The Region - News from Sept. 7, 1986

A bench warrant was issued for John F. Hill of Highland Park when he failed to appear in Los Angeles Superior Court for sentencing on his plea of guilty to charges of operating what is believed to have been the nation’s first illegal methadone factory. Hill, 57, admitted posing as a chemistry student to set up a methadone-making operation in the chemistry laboratory at California State University, Los Angeles. Glendale police said they found 15 grams of packaged methadone--a synthetic opiate used to reduce an addict’s craving for heroin--in Hill’s car and about a pound of the nearly completed drug in the school laboratory.