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To learn more about methamphetamine:

www.kci.org/meth_info/links.htm

www.dea.gov/pubs/states/maine.html.

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Drug-abuse demographics

The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency and Rumford police are seeking help from the public to establish demographics of methamphetamine use in Oxford County.

Ongoing investigations have revealed that some yet-to-be-identified Rumford-area residents who experimented with meth had medical episodes and were treated at area hospitals, said Maine Drug Enforcement agent Gerry Baril.

“We want to impress on the Food and Drug Administration that this is a dangerous substance and needs to have better controls in place to prevent unauthorized use,” he said.

That’s why Baril is looking for phone calls that specify sex and ages only of people treated for meth use.

“If we can confirm these demographics, it will help us to better get the word out that meth use can be hazardous to your health,” he added.

To contact the drug enforcement agency, 800-452-6457; Rumford police, 364-4551 or rumfrdpd@rumfrdpd.com.

Meth abuse rising in Maine
By Terry Karkos
Staff Writer

Methamphetamine is a dangerous drug. It’s dangerous for the people who use it and dangerous for those who live near where it’s made.

Usage of “”meth,”” which has been around since the 1960s, is gaining in Maine.

“It’s an emerging problem,” said Gerry Baril, special agent for the Maine Drug Enforcement Agency.

Over the past 12 months, drug enforcement agents and police have searched for clandestine “”meth”” manufacturing labs in seven locations in Oxford County. They’ve found three.

Before that, a major meth lab in Peru was raided and dismantled.

“It’s a major mid-America problem that used to be a West Coast problem,” said Baril, supervisor of the Lewiston office serving Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties. He cited high usage in states such as Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas and Indiana.

“”Kitchen crank”” is a low-grade form of meth, which is increasingly being manufactured in rural neighborhoods on kitchen tabletops or small areas.

The process uses heated ethyl ether, which can explode.

“If neighbors should have a concern, that’s one of them. One can of ether will completely disintegrate an automobile. It will even blow the roof off a house,” said Dan Rousseau, a Portland-based U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, 20 to 30 percent of illegal meth labs are found because of explosions.

Most dangerous

It is the kitchen crank found in Oxford County that has state, federal, county and local police joining ranks to prevent it from spreading statewide. Rousseau considers methamphetamine to be the most dangerous drug because “it completely soups up your system.”

Rousseau said that meth shares all of the characteristics of the psychedelic PCP – decreased awareness of pain, impaired thinking, speaking and reasoning, violence and extreme paranoia, dramatic changes in perception and mood, to name a few.

But unlike PCP, a meth high also gives users superhuman strength that can last up to four hours, depending on quality, he added.

So from the viewpoint of a local police officer, meth is “a little worse” than PCP because of the level of violence associated with it, Rousseau said.

When local police encounter someone high on meth, Rousseau said, “We tell the officers, ‘Don’t trust them,’ because their mood can change instantaneously … because of the supercharged adrenalin effect.””

Baril said that when police make felony arrests, they’re trained to meet force with force.

That’s the last thing you want to do with a person on meth, Baril said. “”You have to ratchet down and take more time. You take them into custody by calming them, by not moving quickly, not being loud and abusive or aggressive.””

Damage like Alzheimer’s

According to the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the effects of methamphetamine usage include addiction, psychotic behavior and brain damage.

Chronic use of the central nervous system stimulant can cause violent behavior, anxiety, confusion, insomnia, auditory hallucinations, mood disturbances, delusions and paranoia.

Rousseau said “kitchen crank” as it’s called on the street, is very acidic and can rot skin.

Withdrawal symptoms include depression, anxiety, fatigue, paranoia, aggression and intense cravings.

Meth damage to the brain is similar to Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and epilepsy, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Explosive mixture

And that’s just the risk to the user.

Local manufacture of methamphetamine and an amphetamine-like substance “are presenting new challenges to law enforcement in Maine,” said Maine Drug Enforcement Agency Director Roy McKinney.

Commonly found in starting fluids, ether – when used as a solvent during the heating process – may form an explosive mixture with air.

“Ether is the most volatile ingredient, because it has the lowest flash point of similar substances out there. It can flash and fireball or simply explode,” Rousseau said.

In addition to the explosion risk, there are respiratory hazards produced by acids and solvents used to manufacture crank and the hazardous wastes generated.

At one of two raids Wednesday in Rumford and Mexico, the inside compartment of a new microwave seized in the basement of a Cumberland Street apartment was disintegrating from the chemical reaction of cooked meth ingredients.

Links to Texas

Investigations so far have revealed that meth being manufactured in the Rumford area has been done by one family with ties to Texas and associated friends, Baril said.

“This originated in Texas where they learned how to do this. Then one person teaches one person who teaches another and it spreads by example.””

Recipes for manufacturing meth are also all over the Internet, Baril said.

The two apartments in Rumford and Mexico were the fourth and fifth residences to be searched by agents for evidence of local clandestine manufacturing of crank since Oct. 23, when officers executed search warrants at a single-family home in Roxbury, and at two apartments in Rumford on Falmouth and Cumberland streets.

There was no evidence of a meth lab at the Roxbury location, but at Rumford locations officers found muriatic acid and discarded Benzedrex inhalers.

The inhalers’ cotton centers, which contain the chemical propylhexedrine, had all been removed, McKinney said.

Propylhexedrine, when mixed with a chemical from nasal decongestant tablets and hydrochloric acid, then cooked, creates crank.

One Benzedrex inhaler can produce from half a gram to a gram of crank.

The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency is trying to alert Maine pharmacies about the propensity for abuse with Benzedrex inhalers, which are commonly sold over the counter.

tkarkos@sunjournal.com

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