in unprecedented numbers. It will be broadcast simultaneously at 6:30 p.m. on nearly every network-affiliated and locally owned Arizona television station in a media blitz. It will also be transmitted on 20 radio stations.

The message is told through the compelling testimonies of young meth addicts and the families who have suffered alongside them. Recovering youth shed light on the depths of addiction with the hope that others will find strength in their stories.

On the night of the broadcast, there will be a panel of speakers at the Phoenix Convention Center and a telethon. The call center will operate from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. and will give callers direction on how to seek help for themselves or others.

There’s even a sports connection. Former Phoenix Suns owner Jerry Colangelo has been an active presence in the Crystal Darkness project. In January, he hosted a breakfast that raised $60,000. Now he plans to host a VIP luncheon the day the program airs.

The goal is to raise $150,000 to distribute three million educational booklets and flyers to students statewide in kindergarten through grade 12. The funds will also support other drug prevention programs.

The Crystal Darkness movement has quickly spread through the West. Participating states include California, Nevada, New Mexico and Oregon.

Nevada was the first to host the media blitz on Jan. 9, 2007. Although the results will be measured over time, officials say Nevada’s campaign created a blueprint for other states to build on.

Arizona has invited prevention specialists from around the country to observe how the campaign works so they can take the model back to their states.

Crockett says Arizona’s close proximity to Mexico is a contributing factor to the increased availability of meth. The drug is smuggled across the border and shipped to other Western states.

Meth is also produced in dangerous neighborhood home labs that pose an imminent fire threat and are extremely volatile. Officials have been able to curtail the availability of these makeshift laboratories by restricting the sale of items used in the production process, such as the cold medicine pseudoephedrine.

Meth addiction progresses quickly, causing severe moral regressions, aggression, paranoia and anxiety in its users.

The drug creates a feeling of euphoria when ingested by stimulating the central nervous system. Prolonged abuse can result in schizophrenia and permanent brain damage. Other side effects include a decreased appetite, acne and sores.

“My morals completely changed. I would lie, steal and sleep around. I was a completely different person,” Danika says.

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.