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Maine On Track to Double Meth Lab Busts This Year

MDEA

While the state’s worsening heroin and opioid addiction crisis dominates the headlines, Maine’s drug enforcement community is also chasing a growing methamphetamine problem. They say they’re on track to double the number of meth lab busts this year.

So far this year, authorities have uncovered more than 100 meth labs, or debris from former operations, across the state. That’s twice as many as last year, and a decade ago, it would have been just five or six.

Unlike the complex manufacturing systems portrayed in the popular cable TV show “Breaking Bad,” most meth labs in Maine are relatively simple.

“Everybody thinks methamphetamine is produced in those labs. It’s not. It’s produced in soda bottles. It’s produced in one-liter bottles, two-liter bottles, and those are more dangerous than those ‘Breaking Bad’ labs,” says Matt Cashman, a supervisor with the Maine Drug Enforcement agency who leads a team of agents that respond to meth labs.

The drug, he explains, is made from easily available ingredients including pseudoephedrine, contained in allergy medicines. In what’s called the “shake and bake method,” ingredients are placed in a container with lithium from a battery you might find in your flashlight, and the chemicals generate heat as they react to make the meth.

Cashman says the lithium can cause an explosion from contact with water and, if improperly mixed, can cause part of the bottle to melt, shooting out a flame several feet as it whirls around.

“Lithium will catch fire and it burns as hot as a sparkler, burns as hot as a flare,” he says.

Cashman says at one meth lab cleanup site in a crowded apartment, acid from a container spilled on his protective suit as he bagged evidence. He was decontaminated at the scene in a mobile unit that is also dispatched to every incident.

MDEA Director Roy McKinney says the bulky suits provide critical protection, but also take a toll on the AGENTS.

“If you put yourself into one of these chemical resistant suits on a hot or even a cold winter’s day, it fatigues them, to say the least,” he says.

And the labs can be found anywhere. Cashman says that earlier this year agents followed a suspect from Damariscotta along U.S. Route 1 and watched him pull in behind a gas station for about a half hour. They then followed his car to the parking lot behind a big-box store in Brunswick, where he was arrested.

“What he had done was he had completed the entire process of manufacturing, adding all the chemicals at the Irving station, and was driving down Route 1 while it cooked off for 45 minutes and ultimately what his intent to do was to use the hydrogen chloride gas and salt it out and make his product in the parking lot of Lowe’s,” he says.

Cashman says if he had not been caught, the toxic waste from the mobile lab
would likely have been discarded in the dumpster behind the store.

Specially trained staff from the Department of Environmental Protection are sent to these incidents to clean up all that hazardous waste once the evidence gathering is over. And other responders are also brought in, including law enforcement officers maintaining security around the area, and emergency medical personnel and firemen standing by in case of an explosion or fire.

McKinney says it can get expensive.

“A worst-case scenario, on a weekend everyone is on overtime, over $10,000 for one, one lab seizure response,” he says.

McKinney says MDEA will spend on average $4,000-$5,000 for its costs at every incident. Sometimes local police and emergency agencies are reimbursed for the work, but not always. A lab discovered in Brewer last spring cost the city $1,500 above the $1,700 that was billed to MDEA.

“Eventually you are paying for every single one pot, every single bottle that has lithium and baby oil in it. Yes, it’s thousands of dollars,” says Robert Shannon, who supervises a Bangor-based response team for the Department of Environmental Protection.

For every pound of meth produced in these small labs, 5-6 pounds of hazardous waste is generated. The state pays for disposal by weight, and Shannon says costs have been reduced thanks to the creation of a short-term hazardous waste storage facility to hold the neutralized hazardous materials, which are taken away by an independent contractor every three months.

McKinney says if the meth problem continues to grow, the agency may have to seek funding for staff who are dedicated to it, so they aren’t torn away to work on heroin or opioid investigations.

Journalist Mal Leary spearheads Maine Public's news coverage of politics and government and is based at the State House.