Cleaning up meth labs costly

By Steven Olson
Correspondent

More on meth: Problem assessment

Twenty thousand dollars. That's the minimum it will cost for a property owner to clean up a house that's been used as a methamphetamine lab.

The number comes from Doug Griffith, the head of Bio-Clean of Colorado in Windsor. Griffith spent nine years cleaning up crime scenes in New Jersey and has spent another three here in Colorado doing the same thing. Griffith sometimes gets assignments like cleaning up apartments where elderly people have died and haven't been found for a week or so. However, crime is his specialty. When asked how much of his business is spent cleaning up meth labs, he knows the answer immediately--80 percent.

As far as drug problems go, meth used to be almost no problem at all. In the 1980s the big thing was crack cocaine, and the earlier types of methamphetamine weren't all that addictive.

Ice was the first type. Lt. Craig Dodd of the Larimer County Drug Task Force said it started in Hawaii and got its name because it was a clear solid that looked like its namesake. Ice either petered out or underwent a metamorphosis when it hit the mainland. Dodd is not sure.

Then meth started to be a problem in Pennsylvania. Motorcycle gangs were making it. Griffith said authorities saw it mutating and getting worse as it hopscotched around the country.

The addictiveness of meth is determined primarily by how it is administered, according to psychiatrist Craig Heacock of Mountain Crest Behavioral Healthcare Center. The drug is more dangerous and addictive if it's injected or smoked, and less if it's taken orally or snorted.

Griffith said the addictiveness of meth can be gauged by what it does to a person's dopamine levels in the brain. Alcohol sends a person's dopamine level to about 250. Sex sends it to 260. Cocaine sends it to 1,800. One form of meth sends it to 3,500 on one dose. People seeking that kind of rush, and the knowledge that $200 worth of chemicals can be turned into $10,000 worth of product, fuel its growth.

Meth's addictive nature and the fact that it contaminates everything it touches leads to a pattern of growth that's haphazard: growing, then burning itself out. There were 150 clandestine meth labs busted in Colorado in 1999. In 2002, the year most recent figures are available, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment reported more than 700 were raided.

Tom Norman, who runs Century Environmental Hygiene in Fort Collins, tested 12 houses for traces of methamphetamine in the past year and all tested positive. While being interviewed, he was working on three more.

"We usually get them two ways," Norman said. "One is when a house gets busted by the drug task force. The other is requests from Realtors or from people wanting to buy from a property owner, but they heard that people were cooking meth in that house."

Methamphetamine manufacture is extremely contaminating. That's because of the veritable stew of chemicals involved in the process, such as muriatic acid, used to take oil stains off concrete. Some retailers can only sell limited quantities, similar to restrictions on cold medicine, another ingredient in meth making. Elements like lithium are also used.

"We've had people take apart batteries to get at the lithium strips inside," Griffith said.

The chemicals get into everything, particularly fabric and raw wood. Drapes, carpets, carpet pads and furniture all have to be junked. Some of the chemicals in meth manufacturing partially dissolve the glue that holds some doors together. Griffith has had to junk kitchen cabinets just because of this. He's also had to throw away microwave ovens because it costs much more to clean an existing unit than to buy a new one.

Walls have to be scrubbed so that a subsequent test reads about 0.5 microgram per 100 square centimeters of wall. Norman said he finds it most commonly in the floors of a property or the heating system. The 0.5-microgram standard is not low enough for some states, and it may be dropped even further in Colorado.

"I think it's going to become 0.1 [microgram]," Griffith said. "The next time the legislature meets, they are going to put a time limit on it. I think it's going to be 180 days, because a lot of people just let it sit there. I mean, it has all the warnings and everything. You know, 'This property was a meth lab,' but people don't do anything. I know of about 40 properties in northern Colorado that are that way."

Kent Berg, the founder of the American Bio-Recovery Association in Massachusetts and now the director of the National Institute of Decontamination Specialists in Greenville, S.C., agreed. He's repeatedly run into the problem of contaminated houses sitting vacant. They are not only eyesores, affecting property values, but no one is really sure how dangerous the houses are even though methamphetamine contamination deteriorates when exposed to sunlight.

Methamphetamine contamination in people is something that can only be detected by a blood test analyzed by someone who "knows what they are looking for," said Berg. It is generally easier to test the suspected source of contamination than a person, he added.

In Colorado, real estate agents have to notify buyers of any methamphetamine contamination found on a property, almost the same way they have to notify buyers of the presence of lead paint.

Some buyers, however, may wonder if they have been told everything about a property, especially when dealing directly with a property owner rather than a real estate agent. Suspicious buyers can hire their own testing for methamphetamine contamination, but it is not going to be cheap. "You'll be looking to spend between $300 and $1,000," Berg said.