Washington

It's a wrap: a Tennessee cop wrestles with the remains of a home lab for making methamphetamine. Credit: M. HUMPHREY/AP

Abuse of methamphetamine is creeping across the United States from the west coast, producing a welter of toxic home labs, a congressional committee heard last week.

The drug, a cheap, potent and highly addictive stimulant, can be ‘cooked’ on a hotplate from easily acquired ingredients such as cold remedies and fertilizers. And the mess left behind can affect the health of police who raid the premises, children who live there, and even subsequent tenants.

“During the cook, it reaches levels that can be extremely toxic,” says John Martyny, a toxicologist at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver, Colorado, who testified at the hearing.

After complaints from police in his district east of Nashville, where ‘meth’ use has boomed in a big way, congressman Bart Gordon (Democrat, Tennessee) put together a bill to fund research into the drug's health risks and to devise standards for decontamination. The bill's bipartisan supporters expect it to move speedily into law.

If enacted, the bill will charge the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology with researching the health risks of meth labs and setting standards for decontamination, as well as funding the development of better field-test kits.

Meth users who make their own drug do so wherever they can: at home, in motels, even in cars. Various recipes exist — most are available on the Internet — but even the simplest are dangerous and toxic. Typically, ephedrine is separated from a decongestant using solvents, then added to chemicals such as ammonia, hydrochloric acid, phosphorus or iodine. The resulting methamphetamine is a fine particulate that gets everywhere. And many of the chemicals involved are absorbed by porous surfaces such as carpets, curtains, wallpaper and clothes.

Sheriff David Andrews of Putnam County, Tennessee, says he hates entering meth labs. “Every time I go around one, I get a headache, and I have a detective who breaks out in red blotches,” he says. Setting standards would not only help law enforcement, Andrews points out, but also mortgage lenders who, without a decontamination standard, must take a financial loss when they repossess a house that has been used as a meth lab.

Julie Mazzuca is president of the Meth Lab Cleanup Company based in Post Falls, Idaho, where business is booming. She and her crew charge a few thousand dollars to don respirators and scrub away traces of methamphetamine from meth labs. She has seen the health effects at first hand. “You see respiratory problems, throat irritation, skin irritation and nausea,” she says.

Meth sites, Mazzuca says, are unbelievably filthy. “On one of my first clean-ups I removed seven tonnes of residue from a mobile home,” she says.

Although anecdotal evidence shows that meth labs are unhealthy, there is little research on the subject. Some US states have standards for detectable levels of methamphetamine, but they are based on the detection technology rather than knowledge of the health risks. “There's a lot of seat-of-the-pants stuff going on with these clean-ups,” says Charles Salocks, a toxicologist with the California EPA.