City Allows Use of Incinerator to Dispose of Drugs : Environment: Cocaine and other drugs are considered hazardous materials that need special handling. Not a trace of the burned substances will be noticeable in the air.

A lot of cocaine, marijuana and other drugs are going to be smoked on Terminal Island--but no one’s going to get high from it.

Instead, the illegal drugs--an estimated 50,000 pounds of them a year, all seized in drug arrests--will be burned along with hundreds of thousands of tons of other garbage in the incinerators at the Southeast Resource Recovery Facility on Terminal Island, which produces electrical power by burning garbage.

The Long Beach City Council decided this week to allow state law enforcement officials to use the plant to destroy the drugs.

But officials insist that despite the vast amounts of drugs that will be burned, no one will notice even a funny smell in the air, much less any physiological reaction. Not even the inmates serving time for drug offenses at the nearby Terminal Island federal correctional facility will be able to tell that their erstwhile wares are going up in smoke.

“You could climb up on the stack and lean over the edge and not get a thing out of it,” said Jim Kennelly, project director at the plant. “There will be no detectable narcotics in the stack.”

Dave Puglia, spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, said the City Council’s approval is a “very significant development” in solving a problem that has plagued law enforcement agencies in California for several years--that is, what to do with drugs, primarily cocaine, seized in drug raids after they are no longer needed as evidence.

Previously, Puglia said, the cocaine was simply tossed into the nearest available incinerator. But several years ago, state environmental agencies decided that cocaine and certain other drugs are hazardous substances that need special treatment. The drugs started piling up in warehouses and other storage facilities, which Puglia said poses “a serious security problem.”

Some law enforcement agencies use hospital incinerators to destroy drugs because they can handle the destruction of hazardous materials. But those facilities are too small to handle large volumes of drugs.

Using the Terminal Island plant will help alleviate that problem. Officials estimate that the plant will destroy as much as 100,000 pounds of drugs the first year to help eliminate the backlog, and about half that much annually thereafter. The state will pay Long Beach a $10,000 annual fee for the use of the plant.

Kennelly said tests have determined that whatever kind of drug is being burned, from marijuana to cocaine to pills, the emissions come up with a clean bill of health. This is primarily because, while the amount of drugs to be burned seems large, the drugs will represent only a fraction of the 427,000 tons of garbage the plant burns each year.

Also, Kennelly said, regulations require that a maximum of 500 pounds of drugs be included in any 7,000-pound load of garbage that is fed into the incinerator. Consequently, a pound of cocaine would be diluted by being mixed in with at least 13 pounds of other garbage.

Kennelly likened the process to burning azaleas. If you burn a pound of azaleas with 13 pounds of other garbage, he pointed out, the resulting emissions aren’t going to smell like azaleas. Most drugs, Kennelly said, are simply “green matter,” no different from grass clippings of palm tree branches--or azaleas. As for chemical substances such as pills, the volume of such drugs is so small as to be insignificant.

Kennelly said that although the burned drugs will generate some electrical power at the 38-megawatt plant, it won’t be enough to notice.

“They will yield some energy,” Kennelly said, “but it’s a minuscule amount. This is primarily a public service.”

Long Beach City Council members seemed to agree.

“With a lot of pride we can say here in Long Beach we’re eliminating a lot of . . . contraband,” Councilman Doug Drummond said before the council’s unanimous decision.

Kennelly said he expects the first load of drugs to be destroyed by the end of this month. Law enforcement officers, not plant employees, will be responsible for the drugs every step of the way, he said, including loading them into the incinerator.