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Monday, Jun. 08, 2009

Meth labs back on the rise in Kentucky

Toddler's death brought attention to increase

The number of illegal methamphetamine labs destroyed in Kentucky has increased in the last 18 months as meth "cookers" have found ways around efforts to limit production of the dangerous, highly addictive drug.

A 2005 change in state law to restrict access to a key ingredient needed to produce meth drove down the number of makeshift labs police found, but only for a while.

The May 30 death of a 22-month-old Wayne County boy who drank drain cleaner his parents allegedly were using to make meth grabbed local and national headlines at a time when the number of labs is going up.

The number of labs across the state fell from 604 in 2004 to 302 in 2007, but that number rose to 405 in 2008, according to the Kentucky State Police.

The upward trend continues this year, according to police around the state.

In far western Kentucky, the Pennyrile Narcotics Task Force cleaned up 49 meth labs the first five months of this year compared with 10 in the same period last year. In Eastern Kentucky, Operation UNITE cleaned up 30 meth labs in 2008 but already has worked 23 this year, according to officers with those agencies.

When the number of labs started going down a few years ago, "We thought, 'Great, we've beat back the tide,' " said Capt. Kevin Payne, head of the state police's drug enforcement-special investigations unit for the eastern half of the state. "Now the tide's kind of turned and is coming back in again."

Meth producers have adapted to efforts to restrict access to pseudoephedrine, which is found in over-the-counter cold and allergy medicines and is needed to make meth.

Cookers use a chemical process to extract the drug from tablets such as Sudafed and convert it to meth. The crude labs used in the process can be made with coffee pots, glass jars or other small containers.

State law has a number of controls on sales of pseudoephedrine, including a limit on how much one person can buy in a day or month.

The state has a real-time electronic system, called MethCheck, to track sales of the drugs. Pharmacists use it to block sales to people who are about to exceed the purchase limits.

To get around the restrictions, meth cookers have started having multiple people buy cold and allergy pills so none of them goes over the limit. They call that smurfing.

They also leave Kentucky to buy products in nearby states without similar controls, police said.

"They're shopping smarter," said state police Sgt. Jere Hopson, who works in the drug enforcement-special investigations unit covering Western Kentucky.

That action-reaction dynamic in the fight against drugs isn't unusual.

After the state developed a system to track purchases of prescription pills, for instance, traffickers and addicts began going out of state in increasing numbers to get prescriptions in places where they wouldn't be monitored as closely.

"It's like anything else — give them two or three years, and they'll find ways around it," said Dan Smoot, law enforcement director for Operation UNITE, which covers 29 counties in southern and Eastern Kentucky.

It's not just Kentucky

Kentucky isn't the only state that's seen an increase in the number of meth labs in the last year or so, said Van Ingram, executive director of the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy, who recently attended a national conference that dealt with meth issues.

"Everyone's frustrated," Ingram said.

Part of the national increase might be a reaction to a ban of imports of pseudoephedrine to Mexico, he said.

So-called "superlabs" in Mexico were a key source of meth coming into the United Statets. The increase in small labs in this country could reflect an effort to make up for a drop in supply from Mexico caused by the pseudoephedrine ban there, Ingram said.

Traffickers still import meth into Kentucky from operations inside the United States, including the West Coast and Southwest, according to a report from the Appalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area task force, which covers more than 60 counties in Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.