Spun out: Meth cleanup is health concern

JOHN DAVIDSON-Frontiersman reporter

SUTTON -- They wanted to try it out, see what it felt like. His friend knew a guy who knew a guy who had some for sale. They pooled their money and bought $200 worth, about two grams. They tried it. Nothing happened. It was a dud, pure cut. They had been duped.

Next time around they decided they would just cook it up themselves. They did. It worked.

That's the story told by "Jack," an inmate at Palmer Correctional Center in Sutton. Jack is waiting for his trial to begin; he was arrested for allegedly cooking methamphetamine in a makeshift lab and now faces felony charges. Because his case is still in the pre-trial phase, Jack requested his real name not be used.

Jack says he has never been a habitual user of anything, certainly not drugs. He and some friends just wanted to try a little methamphetamine to find out what all the fuss was about.

Although Jack had been around meth before and had seen it cooked a few times, no one ever taught him exactly how to cook it. After he and his friends were scammed out of $200, he figured he would just try cooking it himself by mimicking what he had seen others do.

To Jack's surprise, it worked. He could cook meth.

Cooking chemical soup

To acquire most illegal drugs, a person has to know a drug dealer or know someone who knows a drug dealer. The main ingredient for cocaine or heroin, for example, is extracted from plants that grow in distant regions of the earth. Not only is it difficult to ship the drugs, it's also expensive to buy them. Even when you have the money, the product is not always readily available.

But not methamphetamine.

If you type "cook methamphetamine" or "meth recipe" into Google, minutes later you could be looking at a list of store-bought items you'll need and detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to make meth in your own home. Anyone remotely tech-savvy could get online and quickly find dozens of Web sites with multiple recipes for meth.

But as Jack's story illustrates, some people don't even need a written recipe to pull off meth-making. Jack just watched closely a few times and was able to imitate the process accurately enough to get product.

For Jack, cooking up meth and perfecting the process -- producing purer meth and getting faster at it every time -- was a fun challenge; it was something he enjoyed doing.

"A lot of people are as addicted to making it as they are using it," Jack said. "The people who cook it are all pretty much young people. Some of these guys think they're going to get ahead by cooking, but it's a vicious circle."

When it comes to meth, Jack is a self-educated man. He was never interested in cooking to sell; making meth was just a hobby, something he and his friends would plan a weekend around. Here and there they would slowly gather the materials they needed in the days and weeks leading up to the cook, and then they would make a batch of meth that would last them awhile.

"The ones who cook it to sell are dangerous, as far as chemicals getting out of hand and stuff being in the meth that shouldn't," Jack said. "It's easy to contaminate the final product if you don't know what you're doing or if you're too hasty to complete the process and sell it."

Sellers, after all, are trying to make the most meth in the least amount of time. At $50 to $100 a gram, a good cook could easily spend $200 on raw materials and end up making more than $2,000 in profit, just off one cook.

It takes as long to cook a gram of meth as it does to cook 12 grams, which is about a day; it just depends on how much ephedrine -- the key ingredient -- you have to begin with.

Jack says he can usually get a three-quarter yield, meaning he can get six grams of meth out of 10 grams of ephedrine.

He is no chemist, but Jack understands the chemical process that creates methamphetamine. While describing it, Jack placed his hands flat on a tabletop, palms down, and said, "This is ephedrine." Flipping his hands over, palms up, he said, "This is meth."

Cleaning up the poison

Although making meth from ephedrine might be something anyone can do, cleaning up meth labs is a difficult, time-consuming process.

Mike Anderson, a toxicologist with Environmental Compliance Consultants, admits cooking meth is not very complicated. By following directions and using the proper ingredients, all of which can be purchased at a hardware store or drugstore, almost anyone can cook up a batch of methamphetamine.

"Meth is basically cleaning agents and cold medicine combined to make a new molecule," Anderson said, in an interview at his Anchorage office. "It's very corrosive stuff that produces eight or nine different chemical wastes."

In fact, meth waste is so corrosive and unstable, investigators call in specialists like Anderson to clean up when they seize a meth lab.

ECC is the sole contractor for meth lab cleanup in Alaska. When law enforcement officers find a lab and make their arrests, ECC comes in an hour or two later to dispose of toxic waste and contaminated items.

The job involves being on call 24-7. If a week goes by and the phone doesn't ring, Anderson starts expecting a call.

Sometimes Anderson and one or two other ECC workers are flown to a meth lab site by helicopter, if it's in a remote location, but usually they only have to drive about an hour.

"Half the time we're going to the Valley," Anderson said. "This spring, we had four [meth labs] in one night in Wasilla. For a while there when they called I'd assume it was the Valley."

According to Anderson's data, ECC has responded to 78 meth lab calls this year; 51 percent of those have been in the Mat-Su.

The labs themselves are all fairly similar, Anderson says, including the smell -- a potent rotten-egg, sulfur and burnt-chemical smell that lingers even after the site airs out.

Most are small, personal-use labs -- called "table-top labs" -- that use a variety of store-bought products to make meth in small quantities. Often meth cooks will set up such labs in their homes or garages, even when children are nearby.

According to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, children were present at more than 20 percent of the meth labs seized last year nationwide.

But table-top labs can be set up anywhere -- in a hotel room, van, shed -- and can be carried around in a backpack until a cook finds a good place to set up.

Understandably, cooks often don't want to set up a lab in their homes; the chemicals are unstable, Anderson says, and the waste produced is both corrosive and flammable. The fumes that come out of some meth lab jars could knock a person down, he says, and sometimes trash bags of meth lab waste can catch fire.

In fact, meth fumes are so toxic and corrosive that when the Mat-Su Drug Team busts an active lab, suspects are sometimes made to strip off their clothes and wear white chem suits back to the station; investigators don't want them filling the cab of the car with toxic fumes. ECC takes meth-contaminated clothes and other items and disposes of them along with the chemicals in the lab, Anderson says.

Sometimes ECC even has to dispose of contaminated cell phones. Anderson recalls one lab that blew up recently in which a cell phone was found with skin stuck to the keypad; the meth cook was trying to dial 911.

The chemical fumes from cooking meth cling to almost everything at a lab site, Anderson says, including the walls, paint, carpet, even dust particles that cooks and users -- and sometimes children -- can breathe in.

All those chemicals make it an extremely difficult and costly project to clean a house that was once used as a lab. Anderson says the price of cleaning a meth house is usually between $3,000 and $5,000.

"We call some cleanup jobs 'napalm jobs,'" Anderson said. "They're dumps, they're not even worth cleaning up."

As damaging as meth is to walls and carpets, its effects on the human body are even worse. A powerful and destructive stimulant, meth contains chemical agents that shut down and destroy organs while fooling a user's body into thinking it doesn't need food. Meth users, Anderson says, are essentially living off adrenaline.

Almost every physical effect of methamphetamine manifests its harmful effects on the human body. Long-term cocaine use destroys the lining in a person's nasal passage; meth does the same thing, only much faster.

The corrosiveness of the chemicals in meth also breaks down tooth enamel and bone, often causing addicts to lose their teeth. Most drug-abuse Web sites say the life expectancy of a meth addict, from the onset of addiction, is five years.

"People don't realize, these chemicals are nasty," Anderson said. "You wouldn't want to put them in your body."

This is the second story in a three-part series exploring the rise of methamphetamine in the Mat-Su. Look for Part III in Friday's edition.

Contact John Davidson at john.davidson@frontiersman.com.