Trafficking in Tragedy

 LOOKINGGLASS — The pile of trash strewn about a dry creek bed in October hardly seemed to call for a hazardous materials cleanup crew and a police investigation.

Found by construction workers at the intersection of Coos Bay Wagon and Flournoy Valley roads near Lookingglass, the trash pile included canisters of fairly common household chemicals such as denatured alcohol, Red Devil lye, lighter fluid and camping fuel.

Other items aroused more suspicion, if only for the condition in which they were found: a grocery bag full of matchbooks missing their red phosphorous striking plates, two dozen used-up cold medicine packages, iodine-tinged coffee filters, and an empty Gatorade bottle stained white with residue.

Still, there wasn’t much to suggest the debris bore the slightest connection to an illicit drug trade that consumes hundreds of thousands of dollars in county law enforcement resources every year.

The discarded chemicals were used to make methamphetamine, police say. The narcotics detectives in charge of cleaning up the leftover lab admit it was hardly a sinister-looking crime scene.

What is remarkable, they said, is there are probably dozens of such sites lying undiscovered in other creek beds, forests and hillsides around Douglas County.

“Some of the things that make Douglas County so appealing ... the rural nature of the county, the remote areas of the county, are what are so appealing to the manufacturers and the dealers of meth,” said Douglas Interagency Narcotics Team Commander John Hanlin.

“It makes it easier to conduct drug trafficking business without having your neighbors looking down on you every minute of the day ... (and the cooks) don’t have to worry about someone smelling all the odors of the meth lab or seeing all the traffic.”

That doesn’t mean that meth production is confined to the rural wilds of the county, however.

On Nov. 24, a monthlong police investigation culminated in the seizure of a lab being run out of a trailer in southeast Roseburg. Seven people were arrested on methamphetamine charges after Terri Lynn Savas’ trailer was raided at 1932 S.E. Eddy St. DINT officers clad in the white suits worn by hazardous materials teams allegedly seized denatured alcohol and other materials used to manufacture the drug.

“If you cook or deal methamphetamine, eventually we will learn about it and we will come,” Hanlin said.

Greatest drug threat
Methamphetamine use in Douglas County and the rest of Oregon has exploded since the early 1990s. It poses the most serious drug threat to the state of any controlled substance, according to a report prepared by the federally funded High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program.

HIDTA tracks drug enforcement efforts in seven Oregon counties shown to have the most serious drug problems, including Douglas, Jackson, Deschutes, Marion, Clackamas, Washington and Multnomah.

Methamphetamine has steadily risen to become the most popular drug in the HIDTA counties in the last five years, according to the report, and Oregon consistently ranks among the top 10 states in the nation for the number of meth labs seized annually, with 530 in 2002.

DINT has seized 20 labs in Douglas County so far this year, up from 14 in 2002. Four of those 20 were partial labs, where some of the precursor substances needed to make methamphetamine were found.

“They would’ve been labs, we just got on them before they got there,” Hanlin said.

In 2000, 29 labs were seized.

“The most common meth labs that we have around here now are red (phosphorous) and iodine labs,” Hanlin said. “They’re generally called red-p labs, or tweaker labs, because meth tweakers — people who use and abuse the drug — typically around here are the ones who make meth using this method.”

The lab seizures contributed to the recovery of a staggering quantity of methamphetamine this year, most of it seized in a 30-pound Drug Enforcement Administration bust in November.

Including the DEA case, more than 16,732 grams of meth have been seized in major drug operations this year, which would yield about $836,600 if sold on the street. DINT alone has seized almost 3,000 grams, which is way up from the 703 grams they seized in 2002.

Interestingly, the number of people arrested by DINT on methamphetamine-related charges has gone down over the same period — from 143 in 2002 to 131 so far this year.
“
The reason you’ll notice that the amount of meth seized is higher and the number of arrests is lower is because we are going after the bigger players,” Hanlin said. “We’re trying to go after the bigger guys and dry up the supply.”

The drug’s availability on the street is scarcely suffering, however, as even law enforcement officers will attest. Part of the reason for its prevalence is the ease with which it is made.

“You can get the recipe right off the Internet from a variety of sources,” Hanlin said.

The red phosphorous method involves the use of ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, red phosphorous, iodine, camping fuel, fuel-line antifreeze, drain opener, and other substances.

Manufacturers can get pseudoephedrine from cold and allergy tablets bought at the supermarket and then distill the tablets down to their active ingredients using a solvent. Red phosphorous is often obtained by stripping the striker plates off matchbook covers, which can then be combined with water, iodine and the pseudoephedrine and heated up again in a subsequent step.

The highly toxic chemical mix goes through a series of additional chemical reactions and filtering processes before the methamphetamine is done and ready to be “purified,” or whitened, using ether or acetone.

“It’s just a brew of toxic chemicals,” said Douglas County Deputy District Attorney Jeff Sweet. “They’re getting what they wanted, but even that’s just nasty.”

Occupational hazards
The whole process can be completed in less than a day, provided nothing blows up.

“The biggest hazard with these labs is fire. In fact, to a meth cook that’s a bigger hazard than getting caught by the police, is the risk of explosion,” Hanlin said. “You’re cooking meth on a burner of your stove, and the material you’re trying to cook off is this white sludge sitting in a gallon of camping fuel, and you’re evaporating that on your stove, and these people smoke …”

“And they’re high while they’re doing it,” chimed in Sweet.

The gases produced in the manufacturing process can also be deadly.

“If you overheat it you can produce phosphine gas, which can just flat-out kill you,” Sweet said. “We’ve seen a video of a hotel room where a maid walked in and they (the methamphetamine manufacturers) were just dead.”

To evade detection, meth cooks may increase the danger to themselves and others by using duct tape or towels around the edges of doors and windows to prevent the fumes from leaking out. Motel rooms are popular with meth cooks because they can make their product and then leave without a trace.

“It’s not that hard necessarily to do a cook in a hotel room, contaminate it, and leave it and not get caught,” Sweet said.

Hanlin and Sweet displayed photographs of a lab left behind in a motel room by a sloppy clan of cooks, who left sludge-filled coffee filters, stained bed comforters and dirty Pyrex dishes in their wake. The drugs were mixed in the room’s bathtub and sink, and the toxic chemical byproducts were simply washed down the drains.

Once a lab has been discovered on a piece of property it must be disposed of, cleaned up and deemed suitable for habitation by the state, costing the owner several thousand dollars. Labs also are commonly found in homes, businesses, trailers, the woods, or even stashed inside a backpack or the trunk of a car.


Smurfs for hire
In response to the proliferation of methamphetamine manufacturing in Oregon, legislators have passed laws to limit the availability of the substances used to make it. Called precursor laws, they regulate the sale of such substances as anhydrous ammonia, red phosphorous, concentrated iodine, and cold and allergy medications.

“The precursor laws have been very ... beneficial in making it more difficult to get pseudoephedrine, iodine ... and red phosphorous,” Hanlin said.

Meth users say the laws have done little to choke off the supply of the drug on the street, however.

“There’s just ways around all that,” said recovering addict Andrea York of Roseburg. “I’ve never known anybody to have a problem getting what they needed ... you have a hundred junkies all ready to do whatever you ask them to do” so they can get high.

Meth cooks will employ other users, sometimes called “smurfs,” to go from store to store buying the chemicals they need to make the drug.

“Smurfing is a term ... used to describe people running around purchasing under-the-radar amounts of pseudoephedrine, iodine” and other precursor substances, Sweet said.

Their activities are often noticed by security guards at local retail stores. The head of security at one grocery store, who requested his identity and that of his employer be kept secret, sees them on a regular basis.

“A lot of them were stealing it off the shelves,” the security guard said. “I see somebody pull up and then they’ll come up separately, or you might see them in the aisle discussing what they’re going to get, and then they’ll split up and go to different registers.”

The man, who also works security at other retail stores in Roseburg, will note their descriptions and the frequency with which they buy the cold medicine and pass the information along to police.

“They’re doing a pretty good job with some of the tips that we give them,” he said.

Imported meth
In spite of the relative ease with which the drug can be made, most of the methamphetamine circulating the county is imported from bigger cities north and south of here, which are distribution hubs for manufacturers in Washington, California, Mexico and sometimes Canada.

“There’s a big influx of methamphetamine coming up from Mexico ... through illegal aliens or through individuals who still have ties to Mexico,” Hanlin said. “We don’t have that big of a Hispanic population here in Douglas County so we don’t really see it quite like they do in some of the areas like Medford, and up north of us, but it comes through here obviously because we’re right in the middle of it.”

The HIDTA assessment reports the majority of the meth supply in Oregon is controlled by Mexican drug trafficking organizations. It may be smuggled via rail cars, personal vehicles, bus lines and commercial vehicles. Police have even found it hidden between stacks of lumber on logging trucks. Much of the methamphetamine is run up and down Interstate 5, and many of the labs themselves are mobile.

“With the decrease of the full complement of Oregon State Troopers on the highways, comprehensive interdiction of these rolling meth labs will consequently be diminished,” states the report.