New way to make meth

By CAITLIN SULLIVAN/Staff
A new easier and cheaper way to make meth, using just a soda bottle, some household chemicals and a handful of cold pills, is gaining popularity throughout the region.
The process, according to Virginia State Police 1st Sgt. John Ruffin, is known as “shake-and-bake” or the “one-pot” method.
“We’ve seen them in Wythe and Smyth counties within the last six months,” Ruffin said.
Police in the region have uncovered about five shake-and-bake meth labs in the past six months, two in the past two weeks. None have been found in Washington County to date.
“We haven’t seen (shake-and-bakes) in our area,” Washington County Sheriff Fred Newman said. “But I’m not naïve enough to say that it’s not here.”
Virginia State Police found the first shake-and-bake in this region a little more than a year ago in Bland County. Ruffin said a woman called the police when she found a strange-looking 20-ounce soda bottle in the ditch in front of her house.
Simplicity makes this new type of meth lab popular. It doesn’t take as much equipment or chemicals as a traditional meth lab. In addition, it’s harder to monitor, is very mobile and is easy to get rid of. Witness that 20-ounce bottle in the Bland ditch.
How it works
“The whole cook is done in one bottle,” Ruffin said. “They don’t get as much yield per cook as opposed to red phosphorous cooks.”
The red phosphorous method, the traditional meth lab, yields between 10 and 18 grams of meth, Ruffin said. The shake-and-bake yields three or four grams.
“Because they’re not getting as much meth per cook, they’re cooking more often,” the sergeant said.
Fires have always been a meth lab danger. Condensing everything down to 20 ounces only makes it more so.
“The one-pot cook you have to monitor more closely,” Ruffin said. “These plastic bottles aren’t designed to hold these ingredients. They’re seeing more leakage.”
If the cook is not done just so, Ruffin said, if there is too much of one ingredient and not enough of another, fire is just one of the dangers. There’s also the possibility of explosions.
“During the cooking process there’s a build-up of a lot of pressure,” Ruffin said. “If they don’t release the pressure properly it explodes… It looks like a dragon breathing fire.”
Ruffin said the new trend in meth labs could stem from the crackdown that limits access to ingredients used in traditional red phosphorous labs. One of the old-style labs would take 10 boxes of cold pills containing pseudoephedrine. Shake and bake needs only two.
“We’re finding a lot of the cookers are not in it for the profit but for the effects. Three or four people can bring the ingredients to a cook and split the product,” Ruffin said. “It’s easier to conceal, you can start cooking it in your car driving down the road. If the police show up at your house, it’s a lot easier to pour a 20-ounce bottle down the drain.”
And then it gets into the public water system. Ruffin said people picking up trash roadside have found the waste, too. For every pound of meth produced, he said, there’s another five to seven pounds of waste.
A Trend
Newman said three traditional meth lab were busted in Washington County two months ago over a seven to 10-day stretch.
And last week there was another one.
Although the lab busted Thursday on Abingdon’s Hidden Valley Road was a conventional one, a man who had been in trouble with the drug before is accused of operating it.
Richard Jerry Hicks, one of the two people arrested, was found guilty of possession of schedule II drugs in 2003.
“Some of the ones that we have encountered now, we have seen before,” Ruffin said. “They’re getting out of jail and going back to cook.”
Newman said in the mid-2000s, when the Sheriff’s Office busted 26 labs, most of the evidence was given to the DEA so the offenders could be tried under the tougher federal laws. Though the terms varied, with one man landing a 30-year sentence, most found themselves behind bars for three to eight-year runs.
“In the near future, the people sentenced back then will be out of prison,” Newman said.
Since the heavy crackdown on meth labs in the county, Damascus Police Chief Bill Nunley said he’s seen meth production become less popular and prescription drugs become more of a problem.
“Prescription medications is the No. 1 abuse now (in Damascus),” Nunley said. “It’s readily available.”
Smurfing
Part of why shake-and-bakes have become popular and part of why they’re so hard to catch is that all of the ingredients and quantity of ingredients are legal. Participants can go from drugstore to drugstore and from state to state buying the legal amount of pseudoephedrine. This is known as “smurfing.”
Newman said it’s difficult to monitor who’s obtaining legal amounts of cold medications.
“They’re crafty enough to not revisit real often,” Newman said. “It’s tough to monitor different persons going to different businesses on different days.”
Ruffin said part of the uptick could be tied to the recession.
“Usually when the economy goes bad, our drug cases will increase a little bit,” Ruffin said.
To combat the increasing number of one-pot shops, Ruffin said the Virginia State Police is pushing awareness, education, enforcement and treatment. He said it’s important that law enforcement officials know what to look for.
“A 20 oz. soda bottle that looks like it has sand and water in it, he’s looking at a meth lab,” Ruffin said. “(A law enforcement official) could be standing in a house with a potential meth lab and they need to be aware of it because it is very hazardous.”
Ruffin said police rely heavily on the public for information.
“If people see suspicious activity or smell a strange odor, call law enforcement,” he said. “In my 17 years with the state police, this is one thing, one drug, where the public … and law enforcement … actually work together to share information and share a common goal to get rid of meth labs. There are a lot of innocent victims with these meth labs.”
The calls he said, have been increasing, especially about the shake-and-bake method.
“We’re starting to receive more calls from the community on one-pot meth labs,” Ruffin said. “They’re starting to pick up a little bit right now. I think it will spread to Washington County.”
To contact Caitlin Sullivan e-mail or call (276) 628-7101.