Part 1: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n021.a01.html

Part 2: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n021.a02.html

Part 3: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n021.a03.html

Part 4: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n023.a01.html

Part 5: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n022.a02.html

Part 6: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n022.a01.html

Part 7: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n022.a03.html

EPIDEMIC IN OUR MIDST

ANALYZING THE METH OFFENSIVE

And then along came meth. 

As America closes out a century of stimulant abuse, its slavishness

to methamphetamine has spawned a public health epidemic equal to, if not more devastating than, the crack cocaine siege of the '80s. 

The mystery, for narcotics officers and public health officials alike, is when meth will jump the Mississippi River, the gateway to the East Coast.  It will not be long.  From California, where it took hold after World War II, a re-engineered meth has already leapfrogged the Rockies to ravage the Midwest. 

There is no mystery about meth and Washington state.  This drug is insinuating itself here at the speed of light. 

Meth is as seductive a drug as can be imagined -- its euphoric sensation is inexpensive and long-lasting.  And meth can be ingested in varied ways: Inject it, smoke it, snort it or, diluted with liquid, swallow it. 

Only with time -- marked by devastated lives, splintered families and debilitated neighborhoods -- does meth reveal itself to be, as national drug policy analyst Mark Kleiman observes, "really everything they said crack was: The real horror drug."

Meth's allure to its victims is palpable.  "In some ways, it's the perfect drug of the '90s," notes E.  Michael Gorman, a research scientist at the University of Washington Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute.  "It's about making the most out of life."

Those who fall under its spell worship it initially as the ultimate drug of productivity. 

On the benign end ( relatively speaking ) of the spectrum of stimulants that engage the brain's pleasure center are nicotine and caffeine.  Rocketing off the other end is meth, a synthetic drug so arousing that its intensity has been equated with the might of 10 orgasms and so energizing that people knock off the weekly housecleaning in a half hour, watching extra pounds melt away at the same time. 

Meth is known as the "poor man's cocaine" because it can cost half as much.  Meth also feels good for six to 14 hours or more, compared with cocaine's rush of 30 to 45 minutes. 

The payment for such pleasure is a phenomenal rate of addiction.  "Once you become addicted to meth, you can't stand how you feel without it," says Dr.  Alex Stalcup.  His practice in the San Francisco area is rife with women who have bartered away their children for the drug and law enforcement officers whose careers have crashed under meth's weight. 

Anyone with a passing familiarity with the meth of old, called "speed" during its heyday in the '60s, knows it is synonymous with California.  Originally a biker drug in the San Diego area, meth was essentially appropriated by organized crime families in Mexico and pushed northward along well-established drug supply routes, including I-5. 

The improved version still arrives in Washington state this way; in what amounts no veteran narcotics officer is willing to hazard a guess. 

But what's truly unnerving about meth is that even if the United States erected an impenetrable barrier along the Mexican border, the drug would still be plentiful here.  California, like Mexico, is a "source country" for Washington state.  Moreover, unlike most other drugs, meth can be produced -- in large quantities that routinely elude law enforcement -- easily and cheaply, if not always without explosions and fire. 

An endless supply of recipes is as handy as the Internet.  Those who distrust the sources -- sometimes meth cooks whiling away time in prison -- can click on amazon.com to order manufacturing instructions, courtesy of a Port Townsend publisher whose speciality is illegal mayhem. 

Shopping for the ingredients ( "precursor chemicals" ) will take you no farther than local drug and hardware stores.  Hunkering down at home, a person can whip up a batch in about 30 minutes by using basic chemistry and kitchen equipment as common as a blender and a glass bowl. 

At this point meth parts company with drugs like heroin and cocaine: The person has become a manufacturer, a potential supplier and, worse for the unsuspecting public, a threat to the environment. 

Making any quantity of meth creates five times that amount in toxic wastes.  And because making meth is illegal under state and federal law, it's unlikely manufacturers will risk detection by disposing of the wastes lawfully.  So they dump meth's dregs down the toilet or bury them in the yard, with either step allowing the dangerous refuse to seep into the groundwater. 

These consequences -- the personal causing the public -- make meth the state's latest Public Enemy. 

As Lt.  Gov.  Brad Owen aptly says: "Whether you are a fiscal conservative or a social liberal, meth is going to nail you in the pocket or the heart."

But why should King County fret? Drug cultures are inherently local, and our drugs are heroin, cocaine and marijuana.  The county's annual drug trends report last June piled these drugs high on our plate: Nearly one in three high school seniors is regularly smoking marijuana, the county leads the nation in heroin deaths per capita and cocaine is enjoying a resurgence.  In that lineup meth was almost a footnote. 

Meth is on a rampage. 

The measure of meth isn't whether it is already one of the top illicit drugs but the spectacular rate at which it's spreading in King County:

- - Treatment admissions for adults citing meth as their primary drug increased 850 percent from 1992 to the first half of 1998.  The growth was seven times faster than cocaine and more than three times the rate for heroin. 

- - Referrals for treatment from Child Protective Services, which gets involved with a family when the parent is abusing or neglecting a child, or is at high risk for doing so, more than doubled from 1995-96 to 1998-99. 

- - The discovery of clandestine meth labs is a common occurrence.  At the beginning of the decade, King County reported six labs to the state Department of Ecology, which by law must dispose of the remains.  By the end of October, 78 labs had been detected in 1999. 

Numbing as these numbers are, the stories behind them are doubly so.  The first populations to succumb to the vagaries of meth in Seattle have been street kids and gay males. 

Because meth revs up the central nervous system, the drug provides street kids an obvious advantage -- they can keep moving, to avoid police and anyone intent on taking advantage of them. 

Because of its aphrodisiac effects, meth has become a constant companion in gay bars and bath houses in Seattle.  Gay men describe sexual marathons lasting up to four days.  More worrisome than meth's eventual boomerang effect on the body is the potential for those who inject meth to contract HIV and Hepatitis C. 

Meth's incursion in King County could halt.  So far, though, that's tantamount to hoping against hope.  The drug has been detected in 5 percent of Seattle's Evergreen Treatment Services patients, whose drug of choice is heroin.  "If it drifts above 10 percent, I'll get pretty worried," director Ron Jackson says. 

King County is not a gated community. 

It doesn't get much plainer than this: King County's next-door neighbor is the meth capital of the state.  Pierce County has the third highest number of labs in the country, behind two Southern California counties.  Through October, the county told DOE it had found 256 labs, compared with 17 only four years ago. 

On I-5, where Pierce County gives way to King County, there's no border crossing, no agents with dogs screening vehicles for illicit merchandise.  There's no stopping meth from rolling on in, from Pierce County or California or Mexico. 

Besides that, meth's being made in rental houses, recreational vehicles and motel rooms all over King County.  Tony neighborhoods are not immune.  At a meth lab at Carillon Point in Kirkland, the ingredients came in by boat; the finished product left the same way. 

With the county's "huge customer base," it's just a matter of time until meth grabs headlines here as it has in Pierce County, wagers U.S.  District Judge Jack E.  Tanner. 

In less than a decade Tanner has seen meth surpass cocaine as the drug of choice among defendants in his court.  And, as is wholly typical of meth users, all the defendants have been white, a stark contrast to the court's parade of black defendants on cocaine charges. 

Three years ago Kleiman, the drug policy analyst, wrote an article for The Los Angeles Times titled "Meth is Back and We're Not Ready." Today he says he would label it "Meth is Here and We're Not Ready." We're running short on time. 

Kleiman's pessimism reflects his opinion that "nothing useful is being done" in the way of public policy. 

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EX-ADDICT REBUILDS RUINED LIFE FROM THE BOTTOM UP

Anything John Dorman did, he did well. 

After graduating from the University of Puget Sound Law School in the top 10 percent of his class, he built a successful solo practice in Tacoma devoted to personal injury law. 

When Dorman switched vocations _ to making methamphetamine -- he applied himself just as methodically.  At the University of Washington, he spent hours poring over chemical textbooks and trade journals to perfect a recipe to sate his own addiction and supply others with the drug at $1,000 an ounce. 

Today Dorman, 47, is motivated by the most primal of objectives -- survival.  For the next four years and eight months, he will dance to the tune of a federal probation officer: told where he can and cannot live and who he can and cannot associate with.  The probation officer expects Dorman to call once a day to find out whether he has to submit to a urine analysis. 

Dorman's freedom depends on staying clean and sober.  He's been both since he finished a drug treatment program at the federal penitentiary in Sheridan, Ore. 

Four years ago Dorman was the 28th person indicted in Operation Crystal Clear, a massive federal investigation of meth manufacturing in Pierce County, by then the undisputed crank capital of Washington state. 

The state and federal law enforcement officers who worked the investigation wanted Dorman.  He'd cut a wide swath in Pierce County, first as a practicing attorney to be envied, then as a disbarred attorney to be pitied. 

Cocaine had been his first master.  In the mid-'80s Dorman rose at 4:30 a.m.  to prepare for the high-pressure work day.  At first his pre-dawn vehicle was an exercise bike.  Then it was coke. 

After he was sentenced to 45 months in prison for embezzling money from clients, Dorman wisely decided that cocaine was ruining his life.  Meth, he thought, would be more manageable. 

It's a decision people far less worldly have made to their everlasting regret. 

What meth offered Dorman that coke hadn't -- besides a longer high -- was a new occupation he needed desperately.  Within three months of starting to use meth, Dorman began cooking. 

If he's in a rare boastful mood, he will say: "I'm told I made some high-quality meth.''

Dorman's recollections of being a round-the-clock meth cook show his life had lost any sense of normalcy: chemical explosions that "by the grace of God" failed to blind him; a furtive trip to Provo, Utah, to buy red phosphorus and iodine, ingredients for the second-generation cooking method; selling $60,000 worth of meth at a motel after investing less than $2,000 in chemicals. 

His former accomplices are dead or in prison.  Leroy R.  Brandt, who shared a federal indictment with Dorman, was Dorman's partner in a cooking operation in a detached garage in Puyallup.  As is common with meth addicts in partnership, they were paranoid, as much of each other as of law enforcement.  Dorman walked out.  But on the day Brandt was arrested, while manufacturing meth, he reportedly told agents: "You don't want me.  You want John Dorman."

One officer attached to Operation Crystal Clear wanted Dorman very badly. 

Tom Lind had been a year behind Dorman at Stadium High School in Tacoma.  Dorman chose law, Lind chose architecture.  After practicing five years, Lind joined the Pierce County Sheriff's Department, rising to the rank of detective-sergeant. 

In the late '80s, Lind was the first police officer in the state to recognize meth for its awesome potential to be a more addictive, more destructive drug than cocaine.  He became a walking show-and-tell about the limitless variety of meth labs.  Lind wanted Dorman for the havoc the over-achieving ex-attorney was creating: By some accounts, Dorman had been responsible for 68 people learning to make meth. 

Lind, deputized as a federal marshal, arrested Dorman, observing that his prey was "dumbfounded" at being caught. 

Staring at a couple dozen years in prison, Dorman agreed to inform on others; it reduced his commitment to 70 months plus five years probation. 

Dorman's insights into his outrageous behavior are as common today as they were rare, even non-existent, during the decade he was a practicing addict.  Addicts, Dorman says, don't question what they're doing. 

When he speaks to gatherings of law enforcement officers or county prosecutors, Dorman says: "For me, addiction has resulted in my whole life being shattered."

[sidebar]

MOM'S NEW JOB: MANAGING TEEN'S RUGGED RECOVERY

Cindy Fulton couldn't imagine ever snooping in her teenaged daughter's diary, stripping her bedroom bare or calling her friends behind her back. 

Then again, Fulton never dreamed she'd have a methamphetamine addict living under her roof masquerading as her child.  Desperate times call for desperate measures. 

As a pediatric nurse at Children's Hospital in Seattle, Fulton was used to dealing with other people's sick babies.  But she was woefully unprepared to deal with -- even to detect -- what was happening to her own. 

"This drug never came home with the information she brought from school," Fulton says.  That's hardly surprising.  Only in the last few years has the stimulant become wildly popular in Pierce County where the family lives. 

When Fulton's daughter Lauren ( not her real name ) entered Gig Harbor High School, meth was waiting for her across the street.  Going against her mother's wishes that she not leave the open campus for lunch, Lauren headed for a vacant lot.  Courtesy of the older sister of a girl in her class, Lauren did her first line of meth. 

Her mother never saw it coming.  An outgoing and vivacious girl with a 3.9 GPA and more extracurricular activities than hours in the day, Lauren had taken the anti-drug DARE program in fifth grade.  She assured her mother she'd never do drugs because they were "stupid."

Initially Fulton didn't see the telltale signs.  Lauren had gone to live with her dad because she thought her mom was too strict.  When she returned to Fulton's house in a gated community just over the Tacoma Narrows bridge, she'd lost a substantial amount of weight, her grades had plummeted and she'd made wholesale changes in activities and friends.  Lauren wasn't coming home by curfew, and sometimes not at all.  She had a couple of car accidents and been ticketed for speeding a couple of times.  She enrolled in summer school to make up for flunking a course. 

It was "a complete personality change," Fulton thought. 

Though they had no evidence, Fulton and her new husband had Lauren evaluated for drug use.  To a drug counselor the teen admitted she had used meth but had stopped.  After Lauren finished a 12-week outpatient treatment program, some measure of calm returned to the household. 

Over the next year or so, Lauren's urine analyses repeatedly tested negative for meth.  But Fulton couldn't understand why her daughter was still doing so poorly in school.  In December of her senior year, Lauren turned 18.  "Then it was pretty tough to force her to do anything," Fulton recalls.  "The chaos that it ( drug use ) brings into your home is intolerable."

Eventually Lauren gave them no choice.  "It was the last day of high school, and she and I were sitting in the principal's office begging for her to be able to walk" across the stage at graduation, Fulton explains. 

She and her husband decided Lauren "can either prove to us it's not ( drug use ) and we can beg for forgiveness, or we will find the answer." The answer was in a slip of paper Fulton's husband found next to the computer.  Over the Internet Lauren had been buying a product that removed any trace of meth from her urine. 

"Then we sat her down," Fulton says.  "We gave her the choice of packing up and leaving home never to return, even though we told her we'd always love her, or taking a bed in treatment."

Today this mother swears that if her daughter hadn't made the latter choice, she would have had her prosecuted for theft -- for stealing one of her old credit cards and running up a $3,000 tab. 

Fulton switched occupations when Lauren entered inpatient treatment.  She quit her job at Children's Hospital on an hour's notice: Managing her daughter's recovery became a full-time job.  As an indication of how meth had physically ravaged Lauren, the teen regained 22 pounds in the first three weeks of treatment.  After that, Lauren spent a month in Prosperity House in Sumner and three months at a halfway house in Bellingham. 

"Lauren was the youngest person wherever she'd go," Fulton notes, and often one of the few without a criminal record. 

Over six months, Fulton spent $10,000 out of pocket to get her daughter straight. 

Lauren has been clean and sober about 18 months.  She tried college but "cognitively, she was a disaster," Fulton says, alluding to meth's effect on her brain.  She is holding down a full-time job in a financial firm. 

These days Fulton describes her status as "the parent of a meth addict in recovery." In September she introduced herself that way to several hundred police officers, treatment experts, children's advocates and probation officers attending a meth conference held by the Washington State Narcotics Investigators Association. 

After explaining that Lauren wasn't able to think clearly until she had been out of treatment 10 months, Fulton asked them: "Will she ever be the same? I don't know.  You guys tell me."