'Crystal' is replacing meth from home labs

DES MOINES, Iowa — In the seven months since Iowa passed its law restricting cold medicines used to make methamphetamine, busts of homemade meth labs have dropped from 120 a month to just 20. People once terrified about the neighbor's house blowing up now walk up to the state's drug policy director, Marvin Van Haaften, at his local Wal-Mart to thank him for making them safer.

But Van Haaften, like officials in other states that have passed similar restrictions, is now worried about a new problem: The drop in home-cooked meth has been met by a new flood of crystal methamphetamine coming largely from Mexico. Sometimes called ice, crystal methamphetamine is far purer, and therefore even more highly addictive, than powdered home-cooked meth, a shift that treatment providers say has led to greater risk of overdose. And because crystal methamphetamine costs more, police say thefts are increasing, as people who once cooked at home now have to buy it.

The University of Iowa Burn Center, which in 2004 spent $2.8 million treating people whose skin had been scorched off by the toxic chemicals used to make meth at home, says it now sees hardly any such cases. Treatment centers, on the other hand, say they are treating just as many or more meth addicts. And although child welfare officials say they are removing fewer children from homes where parents are cooking the drug, the number of children being removed from homes where parents are using it has more than made up the difference.

"It's killing us, this Mexican ice," said Van Haaften, a former sheriff. "I'm not sure we can control it as well as we can the meth labs in your community."

As Congress prepares to restrict the sale of pseudoephedrine, the cold medicine ingredient that is used to make methamphetamine, officials here and in other states that have imposed similar restrictions recently caution that the laws fall far short of a solution to the epidemic of meth abuse.

Federal drug agents tend to describe ice as methamphetamine that is at least 90 percent pure. Officials here say much of their crystal methamphetamine is less pure — "dirty ice," they call it. But either is far more potent than homemade powdered meth; a "good cook" yields a drug that is about 42 percent pure, but around 25 percent is more common. And in the four months after the law took effect here, average purity went from 47 percent to 80 percent.