The attendees at the Fairfield Neighborhood Association meeting couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Methamphetamine, they’d long thought, was a rural problem.
No longer, Fort Wayne police told them at a recent meeting.
“It can be done right under your nose,” association President Travis Ames said.
Evolving ways to manufacture the illegal and highly addictive stimulant have moved the drug downtown, Fort Wayne Police Detective Bob Kirby said.
Kirby has spent the past 15 years in the police department’s Vice and Narcotics Division. During his first dozen years, a total of three meth labs were found in the city, he said.
This year, there have been 18, already more than last year’s total of 16, Kirby said. Only half a dozen of the meth labs found in Allen County last year were outside city limits, according to Indiana State Police statistics.
When methamphetamine first swept through northeast Indiana’s rural areas in the 1990s, it typically was created in makeshift labs using anhydrous ammonia, a toxic and volatile farm fertilizer.
But in the past few years, police say, meth addicts have mostly switched to the one-pot or shake-and-bake method, which produces less of the drug and doesn’t create as many noxious fumes as a traditional lab, in part because it doesn’t require anhydrous ammonia.
Meth “cooks” can combine the ingredients in a small plastic bottle and, after a chemical reaction, they have their drug.
Still, one ingredient in the recipe is the common medication pseudoephedrine, sold as brand-name Sudafed or as a store brand. While pseudoephedrine has been kept behind pharmacy counters since 2005 and can be sold only in limited quantities, the appeal of the city – where pharmacies are more plentiful than in small rural towns – has drawn some meth cooks to the area, Kirby said.
While Fort Wayne is still learning about meth, the outlying counties have been dealing with it for years.
According to the Indiana State Police, Kosciusko County ranked second in the state for the most labs seized last year with 85. Noble County ranked third with 74 labs, and DeKalb County had 35.
Kirby believes tough enforcement in outlying counties also has driven meth cooks to Fort Wayne.
“They’re thinking they can fly under the radar,” he said.
The Fort Wayne Police Department relied for many years on state police and that force’s specialized training to deal with the few meth labs found in the city.
But a few years ago, it was becoming obvious that state police were overwhelmed by the number of meth-lab seizures. Now Fort Wayne has five officers, including Kirby, who have received 40 hours of training through the federal Drug Enforcement Administration on how to deal with meth labs.
The force still relies heavily on the state police, using their equipment to deal with the chemical risks, he said.
When they’re called to deal with a hazardous lab, they’re required by federal regulations to station two officers inside the home or apartment where the lab is located and two more outside. A lab found in a vehicle requires at least two officers, Kirby said.
Several hours of work are required at the scene, along with more hours afterward spent on paperwork.
And that’s just for dealing with the physical hazards created by a meth lab. It doesn’t include dealing with possible criminal charges or with children found at the scene.
With everything else the vice and narcotics officers face, there hasn’t been much time for Fort Wayne’s five trained officers to be proactive about meth. Often they’re called away to deal with other drug issues, such as the massive federal sting that recently resulted in multiple charges in U.S. District Court.
There are, though, some signs of hope, Kirby said. A database launched last year by the state police helps officers check tips from other counties. It compiles arrest records for meth-related crimes and links the names of associates known to work together to buy the large quantities of pseudoephedrine needed to produce the illegal drug.
Officers from all over have been contributing to the database, and that’s led to some tips. But with such a small force dedicated to the meth problem, following up on those tips isn’t easy.
Fort Wayne police have tried to get as many people involved as possible to help.
All Fort Wayne officers have now been trained on what to recognize – the training is less intensive and comprehensive than the DEA training – and by the end of last year, the Fort Wayne Fire Department had been brought up to speed on how to recognize signs of a meth fire and how to handle the chemicals involved.
But there’s a need for continuing training and no sign of the money needed to provide it. Kirby said because of the evolving nature of methamphetamine production, even the comprehensive training he and the four other narcotics officers received quickly becomes obsolete.
His own training, for example, didn’t include information on the one-pot production method currently sweeping northeast Indiana.
Kirby believes his small force dedicated to meth-related offenses and cleaning up the toxic messes involved has reached capacity for how many labs it can deal with.
“We’re at the number now,” he said.
But based on the current trend, the force will have to continue doing more with less, especially as the weather gets warmer and more people spend time outside.
Ames, the Fairfield Neighborhood Association president, said his group participates in a spring sprucing-up in conjunction with the Great American Cleanup. For this year’s event, to be held May 21, Ames hopes to print fliers letting participants know how to recognize toxic meth-related trash and what to do if they encounter it.
Ames said there were some surprised faces at the recent neighborhood association meeting as the participants learned about new ways meth is being made and the hazards it presents. A few people even shared fuzzy recollections – of 2-liter bottles with strange tubes connected to them, spotted in city parks – that might have been meth-lab trash.
“Everybody was kind of flabbergasted,” Ames said. “You sort of imagine it in a rural county.”
