Tommy Farmer

Each person has a task.

One may drive the car, truck or van while another crushes pills and passes the powder to someone in the back seat. That person mixes the powder with other chemicals in plastic bottles.

Still another takes the bottles and shakes them to swirl and heat the toxic concoction that soon will yield methamphetamine.

All while the group of meth cooks and users drive along a highway or rural country road.

Staff Photo by TIm Barber
Tommy Farmer, director of the Tennessee Meth Task Force, explains the how compact and transportable meth labs have become in recent days.

A meth assembly line on wheels is the way Tennessee Methamphetamine Task Force Director Tommy Farmer describes an increasingly popular process to make meth.

Mr. Farmer and area police say the so-called “shake and bake” or “one-pot method” of making the drug is an adaptation by drug makers frustrated with more busts and more successful law enforcement crackdowns.

In shake and bake, meth is made in smaller batches with different ingredients than have previously been used.

Other methods require heat from either an oven, microwave or open flame. The one-pot method uses chemical reactions to cause heat.

Lookout Mountain Judicial District Drug Task Force Commander Larry Black said his agents haven’t seen any one-pot methods in the four-county area they cover, but they are prepared if the trend shows up in their corner of Georgia.

“We’re in the process of educating officers,” he said.

Patrol officers who stop drivers must be aware of what to look for and signs such as odor and driver behavior to spot someone using a one-pot lab, he said.

The task force’s area includes Catoosa, Walker, Dade and Chattooga counties.

Murray County, Ga., Sheriff Howard Ensley said his deputies found three of the mobile labs during traffic stops or drug investigations in the county two years ago.

Sheriff Ensley said his officers haven’t seen the method since that time, but they are trained on how to deal with the labs.

Staff Photo by Gillian Bolsover
Examples of materials used to make methamphetamine sit on a table at the headquarters of the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit Drug Task Force Thursday.

EXPLOSIVE INGREDIENTS

Mike Hall, director of the Tennessee 10th Judicial Drug Task Force, said many meth cooks don’t know what they’re doing, and the plastic bottles can burst into flame if any number of details are overlooked.

“It can do some serious damage,” Mr. Hall said.

With the right amount of chemicals, the explosion can equal that of a hand grenade, he said.

A 24-year-old man was hospitalized with burns in November after a shake-and-bake meth lab explosion near Dunlap, Tenn.

Sequatchie County Sheriff Ronnie Hitchcock arrested Stanley Stewart after his treatment at the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Nashville. Mr. Stewart was shaking the volatile mix of chemicals that included anhydrous ammonia when it exploded, burning him on the hands and face, the sheriff said.

Mr. Hall also cited a recent incident in which a young girl in Weaver, Ala., drank acid stored in a soda bottle used in meth-making. She thought it was regular soda.

“Once they’re done, these guys throw the (leftover chemicals) out the window. Anyone can pick it up,” he said.

Meth lab seizures are up across Tennessee this year, with police busting more than 470 labs as of April, and are on pace to exceed last year’s total of 815 by more than 300, Mr. Farmer said.

He said the lab seizures are both a sign that the drug still is out there and of better law enforcement. If police quit busting labs, the numbers would go down, he said, but the problem would seep into the health care system, social services, schools and neighborhoods.

Lab seizures still have not reached the heights of 2004, when there were more than 1,500 found across the state. When large volumes are produced, the majority of meth still is made by other methods, usually in stationary labs. Technically, all meth labs are mobile, since cookers can throw equipment into bags and be on the road in a short time, he said.

The one-pot method, however, allows the cookers to make meth on the move, which makes tracking the drug that much harder. Police first noticed the process about seven years ago in Washington state, then it spread through Western states before popping up in this area three years ago.

The method taxes police who, even with stationary labs, first must learn of the lab’s location, then investigate to find any probable cause before getting a warrant. In those situations, the time lag can spook meth cookers, who pick up and leave.

With the one-pot method, it’s that much easier for cookers to move, which makes it that much harder to track, Mr. Farmer said.

But he sees the most recent change as just part of the challenge of fighting drugs.

“It’s constantly evolving, you’re going to put something out there and they’re going to adapt to it,” he said.