‘Shake And Bake’

Addicts have a new way to make their own methamphetamine using the easier and more portable one-pot method.

The one-pot, or shake and bake, involves cooking meth by using a chemical reaction in a small plastic bottle. The method is replacing larger, home-based labs and even mobile labs concealed in cars.

The ups?

Cleanup is easier for law enforcement, which is especially useful when federal budget cuts are taking a bite out of the Drug Enforcement Agency’s budget. And the new method eliminates the need to add anhydrous ammonia, which was often stolen from farms and businesses.

The downs?

Because they are portable and the smell is contained, one-pot cooks are much harder to detect with traditional law enforcement tactics. And more portable means the dangers inherent with making meth can be concealed and carried into public.

Walmart Meth

Mark Booher, a deputy prosecuting attorney in Washington County, said almost all of the meth production cases now handled by the prosecutor’s office involve the one-pot method.

So portable is a shake and bake system, that some users are brazen enough to cook in public. Booher handled the case last year in which a Bentonville man was arrested in the Springdale Walmart after he walked through the store with a bag containing a plastic bottle of still-cooking meth.

“Imagine being in the checkout line and this thing is cooking next to you,” he said.

Authorities emphasize despite the smaller nature of the bottles, they are as toxic as larger labs and just as prone to deadly explosions.

“If somebody cooking in a kitchen miscalculated or knocked something over, they just ran out and let the place burn,” said Lt. Creston Mackey, former head of the 4th Judicial District Drug Task Force. “What they’re seeing now is an explosion right in the cook’s hands, one that both burns them thermally and chemically. It’s a major concern in terms of health care costs both for local hospitals and in the prison system.”

An Associated Press survey last year found some burn units reported 30 percent of their workload related to meth burns. Another study, by burn doctors at a Michigan clinic, found the average meth-burn patient’s bill ran about $135,000, or 60 percent more than other burn victims.

Law Enforcement

Full-size labs were often exposed when neighbors or police noticed the chemical smell, discarded ingredient containers, or unusual traffic at a home or other location, said Sgt. Brad Renfro, the head of the Drug Task Force.

“One-pot eliminates a big part of all those factors. Once they’ve purchased what they need, these cooks are very discreet compared to bigger labs,” he said. “Also, because it’s mostly for personal use, you can’t use one arrest to track down other cooks or users the way you could with a bigger operation.”

Once dumped, the used one-pot rigs leave little traceable evidence.

“We know we’re not going after Coca-Cola or Gatorade, but that’s about the only identifiable markings on the equipment,” Renfro said.

Meth’s addictive qualities mean it will constantly move into new areas, said Asa Hutchinson, former administrator of the Drug Enforcement Agency. A decade ago, it was moving from the Southwest and Midwest into New England, but remained mostly a rural problem. The development of easier-to-hide one-pot methods is increasing the drug’s popularity now in urban settings, he said.

Accurate data on the number of meth users in Northwest Arkansas is hard to pinpoint, but the number of seizures and amounts seized, as well as the demand for rehabilitation services, suggest the problem is steady, officials said.

“We know rehab doesn’t always stick, and there will always be people who are new to the drug getting hooked,” Renfro said. “From what we can tell, it’s a fairly steady thing right now, not expanding the way it was a few years ago.”

Few cooks still use a full-size lab. Those who do are usually long-term users who are more familiar with the older method, he said.

Cleanup Funding

Federal budget cuts dried up a Drug Enforcement Agency cleanup fund about a year ago, forcing local law enforcement authorities to either absorb cleanup costs themselves or look for new money sources, Renfro said. In several cases, grants from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund hazardous material cleanup program helped, he said.

The DEA fund, set up in the late 1990s, once held $20 million annually for cleanups nationwide, Hutchinson said.

“The systems are better today, and the personnel are better trained, but cleanup costs remain a drain on local authorities,” Hutchinson said. “It’s one of those things that really needs to be addressed again on the federal level.”

Neutralizing chemicals, protective suits and additional training make disposal safer than it once was, and one-pot labs don’t present the same inhalant risks as home-based operations.

The Arkansas State Police have received a grant to train narcotics teams in safe neutralization, transport and storage of meth debris, said Steve Coppinger, a state police investigator. The grant also paid for secure pods to store large amounts of toxic debris. Seven of the pods are being deployed across the state, including one at the Washington County Sheriff’s Office. The intent is to reduce the times a commercial decontamination-and-disposal company needs to be called, reducing overall cleanup costs, Coppinger said.

“It’s a good idea, although in reality, it may soon be outpaced by the improvements in neutralization,” Coppinger said. “If the waste can be totally neutralized, it can go in with regular trash, and there’s no more cleanup needed.”

Any structure where meth has been found is placed on a “black list” by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, and can’t be occupied until it’s been tested, cleaned if necessary, and retested. Under Arkansas law, a certified contractor has to perform the testing, and analysis must be completed by a certified lab. The decontamination can be done by anyone.

That’s why methbioclean.com, a local company, has started selling do-it-yourself cleaning kits. The kits include testing supplies, protective clothing, a neutralizing agent and a fog machine that disburses the neutralizer throughout a building. The $800 kits are essentially the same setup used by commercial decontamination teams who can charge thousands to clean a space, said Gary McBride, company president.

The black list was started in 2008, and is growing, said Clyde Rhoads, chief of the hazardous waste division at ADEQ. The list contained 737 structures last week. Last year, 188 addresses were added while only 52 were removed.

Ammonia Thefts

One benefit of the switch to one-pot cooking has been the decrease in ammonia thefts.

Older production methods required adding anhydrous ammonia to the chemical mix. The compound, used as an agricultural fertilizer and an industrial coolant, was often stolen from farms and factory tanks.

“It was an epidemic for several years. Local chicken plants and other industrial sites were hit regularly,” Mackey said. “As the production methods for meth changed, they came up with a way to produce the ammonia during the cooking process, and ammonia thefts really dropped off the radar. The lastest version of full-sized labs, as well as the one-pot method, don’t require the addition of ammonia, so that did help solve one problem that was associated with meth for a long time.”

Tyson Foods added additional security at processing plants around the nation as anhydrous ammonia thefts soared, said Worth Sparkman, a company spokesman. The company doesn’t track details on what those thefts might have cost the company, but said the threat has waned in recent years.

The plants use ammonia mostly as a coolant for industrial machines.

Super Labs

Most distribution-level arrests in Northwest Arkansas have always involved imported meth. Home-based labs and now the one-pot method were often designed only to produce enough meth for personal use, or for a limited circle of users, prosecutors said.

Federal prosecutions for drug distribution have increased dramatically in recent years, though that is mostly because of a handful of very large busts. In 2009, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas handled 60 drug prosecutions. That number increased to 131 prosecutions in 2010 and 201 cases in 2011.

While the U.S. Attorney’s Office doesn’t keep track of which drugs are involved in each case, Conner Eldridge, the U.S. attorney for the district, said meth remains the most popular drug in Northwest Arkansas, followed by cocaine.

“We’ve seen a lot of changes in the meth trade in the past 10 years,” Eldridge said. “Meth used to primarily be cooked locally, but laws have been passed in Arkansas that made obtaining the ingredients more difficult. The Mexican cartels have now taken the trade over.”

Eldridge estimates 80 percent of the methamphetamine in Northwest Arkansas today comes from Mexico.

“We just don’t see the local labs like we used to,” he said. “And more often than not the meth that comes from Mexico is more pure, cheaper and of higher quality.”

The number of area users appears steady while lab busts are down, meaning imported meth is probably accounting for more of the supply than even a few years ago, Renfro said.

Law enforcement can make a bigger dent in the meth problem by pursuing imported meth more than one-pot busts, Hutchinson said.

“Personal-use operators are nigh impossible to hit from a law enforcement standpoint,” he said. “The import stream is where we need to put the energies of law enforcement in order to make a significant impact.”