The meth menace: battling the fast-paced spread of methamphetamine may mean attacking it from several fronts.

For Jim Atkins, addiction to methamphetamine was not an overnight thing. "It really snuck up on me," he says.

Working as a bouncer in a rock 'n' roll bar in San Antonio, Atkins needed something that would give him an extra lift for the late-night hours. "Initially I started using it on a Friday night and would stay up for the entire weekend until Sunday. I would not, in fact, do it again until the following weekend."

But soon a cycle that is hauntingly familiar to millions of meth addicts began to emerge. The days when Atkins wasn't using the drug became shorter, while he stayed up for longer periods of time. "Before I knew it, I was staying up practically all of the time and sleeping only here and there," he says. "I had become a total user and had all of the negative personality traits that go with addiction." He was in a state of grogginess when he wasn't high. He had out-of-control rages and couldn't concentrate on anything except the drug. He was stealing to pay for his habit.

Atkins eventually learned to wean himself from methamphetamine and other substance abuse and is now the manager of admissions at the Hazelden Foundation, a drug treatment and research organization in Center City, Minn. He remains convinced that methamphetamine is the most dangerous drug in the country, largely because of its potent high.

"It produces a great feeling," says Atkins. "It ups your self-esteem and gives you all sorts of energy. I am not surprised at all that it has become such a popular drug."

There are millions of people who have either tried or become addicted to methamphetamine. Its popularity and use can even be tracked geographically, contend many experts who say that it began as a biker gang drug of choice in the Southwest more than two decades ago. It has rapidly moved eastward in the past three to four years.

"It is now clearly a nationwide epidemic, and anyone who thinks it isn't hasn't studied the issue," says Montana Representative Brady Wiseman. He has introduced several measures this year to address the growing problem in his state.

"We are seeing addictions at all levels of society," says Wiseman. "But in Montana it has been particularly noticeable among those who are trying to survive financially and are working two jobs and need something to keep them awake."

Senator Jack Critcher has noticed the same patterns in Arkansas. "There are many upper income level people involved--homeowners, bankers, prominent people. It is much more pervasive than anyone would imagine."

California has been particularly hard hit: "Meth is just completely out of control here," says Senator Jackie Speier. "Right now about 85 percent of methamphetamine in the nation is manufactured in our state. Last year we had more than 1,900 meth labs cleaned up by law enforcement at a cost of nearly $3 million. You really have to wonder how much worse it is going to get before it gets better."

PLATEFUL OF PROBLEMS

For the states, the manufacture and use of methamphetamine presents a plateful of social, child welfare, environmental, criminal justice and economic challenges, all begging to be addressed at the same time.

"We are not just getting hit with the crime that comes with addiction, such as people stealing to pay for drugs," says Dineen Ann Riviezzo, chairwoman of the New York State Commission of Investigation. "We are also dealing with whether or not we have adequate treatment programs, what do we do with the young children who live in these meth labs, and how to clean up the site of a lab, which can be both dangerous and expensive."

At least 17 states in the past few years have passed laws to address drug-endangered children. Some expand the definition of child abuse to include manufacturing a controlled substance in the presence of a child. Others upgrade the crime and enhance the sentence when children are exposed to meth manufacturing.

Cleanup of clandestine and sometimes mobile meth labs falls on the shoulders of state and local governments. Some state laws require restitution of offenders for the costs of cleanup, which average about $5,000, but can climb to $1 SO,000 when large-scale operations are seized.

Recently, lawmakers have focused on reducing access to methamphetamine by making it more difficult to get common cold medicines containing pseudoephedrine, which is the prime ingredient for making methamphetamine.

Last spring, Oklahoma made pseudoephedrine a Schedule S drug, allowing it to be sold only by pharmacists and requiring the purchaser to sign a log of receipt. In a year, the number of meth labs has dropped by 124, or some 80 percent, according to the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drug Control. The decline has saved more than $434,000 in clean-up costs.

Oklahoma's success has prompted lawmakers in other states to take action that would either require a pharmacist to report any transaction involving pseudoephedrine, or better regulate it and other precursor drugs that go into the making of methamphetamine.

"We have to track who is buying this stuff," says Idaho Representative Bob Ring who is a medical doctor. He was disappointed this session when his bill that would have made medicines containing pseudoephedrine available only through a pharmacist or pharmacy technician, was killed by the Senate.

"We tried to be reasonable," Ring says. "The straight pseudoephedrine tablets, that you might get with a product like Sudafed, would have been treated like codeine cough syrup, where you have to show a photo ID to get it. Tablets with mixtures, such as Tylenol, would have been treated the way we treat cigarettes: put behind a counter and available only through the assistance of a clerk." Medicines that contain small amounts of the substance or are liquids or jells, would still have been available over the counter.

Ring says the Senate "caved in to lobbyists from retail merchants and the pharmaceutical industry. Retailers are making big profits selling large quantities of pseudoephedrine, much of it to drug cookers," he says. "The pharmaceutical industry testified that they might lose sales if it is put behind the counter."

NOT ALL IN FAVOR

Pharmacy and retail groups are fighting proposals like Representative Ring's. They complain the legislation leaves the burden of policing up to them. They say it will be labor-intensive, and will not eliminate meth abuse in the long run anyway.

"Most of the proposals say you can purchase so many grams in so many days, say six grams in 30 days," remarks Mary Ann Wagner, vice-president of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores. "That means a pharmacist or clerk will have to go back through all of the sales for the past 30 days and see if that person has made any other similar purchases."

Wagner believes that the law can be easily violated. "Anyone trying to purchase this product can just go from store to store and buy the same maximum amount."

Lawmakers have tried to craft their legislation to address the complaints of pharmacists and retailers. "Our goal is not to make life difficult for the pharmacists and store owners," says Representative Wiseman, "but rather to have them help us keep better control of where these products and ingredients are going."

Wiseman said lawmakers are listening to pharmacists and retailers. His more restrictive legislation requiring a prescription for products containing the powder form of pseudoephedrine was defeated and eventually replaced by legislation offered by Senator Trudi Schmidt. It requires that such products be put behind pharmacy counters and sales recorded in a log.

But not every lawmaker is convinced that such cooperation is a good idea. In California, Senator Speier, who has introduced legislation requiring a photo ID, recording of transactions, and a 9-gram cap on the amount of pseu doephedrine that can be purchased in 30 days, says she has been willing to talk to retailers, but will only go so far.

"There were similar objections to carding for alcohol," says Speier. "Sometimes you have to weigh these kinds of concerns with the overriding social benefit. In the case of meth use and abuse, I think it is pretty clear."

BLACK MARKET WORRIES

Jack Cole, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, worries that lawmakers may be unintentionally creating a more vibrant black market for products containing pseudoephedrine by making it harder to get.

"Our experience with every kind of drug has been that when you prohibit it or restrict access to it, you only push it more into the hands of the criminals," says Cole who was with the New Jersey State Police for 26 years. "I know this is not an easy issue for lawmakers, but until we begin to think along the lines of regulating all of these substances, instead of prohibiting them, we are going to be fighting the same battles over and over again."

Cole's group, made up of current and former members of law enforcement, judges, prosecutors and probation officers, calls for an end to the war on drugs which they believe does more damage than good.

TREATMENT ALTERNATIVES

"You can try to restrict access to ingredients and shut down as many meth labs as you can, but you are still going to have a meth problem until you emphasize treatment," says Carol Falkowski, director of communications with the Hazelden Foundation. "The reason is simple: if a person is addicted to meth, they don't care about anything else. So if you cut off access one way, they will find another way, because they are addicts and getting meth is all that matters to them." In Hawaii, lawmakers looking at a rapidly increasingly incidence of methampbetamine use and addiction, appropriated more than $17 million in spending in 2004, to be used primarily for education and treatment programs.

"When you look at the number of arrests and people found positive for meth at the time of arrest, our rates were and still are among the highest in the nation," says Representative Blake Oshiro. "And we have had certain pockets and communities where the problem has been rampant."

Although lawmakers view treatment as only one of a "three-pronged approach that also includes prevention and enforcement," says Oshiro, "they did come to the view that unless you address the cycle of drug use, you are never really going to get a handle on the meth problenl. The treatment is for breaking the cycle," he says. "The prevention is to make sure that people never get into the cycle in the first place."

Among the treatment programs supported by the Hawaii legislation is the Big Island Substance Abuse Center, which received more than $219,000 and specializes in one-on-one and group counseling sessions; $3.1 million to expand drug courts on Oahu and neighboring islands, which also included $500,000 for the treatment of first-time, non-violent drug offenders; and $2 million for a substance abuse prevention program in the state's schools.

"We came to the conclusion that we have to fight this problem from many different perspectives at the same time," says Oshiro. "It is not the kind of thing where you can adopt a cookie-cutter approach to an individual who may or may not need treatment."

That advice resonates with Senator Critcher.

"We have a law that adds 10 years to the sentence of anyone running a meth lab where a child is present," says Critcher. "Think of that--10 years. But it didn't slow anyone down, and it finally dawned on me why. These people aren't rational. No one in these situations is rational. That's why we need to start focusing on the treatment end as well.

"It comes down to this," he says, "do you want a person behind bars for eight years at a cost of $170,000 or someone in rehab for a year at a cost of $20,000? We are not going to get a handle on this problem until we begin to consider different solutions."

Jim Atkins, who sees new methamphetamine addicts coming in for treatment every day at the Hazelden Foundation, agrees. "Addiction has been around for a long time and it is going to continue. But lawmakers can take an important step forward in this battle if they focus on everything at once. That means restricting access to the substance, enhancing law enforcement, creating education programs and emphasizing treatment for those who are addicted.

"These kind of addictions bring with them many problems," says Atkins. "But unfortunately they can rarely be solved with only one solution."

CHILDREN'S NIGHTMARE

The saddest aspect of the methamphetamine menace is the children of users who live in unimagined squalor, amidst the acid used in manufacturing the drug, frequently going without food, medical attention, or even baths for days and weeks on end.

"Could there be a more traumatic experience?" asked Esther Wattenberg, a professor at the University of Minnesota's centers for Urban and Regional Affairs and Advanced Studies in Child Welfare. She was speaking at a meeting of social workers gathered to specifically address the needs of meth lab children. Wattenberg says meth plays a role in up to 81 percent of child protection cases reported in Minnesota. The rate of abuse and neglect is particularly acute in rural areas, she says, where methamphetamine labs frequently operate unnoticed.

Although national figures are hard to come by, the El Paso Intelligence Center in Texas, which gathers information from more than 15 federal and state agencies tracking illegal drug use, reported that in 2002 more than 2,000 children were living in operating meth labs.

They are at risk for respiratory ailments as well as brain and organ damage because of their constant exposure to the chemicals used in making the drug. Babies born to addicts are often addicted to the drug themselves, and are frequently underdeveloped and premature, according to the University of Minnesota's Center for Advanced Studies in Child Welfare.

And then there are the risks that come from being near firearms and the violent encounters that are a daily aspect of life in the world of meth makers and users. Not to mention what can happen to children when their parents are in a meth-induced psychotic state or deep sleep.

Specifically addressing the issue of manufacturing a controlled substance in the presence of a child, 13 states have expanded either their endangerment or child abuse statues--Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Utah and Washington. Arkansas, Georgia, Washington and Wyoming have made exposing a child to an illicit chemical substance a separate criminal offense. Others have addressed this by enhancing penalties for manufacturers if a child is present.

Child protection advocates in recent years have argued that because the combination of meth labs and children is a relatively new situation for many agencies, states should adopt specific policies and protocols for foster parents, doctors and nurses, social workers, and law enforcement officials.

CLEANUP CHALLENGE

Law enforcement officials say the challenge of cleaning up a busted lab is the worst aspect of the growing methamphetamine epidemic--at least as far as the environment and public purse goes.

"Studies show that traces of meth can be found in the air, in the curtains, in the rugs, everywhere," says Dineed Ann Riviezzo, chair of the New York State Commission on Investigation. Chemicals can be dumped down sinks and toilets and seep into the water table or cause ground contamination.

"More than any other drug addiction, meth leaves behind a trail," Riviezzo says. "And that trail costs an awful lot of money to clean up and repair."

For state and local law enforcement officials, methamphetamine lab clean-ups can cost anywhere between $3,000 to $10,000, with a few costing as much as $150,000.

"As it stands now, the hazardous waste cleanup costs are being entirely absorbed by taxpayers," says Montana Representative Brady Wiseman. "It's extremely unfair."

In Minnesota, where city and county governments spent an estimated $4 million on meth cleanup in 2003, Representative Bob Gunther and Senator Julie Rosen have proposed a bill to require that people convicted of producing methamphetamine pay restitution for clean-up costs.

Tennessee Congressman Lincoln Davis, a former state senator, is sponsoring a bill to develop federal guidelines, update state authorities on the latest clean-up techniques, and provide more than $4.5 million for research over the next three years.

In Oregon, the costs are borne by homeowners. The average clean-up costs for a two-bedroom house is $6,500, plus additional fees to prove the property is clean. Some owners decide to forego this price tag, however, by either demolishing the property or abandoning it.

"Right now there is no actual timeframe for cleaning up these properties," says Sherry. "The owner can just sit on it, as long as it is closed down and no one is using or renting it. But there has been talk of legislation to force homeowners to either clean these structures or tear them down."

In Montana, Representative Wiseman says the costs of cleanups is just one more reason why lawmakers need to do all they can to restrict access to the chemicals used to make meth. "These expenses are just going to continue to grow," he says. "Eventually the state and local governments that are picking up the tab are going to have to find another way to do it."

FAST FACTS ABOUT METH USE

* Methamphetamine kills by causing heart failure, brain damage and stroke. It causes more damage to the brain than alcohol, heroin or cocaine.

* Women are more likely to use meth than cocaine.

* Meth users are the hardest to treat of all drug users.

* The average meth cook annually teaches 10 other people how to make meth.

* Every pound of meth produced leaves behind five pounds of toxic waste that is routinely dumped into streams, fields and sewage systems.

* Methamphetamine-induced paranoia has led to numerous murders and suicides.

Source: Midwest HIDTA 

Garry Boulard is a free-lance writer in Albuquerque, N.M. He is a frequent contributor to State Legislature magazine.