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 Health & Beauty | February 2007 
Meth Trade Not Gone, Just Evolving
 News Tribune
Legislation alone never cures drug addiction. As fast as policy-makers write laws to choke supply, desperate users and the scum that keep them hooked find new ways to feed the need.
Witness methamphetamine. No sooner did U.S. states pass tough laws placing pseudoephedrine — a common cold-medicine ingredient used in meth production — out of reach of backyard cooks than drug cartels from Mexico and elsewhere stepped in to fill the void.
Meth use is still very much a crisis — more than 92 percent of local law-enforcement officials on the West Coast consider it their No. 1 drug threat. But how the drug ends up on the streets has changed in some significant ways.
Homemade meth is on the decline. Pierce County’s experience illustrates what’s happening across the country as meth cooks find ingredients harder to come by. The state Department of Ecology cleaned up 148 meth labs and dumpsites here last year, compared with 589 in 2001.
The drop is cause for both celebration and consternation. Meth’s toxic and explosive alchemy puts not only cooks at great risk, but also families and private property. Fewer meth labs means fewer children sickened by meth exposure and fewer homes, motel rooms, sheds and fields turned into hazardous waste sites.
But kicking meth isn’t as easy as shutting down some mom-and-pop labs. Cutting off the supply of meth ingredients here in the United States has given rise to “superlabs” in Mexico, where drug cartels use established trafficking routes to smuggle the drug into American cities.
The Mexican government has had some success at curtailing the drug trade by racheting down import quotas on pseudoephedrine, according to groundbreaking reporting by The Oregonian.
Federal data analyzed by the Portland newspaper last year showed that street meth’s purity had fallen while its price increased, suggesting dealers were having to increasingly cut meth with additives. Treatment professionals said some addicts, frustrated by chasing an unattainable high, were hitting bottom and entering recovery sooner.
But again the meth trade has adapted. Asian meth traffickers have easy access to meth ingredients thanks to lax oversight at drug factories in India and China. Using more sophisticated techniques, Asian “superlabs” can churn out 1,100 pounds of meth a week, compared to a home lab that makes an ounce at a time or a Mexican superlab that produces 10 to 100 pounds week.
Much of the meth goes to supply Asia’s burgeoning demand. But left unchecked, the drug could easily find its way to U.S. streets. In December, Mexican officials discovered a 19.5-ton cache of pseudoephedrine in a cargo container from China. There also is evidence that traffickers are tapping Indian and Chinese sources to mass-produce meth in Canada.
Plugging the foreign meth pipeline is a much more difficult and delicate proposition than cracking down on the guy making an ounce or two in his storage shed. Lawmakers in this state and others are winning one battle against meth and the harm it inflicts on communities; victory on the emerging international front is just as important if the nation is ever to beat the scourge of meth.
Tricks of the Trade: Tracing Meth's Route into Kitsap County
Angela D. Smith - kitsapsun.com
It flows in the shadows of Kitsap County, moving from hand to hand, exchanged for money, tools, family heirlooms, sex.
Packets of the powerful stimulant drug methamphetamine, sold in grams or in larger quantities, are seemingly everywhere in West Sound.
Informants have told police that meth can be bought virtually anywhere in Bremerton and throughout Kitsap County. Law enforcement so far has found it impossible to stop the trade that is ruining countless lives.
"It's like water," said Randy Drake, head of the West Sound Narcotics Enforcement Team, or WestNET, of the meth trade. "It just finds a way."
The trade is so difficult to dam because of the vise-like grip the addictive drug maintains over its users and because so much is independently produced. Any person with meth-cooking know-how can make it at home in a kitchen sink, and most of the ingredients aren't hard to obtain.
Although much of the meth in Kitsap is made elsewhere, it's rarely in short supply. Frustrated narcotics detectives say that after a seemingly large bust, they will occasionally hear from informants that meth was hard to find — for a couple days.
A string of arrests will stifle the meth supply for a short while, but a new dealer or meth cook seems just waiting to fill the void.
"It's capitalism at its absolute best," Drake said sarcastically.
The Economics of Profits
The economics of the local meth trade are straightforward.
High-quality meth that is cooked to 90 percent or higher purity can run $5,500 a pound.
The dealers who buy meth in large quantities will maximize their product by "stepping on it," or diluting it with things like baking soda or vitamin B-12, before dividing it up and selling it in smaller quantities to lower-level dealers or users.
By the time the addict pays $20 for a "teener," or 16th of an ounce, on the street corner, it's only 12 or 14 percent pure. The original pound eventually is sold on the street for about $33,000, with each dealer or runner taking his or her own share of the profit along the way.
By the time meth reaches the low-end guys "slingin' " or selling the dope, there's not much profit left to be made.
And to make matters worse, they're often selling it to support their own cravings and snorting or shooting up what little profit they could make.
Nationwide, users spent an estimated $5.4 billion on meth in 2000, according to National Drug Control Policy reports. But exactly how much meth is used and where it comes from isn't known.
Kitsap County's meth trade has grown so much that local law enforcement officials have applied to include the county in the so-called High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, or HIDTA, which now includes Pierce, King, Snohomish, Thurston, Whatcom, Skagit and Yakima counties.
Inclusion would mean more access to federal money for law enforcement, although it doesn't necessarily guarantee it. Northwest HIDTA officials endorsed the application and sent it to Washington, D.C., for approval. A decision should be made by the end of the summer.
In the meantime, local narcotics agents have been working with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to catch members of larger organized meth-dealing groups.
"Prior to last year, I thought there was more imported into the state than was commercially (made)," said David Rodriguez, director of Northwest HIDTA. "But with the rise in labs and especially of superlabs, we're probably producing more than importing."
Manufacturing comes to Kitsap County
Pierce County was once the No. 1 meth-producing county in the United States, but narcotics investigators there have emphasized busting meth labs and dealers, forcing many to move outside the county.
Meth makers soon found manufacturing sites in Kitsap and the more rural counties with more open space and fewer police officers.
Most of the meth traded in Kitsap County, however, comes from outside the county, Drake said. The meth traders known in Kitsap bring in pounds cooked in California or Yakima through Tacoma.
But a large percentage still is made in the county in small batches. Although many home cooks produce only an ounce or so at a time, they can be quite active, producing undetermined amounts of meth.
This year, about 50 home-based labs have been busted in the county.
The homemade product trade is mostly characterized by users making meth for themselves and friends or other users who buy enough meth to turn enough profit to supply their own habit.
"You don't get the 'user' out of the job title until you get into the organized (crime) loops," Drake said. And users not enterprising enough to make their own often steal, forge and trade their way to the drug.
Local police have seen piles of tools, antiques and a plethora of other stolen goods in dealers' homes. They have arrested known users trying to cash fake or stolen and forged checks, in some instances from members of their own family.
Organized Trade
One major source of meth in West Sound is a Mexican-based organization that produces the drug in superlabs outside the area and distributes it here and elsewhere.
Two traffickers from the organization distributed an estimated $500,000 worth of meth in Kitsap County in the past year before they were busted by WestNET.
Oscar Delgado Acosta, 28, of Port Angeles and Juan Vasquez Santiago, 28, of Olympia were caught after selling more than 2 pounds of meth to a WestNET informant in February.
Santiago pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Tacoma earlier this month and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Delgado was convicted by a jury July 9 and faces 14 to 20 years in prison. Both may be deported once they've served their sentences.
The distribution network of today has evolved considerably over the past 15 years.
Large-scale meth trade once was almost solely run by biker gangs, particularly the Hells Angels. In Kitsap County, both Hells Angels and Bandidos ran the trade into the early '90s.
In 1987, a sometimes associate of the Hells Angels, Emil Lee "Bud" Hazelwood, was arrested in Seattle after his rental home in Eglon was raided and Kitsap County's first recorded meth lab was found. When police busted the lab, they found Jerry K. Speaks, one of the leading West Coast cooks at the time.
Both were convicted of conspiracy to manufacture meth and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. They later made a how-to video for law enforcement explaining the dangers associated with cooking.
As recently as 1999, three Kitsap-based Bandido members, William Buskirk, James Miller and Randall Cole, were arrested for selling pounds a week of meth.
After an investigation by WestNET, Bremerton police's Special Operations Group and the DEA, they were caught when they sold 500 grams of meth to informants and undercover agents.
Investigators altogether seized 24-1/2 pounds of meth with an estimated 1999 street value of $900,000 as well as cash, other drugs, vehicles and guns.
Miller and Buskirk were sentenced to 10 years each in prison; Cole was sentenced to more than a dozen years.
Biker gangs still run some meth, but since the late '80s, most of the organized trade has primarily been run by Mexican-based family organizations.
They staked a claim on the meth trade while running cocaine and heroin along the West Coast, according to the DEA.
The problem with those drugs, however, is that the Mexican-based organizations were relying on suppliers of raw materials, such as Colombia. In meth, they found a product that they could both make and distribute themselves.
In some instances, cocaine dealers introduced customers to meth as a cheaper and longer high, just as cocaine prices increased. Meth infiltrated the user community in Washington while narcotics detectives were busy battling the crack cocaine epidemic.
Police say the Mexican drug organizations have been particularly hard for law enforcement to infiltrate. Many of the members have family ties that they're reluctant to sever by divulging information.
But the greatest obstacle of all will take more than just law enforcement putting barriers in the tide of meth trade, police say.
When a drug's popularity is dwindling or it becomes too scarce, new drugs are introduced.
"(Drug dealers) are not introducing anything right now," WestNET head Drake said. "It should wake us up to the fact that the end is not in sight."
The only way to stem the flow of meth is to control the chemicals used to make it and especially to quell its demand through education and treatment, police say.
"The cops aren't losing the war on drugs," Drake said. "We're the enforcement leg and the enforcement leg is doing just fine."
But it takes more than that, he said.
"Education is the way for us to get to the people who drug users are going to," Drake said.
"You can't arrest your way out of the problem." |
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