Progress made in Iowa, but work remains in fight against meth abuse

Restricting access to some of the common products containing ingredients for making methamphetamine has worked in recent years, those in charge of battling use of the drug believe.

Yet meth makers continue to find ways around the limits.

“In this business you don't use the word ‘solution'. We're mitigating it,” Dale Woolery, associate director of the Governor's Office of Drug Control Policy, said.

“There's always going to be a way to do it,” said Briana, 29, a former meth user and maker from Keokuk who is in the Area Substance Abuse Council's Heart of Iowa residential treatment program in Cedar Rapids.

After a decade off the drug, Briana, who didn't want to be identified by her last name, began using meth to cope with a deteriorating, ultimately abusive, relationship with the father of her two young sons. Soon, she was making her own meth.

“I could make $1,000 a night, easy,” she said.

In 2005, state laws began restricting access to products containing pseudoephedrine, a must-have meth ingredient also used in over-the-counter cold medications. Retailers moved them behind the counter, and individuals may buy no more than 75 grams a month.

To get around limits on the availability of the key ingredient pseudoephedrine, Briana exchanged a gram of her finished product, or up to $100 cash, for a box of 12 or 24 cold tablets. A single box can produce up to 8 grams of methamphetamine, at $100 to $125 a gram.

A decade ago, “you could buy two or three boxes off the shelf, no big deal,” Briana said. “Putting a limit on the boxes slowed it down a lot.”

Woolery said, “We're trying to make it tougher for people to get their hands on the key ingredient.”

Smaller operations

After a peak of 1,500 in 2004, meth lab seizures in Iowa declined to 178 in 2007. There were 305 seizures last year, which is up from 267 in 2009, records kept by Woolery's office show.

In Linn County, 37 meth labs were seized last year, trailing only Polk County's 47 in Iowa. Dubuque County was third, with 30 labs. Johnson County had 10. This year, 72 labs have been seized statewide to date. Most of them - 21 of March 30 - were in Dubuque County. Six labs have been found this year in Linn County, one in Johnson County.

Dubuque County Sheriff's Sgt. Dale Snyder, project director of the Dubuque Drug Task Force, said labs have gotten smaller since the 2005 laws. Cookers adapted, eliminating restricted ingredients or making better use them.

A simplified “one-pot” recipe uses a single mixing vessel, usually a plastic two-liter soft drink bottle. The one-pot method uses less pseudoephedrine and no anhydrous ammonia, another key precursor.

“I did the shake-and-bake,” another nickname for the one-pot method, said Briana. “The kids' dad, he did the anhydrous, where they have to go out and tap the (storage) tank.”

Briana sold her product to a small circle of friends and acquaintances and to their friends and acquaintances.

Snyder said trading meth for ingredients is common. “They're supplying themselves and few other people who go out and buy (pseudoephedrine) pills for them,” he said.

The National Precursor Log Exchange allows real-time tracking of meth precursors by pharmacies and law enforcement. Funded by the pharmaceutical industry, it has operated in Iowa since September.

Using the database, Iowa police and retailers blocked 22,919 illegal attempts to purchase pseudoephedrine, denying meth cookers 57 kilograms - about 125 pounds - of the ingredient, in the eight months through April 30. That would have made up to 116 pounds of meth by the most commonly used recipes, Woolery said.

Woolery estimated homemade meth accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of the drug used by Iowans.

“Never goes well”

Briana, who worked at restaurants and motels during her 10 clean years, didn't intend to use much when she started again. “But when I got back on the drug, I just kind of secluded myself in my house,” she said.

She consumed increasing amounts of her product, but enough was left over to make good, steady money for a high school graduate.

“That's what ends up pulling a lot of people back on the drug,” Katey Garoutte, Briana's counselor at Heart of Iowa, said. “They say, ‘I'm just going to deal, I'm not going to use.' And it never goes well.”

She never was arrested or charged, but the precursor laws may have contributed to the end of Briana's meth-making days. As her circle of pseudoephedrine-supplying acquaintances widened, someone tipped the Department of Human Services that she was making meth in the presence of her sons, now 2 and 7.

DHS workers visited Briana's home. A drug test on a few snips of boys' hair turned up positive for meth - in much higher concentrations than in her own body. “It's common for kids to have a higher number than their parents,” Garoutte said. “They're smaller, and a lot closer to the ground” where residue collects.

The case was one of 169 child abuse or neglect cases last year investigated by the state Department of Human Services. That's well under the level in 2004, but more than double the 2009 figure.

Faced with losing custody of her boys, Briana went to Heart of Iowa six months ago. Her sons joined here there, where she's subject to periodic drug testing and other monitoring while working on quitting meth for good.

“It's much harder to quit the second or third time,” Garoutte said.

Still, Briana is optimistic. Aftercare is arranged through Heart of Iowa. When her residential treatment is done soon, she'll return to Keokuk.

“I've still got a life back there I need to deal with,” she said.