Storeroom Holds Bodily Fluids, Illegal Substances, Wobbly Pests

The room is about the size of a four-car garage. It is stacked, floor to ceiling, with drugs--cocaine (rock and regular), crystal methamphetamine (much of it manufactured in San Diego), marijuana (which the rats, gnats and cockroaches like to pilfer) and anything else that falls under the heading of illicit, controlled substance.

John Simms oversees the crime lab and drug-storage vault of the San Diego Police Department. He and Jim Miller, the crime lab manager, supervise the more than 1,600 cases that roll into the lab each month at police headquarters in the 1400 block of Broadway.

“Cases” refers not to boxes or crates but to each criminal case, 50,000 of which are on file in the vault. An additional 30,000 to 40,000 blood and urine samples are on file, awaiting the outcome of individual adjudication.

Simms and Miller concede that with the soaring number of arrests and the volume of drugs pouring into the United States, the storage and disposal of illicit drugs is a growing problem. Some contain chemicals that are lethal and pose obvious health hazards. And to store drugs, especially the volume on file in a major police department, adds costly security concerns.

Location Kept a Secret

Drug vaults are guarded around the clock, and details about where and how they are stored are as fiercely protected as the drugs themselves.

Despite the amount of drugs stored in its vault, the San Diego Police Department, like most local agencies, keeps a minuscule amount contrasted to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. The DEA is to confiscated drugs what Ft. Knox is to gold.

Simms said cases involving kilos or pounds almost always go to the federal agency. For example, the 120 kilos of cocaine seized out of the trunk of a car in an arrest last week in Clairemont went immediately to DEA.

Representatives of the federal agency declined to be interviewed at length for this article or to let their facilities be photographed.

“Our offices are in National City, and that’s all I’m going to tell you,” said Robert Countryman, supervisory chemist for the DEA. “The storage and disposal of confiscated drugs represents so much of a concern in our society that I really can’t share any information. It’s extremely guarded. I will say that any time you’re storing drugs of this magnitude and value, yes, it’s a big problem. Destroying them is also a problem, and the fact that the nation’s drug problem gets worse and worse doesn’t make our job any easier.”

Capt. Alan Fulmer, who runs the Vista control station for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, was an officer with the San Diego County Integrated Narcotics Task Force from 1981 to 1986. The task force is made up of local law-enforcement agencies working in tandem with the federal agency on major drug cases. Fulmer said the Sheriff’s Department sends most of its cases to DEA automatically, although a small amount of drugs is kept near the station in downtown San Diego.

Fulmer said that, during his tenure at the task force, storage of evidence got to be a “terrible problem,” but may be more of one now.

“Not only do NTF and DEA get the dope itself but they also get--and have to store--all related paraphernalia,” Fulmer said. “Weapons are a big problem. But the biggest pain that we had relates to the good old methamphetamine problem. For a long time, we had to store all of the equipment and all of the chemicals related to that kind of crime.

“When meth labs first came into being, we had to show the entire lab as evidence. It was a new phenomenon, one that neither we nor the courts knew how to handle. Now we show just part of the lab.

“The same with bulk seizures of marijuana. Instead of storing and showing 5,000 plants, as we once did, now we show only a core sample. I remember one time at DEA we were having to store 3,000 pulled-up marijuana plants in individual cells.”

Busting at the Seams

Fulmer said the storage facilities at the federal agency, burdened during his time, are overburdened now, to the point that portable storage facilities have been erected in the parking lot. He said the toxic chemicals involved in drug seizures are less of a problem now, since courts no longer require them as evidence. Chemical-disposal companies are called in to get rid of them right away.

The swelling cache of drugs and the question of how to store them also affect budgetary priorities. In fiscal year 1987, the San Diego Police Department, after months of lobbying, received approval to hire two new employees--a drug analyst for the lab and a new “storekeeper” for the vault.

Even so, workers in the lab and vault complain of being overworked and understaffed. Simms has four full-time employees in the lab and three in the vault, and, as he puts it, “There is always plenty of work. Believe me, it never stops.”

Simms said he used to have a three-day “turnaround” on cases, meaning he had three business days to do a “presumptive” test on the drugs that were seized, allowing the district attorney enough time to formally charge the suspect.

Now, with even more cases to do, he’s down to 1 1/2 business days as a result of a recent court case. If the tests can’t be completed within that time, the suspect will be released--without being charged.

“And the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles is working to shorten it even more,” he said. “There’s no question we could use more people, but the top priority is for cops on the street.”

Jim Miller, Simms’ boss, said he has never had a problem with outsiders or employees tampering with or stealing drugs on file. He wishes he could say the same for insects and rodents, which seem to like drugs--particularly marijuana--as much as some criminals.

“In the old building (the now-abandoned police facility near Seaport Village), we had a big problem with mice getting to the marijuana,” Simms said. “Over here, we fumigated everything but found that the marijuana plants brought in from the fields had worms in them. Then we had an infestation of cockroaches.”

Storage Better Organized

Simms said the storage of drugs is now neater, cleaner and better organized than in the old building. There, drugs were kept in abandoned jail cells and piled on top of each other in cardboard boxes. In the new building, drugs are catalogued on large industrial shelves. An official wanting information on a case enters the vault, pulls out a drawer and takes the evidence needed from a package or envelope.

Instead of organized memos on file, it’s rock cocaine or tablets of LSD, lying loosely in small, plastic bags.

Simms said that, generally, drugs are kept for two years, then marked for destruction. Evidence from felony cases is usually kept for five years. Before then, if authorities get permission from the court to destroy the evidence, they will happily do so, Simms said, and send it off to incinerators.

Simms said the location of burn facilities is also top-secret. He said each facility is licensed by the Environmental Protection Agency, which monitors the burns. Because of its ether content, PCP poses more of a problem in burning than do other drugs, although the federal agency deals with some substances that contain cyanide and other fatal compounds.

“Thank God, we don’t deal with those here,” said crime lab manager Jim Miller. “And I’m thrilled that we don’t. These ‘cland’ (clandestine) labs you read so much about in San Diego, which they use to make crystal meth, the DEA gets those immediately. Some of the stuff they’re dealing with is very deadly. I hope we never have to handle it.”

PCP, also known as angel dust, was once a major drug in the county, but “now it just kind of trickles in,” Simms said. “Most local cases involve cocaine and crystal meth. Those are No. 1 and No. 2 in San Diego, although we still see a lot of marijuana. I wouldn’t even begin to speculate where all of this stuff comes from, but it’s here in substantial quantity.”

After a day of testing regular and rock cocaine or crystal meth and knowing how harmful and potent such substances are, Simms often finds himself driving home wondering about the lives on the other end of the trouble--why and how they got into drugs and to the level they did. And why people like him have to work so hard to try to make the drug flow stop.

The conclusion that always strikes home is the obvious one, that the drug problem is “overwhelming,” and getting worse instead of better.

“Just when you think you’ve reached some kind of limit, you find yourself working harder--you’re seeing more of the stuff,” he said. “It never seems to end, and, after a while, you do have to wonder why.”