Drug ‘Cooks’ Leave Health Hazards Behind : Toxics: The methamphetamines, feared quickly becoming the drug of the ‘90s, ravage their users. Their makers also poison the environment.

When police raided a white wooden house on Pasadena Avenue early this year, they found a dozen guns and rifles, one pit bull, a couple of boa constrictors, two small children and enough toxic chemicals to blow up the block.

Unbeknown to the neighbors on the residential street, William Odom was in the business of manufacturing methamphetamines, otherwise known as speed. The pipes under the kitchen sink were rotted to nothing from corrosive chemicals poured down the drain. The walls and carpeting were saturated with poisonous fumes. By the time Odom moved into his new residence in state prison, the house on Pasadena Avenue was a miniature toxic wasteland, local police and prosecutors said.

Experts warn that methamphetamines, a highly addictive stimulant long confined to outlaw motorcycle gangs, will replace crack cocaine as the drug of the 1990s. Already, the 15 clandestine drug labs uncovered in Long Beach this year are more than the two previous years combined.

But unlike the cocaine that is processed beyond American borders, police said drug dealers are “cooking” methamphetamines right here--in motel rooms, atop toilet seats, in storage sheds, garages, camper shells and rental houses--using some of the most explosive and carcinogenic chemicals known to science.

As its popularity soars all over California, the drug not only threatens to ravage its addicts but to poison the environment, contaminate police officers and imperil the public health, law enforcement and health officials warn.

“These manufacturers are leaving toxic waste dumps behind them that you cannot smell or see,” said Long Beach Deputy Dist. Atty. Barbara Channell, who has prosecuted 15 cases in a little more than a year, “the tip of the iceberg,” in her assessment.

“Imagine you’re in Room 212 of the motel while he’s in Room 211 and it all blows up?” she asked. “Why should people have to live in an environment like that with no means of knowing what’s going on next door?”

In 1981, police seized 184 drug labs nationwide. In 1989, they took 1,000, according to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. Forty-four percent of the labs were in California, more than any other single state, the DEA reported.

Known on the street as crank, methamphetamines have long been considered the drug of poor white men, injected, snorted, smoked and sold mostly by outlaw motorcycle gangs like the Hell’s Angels.

But as diplomats and drug agents move to shut down the pipeline of cocaine from Colombia and other Latin countries, methamphetamines are moving in to take its place, experts warn. The price is said to be cheaper, the high is said to be longer and the source is local.

Six months ago, only 2% of the addicts who sought help at a city-run drug rehabilitation clinic were methamphetamine addicts. Today 20% are, the majority of them women, said Jane Reddick, a unit supervisor at the Pine Avenue facility.

Worse, a new concentrated form of methamphetamines known as “ice” has already overtaken crack on the Hawaiian Islands, offering a high that is said to last up to 12 hours. While drug experts statewide have yet to encounter that potent form in California, they predict it is only a matter of time.

“Law enforcement is standing on the beach watching a tidal wave and it is going to hit soon,” said Long Beach Police Sgt. Gerry Roberts, who investigates drug labs full time. “Once they realize they can get more for their money with methamphetamines, there is nothing doctors, parents, husbands, wives, sisters or brothers can do to stop them. We will be off to the races.”

The recipe for methamphetamines includes an array of acids and explosives known to cause cancer, birth defects and blindness. One of the byproducts of the cooking process is phosphine gas, similar to mustard gas used during World War I.

Police say it is cooked by “chemists” usually high on the drug themselves. Their crude laboratories are stocked with crock pots, turkey basters and Pyrex pie plates. Police find them in the same motel rooms businessmen frequent--the smoke alarms disconnected and the toxic waste poured down the drain--and in rental homes, the poisonous runoff dumped into back yard soil.

“Are there children playing in the soil? Is it getting into the drinking water? Are there vapors under the house?” asked Dick Smith, chief of the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services hazardous materials unit.

“Cops treat this stuff like something that could blow up the block. You start thinking, ‘What did I breathe? Did it stick to my clothes?’ ” Roberts said. “I went through two pairs of Levi’s, two pairs of shoes and two shirts on two cases. I just took them off outside my house and threw them away.”

A Long Beach police officer recently confided that he was less frightened the day a suspect held a gun to his head than he was by the liquid methamphetamine gushing from the side of a camper on Knoxville Avenue, less than 1,000 feet from Ellwood P. Cubberley School in east Long Beach before dawn on a Monday last month.

He knew the heavy smell drifting from the camper was ether, less than a pint of which could firebomb an area the size of a tennis court. When he and his partner approached, the door slammed shut. The camper rocked violently. The drug flowed like a river out the drainage hole, into the gutter and toward the school.

Inside the camper were five men, several jars of extremely explosive chemicals, a cigarette lighter, a pyrotechnic mortar and a swastika suggesting the presence of the Long Beach Hard Core Suicidal Maniacs, a local street gang.

It took 12 hours and 55 barricades to clean it up. Police chemists later confirmed that the catalytic converter on the officer’s patrol car, much less his pistol, was sufficient to “blow them all the way to Orange County.”

For decades, police treated methamphetamine labs like any other narcotics crime. Today they treat them like “any narcotics crime committed at Love Canal,” said Sgt. Jeff Lowe, hazardous materials coordinator for the Long Beach Police Department.

Nationwide, the DEA prohibits women agents from investigating drug labs because of the risk of birth defects. In Los Angeles, drug agents are experimenting with throat microphones so they can enter a lab in spacesuit-like gear and still clearly identify themselves as police officers.

In Long Beach, the Police Department recently purchased moon suits, respirators, rubber gloves and air monitors to protect officers from exposure. Narcotics detectives are switching to nylon holsters because leather absorbs toxins. A blue-gray Chevy Celebrity loaded with protective suits and breathing apparatus is on call for police 24 hours a day. And contracts with a toxic waste company have been written to safely seize evidence and ultimately dispose of it.

“When I first came on the job, you would sometimes figure out what a chemical was by putting your nose in it. We just didn’t know then,” said Dan Offield, spokesman for the DEA in San Francisco.

Officers complain of labs booby-trapped with grenades or chemicals at the ready to release cyanide gas in the event of a police raid. Detectives find themselves virtually disarmed in an atmosphere of explosives volatile enough to be set off by static electricity.

At a recent narcotics conference at Lake Tahoe, one officer told of a suspect who threw acid at him. The officer answered with a gunshot and the ether fumes set off an explosion that blew him out the door.

“Police are trained to think of hazards as people with knives and guns, not speed. It’s a new mind set that you can’t go playing with this stuff,” Lowe said. “I am sure that over the years thousands of officers have been exposed. Are you going to get cancer? Is your liver going to fall out? You just don’t know and it’s scary.”

By day, Guy Conrick Doran, 40, was working on an orbital maneuvering vehicle for the space program at TRW in Redondo Beach. By night, he was manufacturing methamphetamines in the basement of his home in a affluent section of San Pedro and selling it for $10,000 a pound, according to court documents.

Several witnesses attested to his good character, including the yacht master at his boating club, but a Long Beach jury convicted him of drug charges anyway. Doran put the house up for sale. The court refused to order him to disclose to the new owner that chemicals had been processed in the basement, Channell said.

“I know of no action taken to decontaminate any site in any drug lab case I have prosecuted,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be any coordinated effort on the local level to decontaminate or even determine the level of contamination that exists.”

Health officials say there is indeed a risk posed by vapors that cling to walls and ceilings or sit in sink drains, although they are rarely summoned to test a site.

Los Angeles County health officials recalled a 2-year-old girl who was sent into convulsions by residue from the hallucinogenic drug PCP. The family had unwittingly rented a house occupied by two drug dealers, said Anastacio Medina, chief of the county’s hazardous materials unit.

But most injuries are impossible to trace unless the history of the house or motel room is known, and there is no law requiring disclosure, officials said.

“There needs to be more dialogue between police agencies and health agencies,” Medina said. “Chemicals can vaporize and remain on the walls. Drug manufacturers commit a criminal act that contaminates an environment. What remains for the rest of the citizens?”