TULSA — This is the new formula for methamphetamine: a 2-liter soda bottle, a few handfuls of cold pills and some noxious chemicals. Shake the bottle and the volatile reaction produces one of the world's most addictive drugs.
Only a few years ago, making methamphetamine required an elaborate lab - with filthy containers simmering over open flames, cans of flammable liquids and hundreds of pills. The process gave off foul odors, sometimes sparked explosions and was so hard to conceal that dealers often "cooked" their drugs in rural areas.
But now drug users are making their own methamphetamine in small batches using a faster, cheaper and much simpler method with ingredients that can be carried in a knapsack and mixed on the run.The "shake-and-bake" approach has become popular because it requires a relatively small number of pills of the decongestant pseudoephedrine - an amount easily obtained under even the toughest anti-methamphetamine laws that have been adopted across the nation to restrict large purchases of some cold medication.
"Somebody somewhere said, 'Wait, this requires a lot less pseudoephedrine, and I can fly under the radar,'" said Mark Woodward, spokesman for the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Control.
An Associated Press review of lab seizures and interviews with state and federal law enforcement agents found that the new method is rapidly spreading across the nation's midsection and is contributing to a spike in the number of methamphetamine cases after years of declining arrests.
Bill Bryant, assistant special agent in charge of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration's Little Rock field office, said Arkansas has seen some shake-and-bake methamphetamine labs, but not that many.
"We are seeing a bit of an increase in those, but nothing dramatic," Bryant said. "It's not taking over the state or anything.
"When you do it that way, you make less than an ounce of the drug. Mexican drug cartels make more than 25 pounds at a time, so we have most of out efforts focused on that. We're watching this, too, but it really isn't something we've made a top priority."
The new formula does away with the clutter of typical methamphetamine labs, and it can turn the back seat of a car or a bathroom stall into a makeshift drug factory. Some addicts have even made the drug while driving.
The pills are crushed, combined with some common household chemicals and then shaken in the soda bottle. No flame is required.
Using the new formula, batches of methamphetamine are much smaller but just as dangerous as those of the old system, which sometimes produces powerful explosions, touches off intense fires and releases drug ingredients that must be handled as toxic waste.
"If there is any oxygen at all in the bottle, it has a propensity to make a giant fireball," said Sgt. Jason Clark of the Missouri State Highway Patrol's drug and crime control division. "You're not dealing with rocket scientists here anyway. If they get unlucky at all, it can have a very devastating reaction."
One little mistake, such as unscrewing the bottle cap too fast, can result in a huge blast, and police in Alabama, Oklahoma and other states have linked dozens of flash fires this year - some of them fatal - to methamphetamine manufacturing.
"Every meth recipe is dangerous, but in this one, if you don't shake it just right, you can build up too much pressure, and the container can pop," Woodward said.
After the chemical reaction, what's left is a crystalline powder that users smoke, snort or inject. They often discard the bottle, which now contains a poisonous brown and white sludge. Dozens of reports describe toxic bottles strewn along highways and rural roads in states with the worst methamphetamine problems.
The do-it-yourself method creates just enough of the drug for a few hits, allowing users to make their own doses instead of buying mass-produced drugs from a dealer.
"It simplified the process so much that everybody's making their own dope," said Kevin Williams, sheriff of Marion County, Ala., about 80 miles west of Birmingham. "It can be your next door neighbor doing it. It can be one of your family members living downstairs in the basement."
Because the new method uses far less pseudoephedrine, smalltime users are able to make the drug in spite of a federal law that bars customers from buying more than 9 grams - roughly 300 pills - a month.
The federal government and dozens of states adopted restrictions on pseudoephedrine in 2005, and the number of lab busts fell dramatically.
The total number of clandestine methamphetamine lab incidents reported to the Drug Enforcement Administration fell from almost 17,400 in 2003 to just 7,347 in 2006.
But the number of busts has begun to climb again, and some authorities blame the shake-and bake method for renewing methamphetamine activity.
The AP review of 14 states found:
At least 10 states reported increases in methamphetamine lab seizures or methamphetamine-related arrests from 2007 to 2008.
The Mississippi State Crime Laboratory participated in 457 methamphetamine incidents through May 31, up from 122 for the same period a year ago - a nearly 275 percent increase.
Several states, such as Oklahoma and Tennessee, are on pace this year to double the number of labs busted in 2008. The director of Tennessee's methamphetamine task force said the pace of lab busts in his state is projected to be about 1,300 for 2009, compared with 815 for all of 2008.
States surveyed by the AP also included: Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
Information for this article was contributed by Roxana Hegeman, Holbrook Mohr, Tom Parsons, Bill Poovey, Jim Salter and John Zenor of The Associated Press and by Jacob Quinn Sanders of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 3 on 08/25/2009