With the decline in local methamphetamine production, so too have the instances in which children have been exposed to the harmful chemical used in it’s production, according to Indiana State Police 2018 clandestine labs stats. From a high average of nearly five labs discovered per day in 2013, police say they found less than one per day in 2018 as production has largely been outsourced to criminal organizations in Mexico. Graphic from the Indiana State Police 2018 annual clandestine lab stats report
With the decline in local methamphetamine production, so too have the instances in which children have been exposed to the harmful chemical used in it’s production, according to Indiana State Police 2018 clandestine labs stats. From a high average of nearly five labs discovered per day in 2013, police say they found less than one per day in 2018 as production has largely been outsourced to criminal organizations in Mexico. Graphic from the Indiana State Police 2018 annual clandestine lab stats report
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Crystal meth, once so reviled it prompted sweeping legislation across the nation, at times seemed all but forgotten amid the recent opioid epidemic.

But 12 years after Congress took action to curb domestic production of methamphetamine, it has never been purer, cheaper, or more readily available. And police say it’s never been harder to stop.

Flooding across the United State’s southern border in amounts 10 to 20 times more than seen a decade ago, yesterday’s ounce dealer is today’s pound dealer.

Mostly gone are the days of backyard labs and cold medicine methamphetamine, here are the days of superlab-powered cartels injecting America’s heartland with a huge supply of potent crank via the country’s freeways and postal service.

Meth never went away, police say, people just stopped paying attention.

Meth in the Wabash Valley

“There may be areas of the state where heroin and other opiates are the biggest problem, but in Vigo County and Terre Haute, we’re a meth-driven community” when it comes to illicit drugs, said Sgt. Charlie Burress, Terre Haute Police Department detective and long-time member of the Vigo County Drug Task Force.

Following Thursday’s federal indictment of 15 alleged methamphetamine dealers, seven of whom are from Terre Haute and another from Brazil, the long-running king of street drugs has again been thrust into the headlines.

Terre Haute has long had the rap of being a “meth town,” Burress says, but bringing to light — and to court — a semi-sophisticated ring of suppliers and dealers that spanned the state, the likes of which is typically associated with heroin and cocaine distribution, should wake the community up to the problem.

When meth was being cooked locally by one or two groups, Burress said it was far easier keeping tabs on what those organizations were doing. But with the flood of Mexican meth, the trade is more decentralized and harder to track in some regards.

“In the mid-2000s we might have two or three organizations that were connected and bringing in 10 to 30 pounds of meth at a time,” Burress said. “But now, it’s so cheap and easy to access, people don’t have to buy smaller quantities off this one group or that.

“Everybody knows somebody and everyone has a plug. They can just as easily drive to Indianapolis or Evansville, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, or down to the border.

“So now instead of having all these people feeding off one source, you have 40 or 50 people with their own plug 60 miles up the road bringing back a pound or two, two to three times a week.”

The change in distribution was facilitated by the success of the federal Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005.

The act led, at least in part, to a drastic reduction in domestic meth production after regulating the over-the-counter sale of precursor chemicals such as ephedrine, pseudoephedrine and all phenylpropanolamine products.

And while local producers tried “smurfing” for a time, or send emissaries to several stores to purchase enough precursor to make a batch, domestic meth production and subsequent seizure of meth labs plummeted.

“When they started the regulations making it harder to get Sudafed and the precursors for anhydrous cooks, it really put the cookers in a bind,” Burress said. “If you can only buy a pack or two of Sudafed, you might only be able to make an 8-ball or quarter ounce.

“Whereas in the early 2000s, Walgreens would get their shipment in and an hour later they’d be out of Sudafed. With that you could cook a pound or more. That’s just not possible now.”

In 2018 Indiana State Police reported 192 clandestine meth lab seizures, a fraction of the 1,808 seizures in 2013 and the fewest since 1999.

Police say the legislation was effective in chasing backyard cooks, and along with it the number of children harmed and police officers sickened by exposure to dangerous chemicals, but admit it also opened the door for Mexican criminal organizations to fill the billion-dollar void.

“With so much of what people are using coming from Mexico, we’ve seen lab seizures dwindle in the last five years,” said Indiana State Police narcotics detective Shilo Raulston.

“Think about it. If it costs someone $100 to make a gram and face a higher felony for it, why would they do that? Especially when Mexican meth is cheaper, and generally, of a higher quality.

“... I had been doing multiple labs a week, maybe even a couple labs a day, and then I didn’t have any. Part of me was relieved, but then I saw how much meth was still out there. It wasn’t that people quit using, it’s just they can get it cheaper elsewhere and suffer less consequences. It’s a good business decision.”

Meth has gotten cheaper

With the outsourcing of production came a drastic reduction in price.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s 2019 National Drug Threat Assessment report, an analysis of domestic purchases from 2012 through 2017 show the price per gram of meth has decreased 13.6%, or from an average of $81 to $70, while the purity and potency has continued to increase.

Burress said a Terre Haute man was arrested earlier this year as he was transporting seven pounds of meth from Tempe, Arizona, back to Terre Haute. Burress said the man paid a fraction of the price for that cartel meth than he would have for domestic meth a decade ago.

“He paid $1,700 per pound for that meth whereas in 2005 that would have cost anywhere between $16,000 to $22,000 per pound,” Burress said. “He paid less per pound than people were paying locally per ounce five years ago.”

And what can be frustrating for police, Raulston said, is that even after seven-pound or 23-pound seizures like that in the task force’s most recent case, law enforcement can’t seem to remove enough meth from the pipeline to drive the price up.

“We constantly catch multiple pounds at a time and we’ve not seen a difference in price,” Raulston said. “If we were putting a dent in what was coming in, we’d see the price start to go up. But the price is holding, and in some cases, we’ve seen it drop. No matter how much we get, we’re still behind.”

Easy to ship, tough to intercept

And while neighborhood labs were a nuisance, they were far easier to find and shutter than the methods used today.

Needing to ship their product from the southern border, cartels are using the millions of vehicles traveling America’s interstate system as cover to hide its dope in plain sight. That and the growing trend of enlisting unwitting mail carriers to be drug mules, and police say they’re fighting a battle against things they can’t see.

“A lot of the stops that are made and the loads that are found are due to ongoing investigations,” Burress said. “Whether it’s physical surveillance being put on those people or other methods, we usually know who they are before we stop them.”

But for the thousands of loads they don’t know and can’t see, Raulston said snagging those too often comes down to a detective’s intuition and blind luck.

“Most of it is luck,” Raulston said. “And a lot of times it doesn’t matter how much work we put into it. We’re limited on resources and time. We can’t wait around for things to happen on ‘doper’s time.’

“We have rules to follow and they don’t. We don’t have the time to sit around and wait for a deal to go off and they can. Sometimes we have a case nailed dead to rights, but we have to put it off because it doesn’t come together in the time we have. They’re often more lucky than we are.”

The DEA report doesn’t paint a much rosier picture. With limited time and resources constraining local, state and federal law enforcement, the DEA predicts criminal organizations will continue to produce and traffic high-purity, high-potency meth across the southern border.

In the face of growing government opposition, organizations will continue to adapt production processes, the report predicts, and continue to fill the U.S.’s high demand.

The fight goes on

But Burress and Raulston say they’re anything but hopeless. With collaborative efforts between all levels of law enforcement, police will continue to pursue and arrest those responsible for producing, buying and distributing illicit drugs.

“We have an outstanding relationship with DEA, U.S. Attorney’s Office, FBI, ATF, and we rely heavily on partnerships with state police and other area departments as well,” Burress said. “When we get something going like the group we identified Thursday, we know we can make those phone calls and get everyone involved.

“The resources they bring to the table are resources [THPD] doesn’t have access to. We have a budget we have to stick to, one that we could blow through in a month or two on an investigation like this. When we bring it all together and things start progressing, it’s all of our strengths that start getting drugs off the street.”
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